By Ryan Leasure

This article is part four in a nine-part series on how we got the Bible. Part 1 looked at biblical inspiration and inerrancy. Part 2 considered the development of the Old Testament. And Part 3 investigated the Old Testament canon and the Apocrypha.

In this article, we transition to the New Testament canon. Specifically, I want to answer two questions. First, would the first-century Christians have expected new Scripture in addition to the Old Testament? And second, what attributes did the church look for in canonical texts?

Would the First-Century Church have Expected New Scripture?

Biblical scholar Harry Gamble once remarked, “There is no intimation at all that the early church entertained the idea of Christian scriptures… Therefore, the NT as we think of it was utterly remote from the minds of the first generation of Christian believers.”1. What are we to make of Gamble’s assertion? Was he right? Did the early church assume that God was done inspiring Scripture after the close of the Old Testament? I believe we have good reason to reject Gamble’s claims. Let me give you three reasons why.2

1. First-century Jews regarded the Old Testament story as Incomplete

Several texts from the Gospels and Acts demonstrate that first-century Jews expected God to do something in their generation. Not only were they on the look-out for the Messiah (Luke 2:38; 2:25; John 1:41; 4:25), they expected God to usher in his kingdom and overthrow their oppressors (Acts 1:6; see Dan 2:31-45). Second Temple period (intertestamental) texts also confirm this same expectation (Tob 14:5-7; Bar 3:6-8). As N. T. Wright notes, “The great story of the Hebrew scriptures was therefore inevitably read in the Second Temple period as a story in search of a conclusion.”3

The close of the Old Testament also gives the impression that the Jews expected a Davidic King to rise up among their ranks. Keep in mind, according to Jewish ordering, Chronicles was the final book of the Old Testament. And that book starts off with a lengthy genealogy centered around King David (1 Chron 1-3). It’s no coincidence that the start of the New Testament picks up right where the Old Testament left off with a genealogy focusing on the Son of David (Matt 1). It’s as if the Gospel of Matthew brings the story of the Old Testament to its necessary fulfillment.

2. God’s Pattern of Bringing New Word-Revelation after his Acts of Redemption

According to the Old Testament pattern, God typically gives revelation deposits after his redemptive acts. We see this sequential pattern most clearly in the Exodus. God redeemed his people out of Egypt. He then followed up that redemption with Scriptural installments at Sinai to interpret his saving acts. Given this history, it’s not inconceivable that the early church would have expected more written revelation following Jesus’ act of redemption.

3. The Old Testament Predicted that the Future Messianic Age would Include Verbal Communication

Not only did the Old Testament predict a future messianic age, it predicted that communication would accompany the Messiah. Deuteronomy 18:18 predicts “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” Isaiah 61:1-2  says of the Messiah that “The Spirit of the LORD God . . . has anointed me to bring good news to the poor . . . to proclaim liberty to the captives . . . to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And of this Messianic age, we read, “out of Zion shall go the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem” (Isa 2:2-3).

In sum, those living after the close of the Old Testament recognized that the story was incomplete, that God typically gave word-revelation following his redemptive acts, and that the Old Testament anticipated a verbal Messianic age.

What Attributes did the Early Church Look for in a Canonical Text?

Now that we’ve established the early church’s expectation for more biblical texts, we must now ask what attributes they would have looked for in those new biblical texts. In the remaining space, I will consider three of these attributes—apostolic authority, marks of inspiration, and universal reception.4 Let’s consider each canonical attribute in turn.

Apostolic Authority

Going back to the New Testament, the apostles recognized that they were “ministers of the New Covenant” (2 Cor 3:6), and that the church was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Eph 2:20). They also recognized that Jesus had sent them out as the guarantors and transmitters of his message to the world (John 20:21). For these reasons, the early church only received texts that could be traced back to an apostle.

Therefore, from an early time, the church received the four Gospels, Acts, and Paul’s letters. Of course, Paul makes his apostolic authority known in his letters, but the Gospels make no such claim. How then did they receive apostolic status at such an early stage in the church?

Critics argue that since the authors don’t mention their names in the body of the text, the Gospels must have been originally anonymous. It was only after some time that the church added titles to give these anonymous works some needed credibility. Yet, the critics’ assertions lack evidence. All the earliest manuscripts with titles list Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the authors. Additionally, numerous church fathers state unequivocally that Mark wrote his Gospel based on Peter’s eyewitness testimony, and that Matthew, Luke, and John all wrote their respective Gospels.

That said, why did the church receive Mark and Luke if they weren’t apostles themselves? It’s because of their close association with the apostles. That is to say, books with apostolic authority were not limited to books that were written by the apostles. Rather, books that came from apostolic circles also came with apostolic authority. Notice Tertullian’s comment about Gospel authorship: “Of the apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first install faith into us; whilst of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it afterwards.”5 Tertullian affirms that Mark and Luke were “apostolic men” by nature of their close association with the apostles Peter and Paul.

This close proximity to the apostles also explain why Hebrews made its way into the canon. The author indicates he knew Timothy (Heb 13:23) and that the Gospel message “was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard” (Heb 2:3). These two texts combined indicate that the author walked in apostolic circles (probably Pauline), and therefore, his book was apostolic.

Jesus’ family (James and Jude) also received quasi-apostolic status as well based on their relationship to the Lord. We don’t know as much about Jude, but we know James became a prominent leader in the Jerusalem church and later martyr for his Christian faith.

At the same time, the church rejected books from non-apostolic sources. Commenting on the so-called Gospel of Peter, church father Serapion declared, “We receive both Peter and the other apostles as Christ, but the writers which falsely bear their names we reject.6 Serapion asserted that the church should reject the heretical Gospel of Peter and all others that falsely bear the apostles’ names (Thomas, Philip, etc.).

The Muratorian Fragment makes a similar comment around AD 180. It notes, “There is said to be another letter in Paul’s name to the Laodiceans, and another to the Alexandrines, both forged in accordance with Marcion’s heresy, and many others which cannot be received into the catholic church, since it is not fitting that poison should be mixed with honey.”7 Again, the church rejected all forgeries. The fragment also notes that the beloved Shepherd of Hermes should not receive canonical status because it was written “quite recently, in our own times.” In other words, someone wrote this book after all the apostles had died out.

Marks of Inspiration

Second, the church looked for books that possessed marks of inspiration. If a book came from God, one would expect it to reflect God’s nature and other previously inspired texts. The text, therefore, should reflect the beauty and excellence of God (Psalm 19:7-10). As Jerome once remarked about a New Testament text, it is a “document which has in it so much the beauty of the Gospel,” which is the “mark of its inspiration.”8

Moreover, the text will be accompanied with transformative power. In other words, the text isn’t just words on a page. The text is “living and active” (Heb 4:12). Justin Martyr remarked, “For they possess a terrible power in themselves, and are sufficient to inspire those who turn aside from the path of rectitude with awe; while the sweetest rest is afforded to those who make a diligent practice of them.”9 Irenaeus also asserted that the Gospels are always “breathing out immortality on every side and vivifying men afresh.”10 That is to say, the early church recognized that certain texts brought about salvation and good works in the life of the church.

Not only will the text possess a certain beauty and power, it will be harmonious with other authoritative Scripture. For this reason, the church rejected books like 2 Maccabees which suggests we can offer sacrifices and prayers for the dead (2 Macc 12:43-46). They also rejected gnostic texts (Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Peter, etc.) because they undermined the entire Old Testament altogether. And they rejected the Gospel of Thomas which has Jesus saying, “Look, I will guide her (Mary) to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven”—a clear repudiation of Genesis 1-2.

Thus, as Irenaeus remarked, “All Scripture, which has been given to us by God, shall be found by us perfectly consistent.”11. And as Justin Martyr declared, “I am entirely convinced that no Scripture contradicts another.”12

In short, the church only received texts which bore the marks of divine inspiration. These marks included a certain beauty, power, and harmony, indicating that God was their ultimate author.

Universal Reception

Finally, only books that were universally received by the church obtained canonical status. This means that books like 1 Enoch, which only a few small churches received, did not receive authoritative status. After all, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). Therefore, we could expect the universal church to come to some sort of consensus when it came to their Scriptural texts. And this is exactly what we find in the early church.

From as early as the second century, the church recognized a core group of canonical books which included the four Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, Hebrews, 1 John, 1 Peter, and Revelation. This consensus is reflected in several church Fathers (Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian) as well as the Muratorian Canon. By the fourth century, the remaining fringes of the canon were universally recognizes as reflected in Eusebius (AD 325), Athanasius (AD 367), and the Councils of Hippo (AD 393) and Carthage (AD 397).

A Canonical Grid

As one considers the three canonical attributes, it becomes clear that the early church filtered books through a sort of canonical grid to help them recognize authoritative texts. Only books possessing all three attributes achieved canonical status. Consider the following chart. Notice how both Mark and Romans possess all three attributes while the Gospel of Thomas possesses none. Also notice that the Shepherd of Hermes partially possesses one of the attributes insofar that it is an orthodox text. That said, it lacks the other two attributes:

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace (Book)

Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (mp4 Download)

The Top Ten Reasons We Know the NT Writers Told the Truth mp3 by Frank Turek

Counter Culture Christian: Is the Bible True? by Frank Turek (Mp3), (Mp4), and (DVD)

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Ryan Leasure holds a Master of Arts from Furman University and a Masters of Divinity from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Currently, he’s a Doctor of Ministry candidate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Moore, SC.

Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/1Ouq929

 

By Erik Manning

While reading the gospels, you’ll notice similarities between the characters portrayed across the different stories. Parallels between the gospels concerning character depictions are unlikely to be the result of mere chance. And these correspondences seem so casual and subtle that it’s unlikely they were designed that way. Philosopher Tim McGrew calls these ‘artless similarities.’

In an earlier video, we saw this kind of unity of character with Jesus between John and the Synoptics. But let me give another example with two somewhat lesser-known characters in the gospels — Mary and Martha. We find their stories in both Luke and John. For this evidence, I’m drawing from Peter J. Williams’ excellent book Can We Trust the Gospels?

Mary And Martha in Luke

As we read Luke 10 and John 11, we see that the two stories are very different. The majority of John 11 is about Jesus raising Mary and Martha’s brother Lazarus from the dead. With no obvious link to John, Luke gives the following story:

“As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

(Luke 10:38–42

If John and Luke knew each other’s gospels, clearly they could’ve simply copied the names, but they obviously didn’t copy their completely different stories. Both gospels give us a glimpse of two characters who are in stark contrast: Martha is a hard worker and stressed out about practical matters. Mary sits and listens to Jesus’s teaching while ignoring her sister’s worries over entertaining their guests. Both sisters have different personality types: one is proactive and practical, while the other is introspective and thoughtful.

Mary And Martha in John

The same two women are seen in John’s gospel after their brother has died. Jesus visits them in Bethany, their hometown. Martha went straight to Jesus as soon as she heard he got there, while Mary remained seated at home (John 11:20). Right off the bat, we see a coincidence in the kinds of responses. Both Luke and John describe Mary as sitting while Martha is in action. In both accounts, Martha is the welcoming committee. She isn’t afraid to get a little fussy with Jesus for not coming sooner, just as she got upset when she wanted Jesus to rebuke her sister for not helping with the meal preparation in Luke. (John 11:21)

The fidgety Martha then tells her sister that Jesus is calling her after meeting Jesus. (John 11:28) Mary gets up and rushes to Jesus. Those with her think she’s going to the tomb to weep. (John 11:31) Unlike Martha, Mary “fell at his feet.” (John 11:32) Remember that she was at Jesus’ feet in Luke. Jesus sees her weeping (John 11:33), we don’t have a record of where Martha weeps.

Mary also seems to be perplexed with Jesus for not coming earlier, but Jesus doesn’t even talk to her. Jesus gets deeply emotional when he sees Mary crying with the others and asks where Lazarus is buried. Jesus seems to be especially moved by Mary’s tears. At the tomb, Jesus himself weeps and commands the stone to be moved. At this point, the ever-practical Martha blurts out, “Lord, by this time there will be a bad odor, for he has been dead there four days.” (John 11:39) She obviously fails to realize that Jesus is about to raise Lazarus from the dead.

Then in chapter 12, Martha is once again seen as serving. (Jn 12:2) Mary pours costly perfume on Jesus’ feet. (Jn 12:3) She’s once again at Jesus’ feet. As Jesus had to defend Mary to Martha for her right priorities, he also had to defend her to Judas and the rest of the disciples. Judas (and perhaps the other disciples) said the ointment should’ve been sold and given to the poor instead of being wasted on Jesus’ feet.

The Same Mary and Martha

Although these two stories are completely different, they both describe the two women in complementary ways. The physical matter of Mary “sitting” and placing herself at Jesus’ feet and Martha’s practical concern illustrates this. Likewise, Martha appears to be more active in both stories. It seems clear from this that both Luke and John are talking about actual people, showing that the Gospel accounts are shaped by eyewitness testimony.

Additionally, there are some practical insights here for the believer. In both accounts, Jesus shows love for his friends. He’s direct when they’re out of line, but commends them when they do what’s right. Jesus also jumps to his friends’ defense when they’re being misunderstood. He weeps with them when they weep and is willing to put himself in harm’s way to help them. As you may recall, the high priest plotted to kill Jesus after Jesus raised their brother from the dead. (John 11:53)

Lydia McGrew sums these points up well in her book The Eye of the Beholder:

“Jesus’ interactions are always with specific people, never abstractions…His friendships in all four Gospels show us something more than a gifted, focused communicator; they show us a man who felt human affection for specific people, as we do ourselves.”  p. 398

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace (Book)

The New Testament: Too Embarrassing to Be False by Frank Turek (MP3) and (DVD)

Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (mp4 Download)

The Top Ten Reasons We Know the NT Writers Told the Truth mp3 by Frank Turek

Counter Culture Christian: Is the Bible True? by Frank Turek (Mp3), (Mp4), and (DVD)        

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Erik Manning is a Reasonable Faith Chapter Director located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He’s a former freelance baseball writer and the co-owner of a vintage and handmade decor business with his wife, Dawn. He is passionate about the intersection of apologetics and evangelism.

Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/JUw4fu0

 

By Ryan Leasure

This is part three of a nine-part series on how we got our Bible. Part one addressed the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. Part two explained the formation and preservation of the Old Testament text. This post will address issues surrounding the Old Testament canon and the Apocrypha.

Canon

Before going any further, we must first establish what we mean when we say “canon.” We are not, of course, referring to the weapons of bygone eras. Rather, canon refers to an ancient measuring stick cut from a reed-like plant which was used as an infallible standard—much like a yardstick. The term was later applied to the biblical texts that the church received in its collection of authoritative books.

The Tanakh

The Jewish order of the Old Testament was and is radically different from how we typically order our books. From an early time, it appears that the Jews had a threefold division of the Hebrew canon. This threefold division is often referred to as the Tanakh based on the three divisions—Torah (Law), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). This final division could sometimes be called “the Psalms” since Psalms was the first and largest book among the writings and was often representative of the whole. Also, note that Jews combined several books. So while their canon contains the same content as our protestant Bibles, their Bible only has twenty-four books instead of thirty-nine. Consider the breakdown below from Genesis to Chronicles:

Bible table

The Septuagint (250-150 BC)

After Alexander the Great Hellenized the known world, Jewish scholars realized they needed to translate the Hebrew scriptures into Greek so that more people could read them. Legend has it that seventy-two Jewish translators (six from each of the twelve tribes), over the course of seventy-two days, each translated the text from Hebrew to Greek independently, and all seventy-two translations came out the exact same. The translation, therefore, came to be known as the Septuagint (from the Latin septuaginta meaning “seventy”) and is often represented by the Roman numerals LXX.

A couple of points are worth noting about the Septuagint. First, this translation changed the order of the books to the order that we are more familiar with today. That is to say, it changed from the threefold division of the Tenakh to our current order of law, history, poetry, major prophets, and minor prophets. Furthermore, the Septuagint also included the Apocrypha.

The Apocrypha

The Apocrypha consists of a dozen or so Jewish books written during the intertestamental period. These books contain history, poetry, wisdom literature, and prophecy. Probably most famous among the Apocrypha are the first and Second Maccabees. These books detail the Jewish rebellions and reclamation of the temple from the Syrians. While these works contain much historical value, they also contain disputable material. This is especially true of second Maccabees which teaches that saints in heaven intercede for people on earth (15:11-16) and that prayers and sacrifices can be offered for the dead (12:39-46). Roman Catholics us this last text to justify belief in purgatory and the practice of indulgences.

Tobit, another Apocryphal book, contains a fanciful story about a devout Jewish man in exile who is blinded by bird droppings in his sleep. His wife Sarah, also had troubles of her own. A demon had killed seven of her previous husbands on her wedding night. So God sent the angel Raphael to help Tobit and Sarah conquer the demon. Ultimately, they use a fish heart and liver to drive out the demon from the wedding chamber. Finally, Tobit’s son rubs fish gall on Tobit’s eyes to heal his blindness. This story is entirely fanciful.

Another book, known as Judith, describes God’s deliverance of the Jewish people. In this story, Judith seduces an Assyrian king only to cut off his head during his drunken stupor. We have no evidence that this story ever occurred. Moreover, this book erroneously states that Nebuchadnezzar was king of Assyria, not Babylon.

Other Apocryphal books include Sirach (wisdom literature similar to Proverbs), Baruch (not written by Baruch), Wisdom of Solomon (not written by Solomon), and additions to Daniel (Susanna and Bel and the Dragon).

Why The Bible should not Include the Apocrypha

You are probably familiar with the Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox debates over whether the Apocrypha belongs in our modern Bibles. In the remaining space, I’d like to offer five reasons why I don’t believe the Bible should include the Apocrypha.

1. The Apocrypha Acknowledges that Prophets Weren’t Speaking during its Time

Consider the following texts from 1 Maccabees:

So there was great distress in Israel, the worst since the time when the prophets ceased to appear among them (1 Macc. 9:27).

The Jews and their priests have resolved that Simon should be their leader and high priest forever, until a trustworthy prophet should arise (1 Macc. 14:41).

And laid up the stones in the mountain of the temple in a convenient place, until there should come a prophet to show what should be done with them (1 Macc. 4:46).

Notice how all three of these verses indicate God was not speaking through prophets during their time.

2. Jews Never Accepted the Apocrypha as Scripture

Consider the following quotation from first-century Jewish historian Josephus:

From the death of Moses to the time of Artaxerxes, who was king of Persia after Xerxes, the prophets who followed Moses have written down in thirteen books the things that were done in their days. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and principles of life for human beings. From Artaxerxes to our own time a detailed record has been made, but this has not been thought worthy of equal credit with the earlier records because there has not been since then the exact succession of prophets.1

Josephus indicates that after the time of Artaxerxes (465-424 BC), Jews continued to write books (the Apocrypha), but these books were not on par with Scripture, because the prophets had stopped speaking.

Moreover, the Babylonian Talmud, which is a sacred collection of Rabbinical traditions, notes that “after the latter prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi had died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel” (Yoma 98). In other words, special revelation ceased after the time of these prophets. Therefore, we should not consider the Apocrypha as Scripture since it followed after these prophets.

Finally, around the year AD 90, a council of Jewish leaders gathered at Jamnia to figure out how to reconstruct Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the temple. As they discussed their sacred books, they merely reaffirmed the universal practice of all Jews that the Apocrypha did not belong in their Bible.

3. The New Testament Never Refers to the Apocrypha as Scripture

The New Testament authors quote from the Old Testament hundreds of times. Often they preface their quotes with phrases such as “it is written” or “Scripture says.” Consider the following examples:

As it is written: None is righteous, no, not one (Rom 3:10).

Scripture says, They will look on him whom they have pierced (John 19:37).”

Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion (Heb 3:7-8).

Never once do the New Testament authors do something similar with an Apocryphal text. This omission is telling considering the fact that the New Testament authors usually quoted from the Septuagint which contained the Apocrypha. Meaning, the New Testament authors were well aware of the Apocryphal texts. They simply never refer to them as Scripture.

4. Jesus Affirmed the Three-Fold Division of the Tanakh

Two quotations from Luke indicate that Jesus believed in a closed Old Testament Canon that did not include the Apocrypha. Consider Luke 24:44:

Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

In this text, Jesus makes a clear affirmation of the threefold division of the Old Testament—Apocrypha not included. Also consider Luke 11:51:

From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation.

By speaking of Abel (the first biblical martyr) and Zechariah (the last biblical martyr), Jesus indicates that the Old Testament canon concluded with Chronicles (traditional order of the Tanakh). It is worth noting that several martyrs died in the Maccabees. Jesus doesn’t mention them because he didn’t consider Maccabees as part of his Bible.

5. The Catholic Church didn’t Grant Authority to the Apocrypha until Later

The earliest Old Testament canonical list from a Christian comes from Melito of Sardis (AD 170). His canon leaves out the Apocrypha. Origen’s canonical list in the mid-third century also leaves out the Apocrypha. Additionally, Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Council of Laodicea leave the Apocrypha out of their canon.

Sometime in the fourth century though, the Apocrypha started to gain acceptance in some circles as demonstrated by some of the canonical lists (St. Augustine and the Council of Hippo) and biblical manuscripts (Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus). Of course, St. Augustine also persuaded his friend Jerome to include the Apocrypha in the Latin Vulgate in AD 404. That said, Jerome prefaced the Apocryphal writings by stating:

Therefore as the church indeed reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical books, so let it also read these two volumes for the edification of the people but not for establishing the authority of ecclesiastical dogmas.2

Jerome made a clear delineation between Scriptural texts and the Apocrypha. Scripture established church doctrine. The Apocrypha was for mere edification alone.

For the next thousand years, the Catholic Church was hardly unified on the Apocrypha. William of Ockham, influential medieval theologian, echoed Jerome’s sentiments when he wrote that apocryphal texts “are read for the edification of the people, but not for the establishment of doctrine.3 Even Cardinal Cajetan, a chief opponent of the Protestant Reformers and appointee of Pope Leo remarked:

The Latin church is greatly indebted to Jerome on account of his separation of the canonical from the uncanonical books. . . . those books and any others there may be like them in the Canon of the Bible are not canonical in the sense of establishing point of faith; yet they can be called canonical for the edification of the faithful.4

Despite being far from unified, the Council of Trent official granted canonical status to the Apocryphal text in what can only be seen as a counter-Reformation move.

Moving On to the New

The next post will transition to the New Testament. Specifically, the post will address two key question. First, would the early church have expected more Scriptural books? And second, what clues tipped off the early church that certain books were authoritative Scripture while others were not?

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace (Book)

Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (mp4 Download)

The Top Ten Reasons We Know the NT Writers Told the Truth mp3 by Frank Turek

Counter Culture Christian: Is the Bible True? by Frank Turek (Mp3), (Mp4), and (DVD)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Leasure holds a Master of Arts from Furman University and a Masters of Divinity from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Currently, he’s a Doctor of Ministry candidate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Moore, SC.

Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/NY40j0n

 

By Tim Stratton

Sermon Outline

Riddle me this: What’s black and white and RED all over?

I remember the first time my dad posed that question to me when I was a young child. Even as a little boy – untrained in philosophy – I knew something was amiss.

I intuitively understood that if something was literally black and white . . . like a news paper . . . then it could not be the COLOR RED all over. After all, something cannot be the colors RED and Black and White simultaneously and in the same sense. There’s a contradiction here – nothing can actually be black and white AND the color red ALL OVER.

Then my dad explained to me that there was a “play on words” going on here – a “word game!” The “read all over” doesn’t refer to a color, but refers to the fact that someone can read the entire newspaper, and thus, the black and white newspaper will be READ all over.

Now, why can’t a newspaper actually be black and white AND the COLOR RED all over? Because this statement violates the logical law of non-contradiction.

The Laws of The Logos

How many of you know about the laws of logic?

I actually discuss the laws of logic in my book (my doctoral dissertation which was published last year). The first chapter is focused on how to properly interpret The Bible. Think about it: Interpreting Scripture correctly presupposes and depends upon the laws of logic. There are three fundamental Laws of Logic that are always required in rational discussion – and in interpreting Scripture:

  • The Law of Identity: Something is what it is. Things that exist have specific properties that identify them.

Let’s talk about God. Christians typically recognize God as a Maximally Great Being who possesses certain properties such as omnipotence (perfect power), omniscience (perfect knowledge), and omnibenevolence (perfect love for all people). Some theologians claim that God does not love all people and thus, based on the Law of Identity, worship a different God. I have noted that this is dangerously close to idolatry (see this short video for more).

  • The Law of Excluded Middle: A well-defined proposition is either true or false. There is no middle position. For example, the proposition that “A proposition is either true or false” is either true or false.

I’ve often said that the Law of the Excluded Middle is my favorite logical law! Think about it this way: God either exists or He doesn’t (there is no middle position). Jesus either physically rose from the dead, or He didn’t.

  • The Law of Non-Contradiction: When two claims contradict one another, one must be false.For example, if one person claims that God exists and another asserts that God does not exist, we can know that one of us must be correct and the other must be wrong. When two propositions contradict one another, one must be false and the other must be true; they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false.Similarly, when two contrary statements are made (not to be confused with contradictory statements) we can know that at least one of them must be false (even though both of them could be false). If Bill says that “the moon is made entirely of green cheese” and Bob says “the moon is made entirely of blue cheese,” then these contrary statements cannot both be true. Either Bill or Bob must be wrong. In fact, both Bill and Bob are wrong.Now, let’s talk about contradictions: As Wayne Grudem puts it, “Contradictions aren’t acceptable in the study of systematic theology, since there aren’t any contradictions in the Bible.”

This presupposition is supported by Scripture itself. For example, Psalm 119:160 states that the sum of your words is truth and this implies, in turn, that God’s Word, which Christians believe is true in all that it teaches, will be logical when studied in the context as a whole.

Wayne Grudem continues:

“There are many times we need to acknowledge mystery, paradox, and things we can’t fully understand. But that’s different from saying there’s a [logical] contradiction. God never asks us to believe a contradiction.”

These laws are just as necessary to keep a person grounded in rationality as the law of gravity is necessary to keep them grounded on the earth. The laws of logic are tools which help a person to objectively determine true or false propositions, inferences, and deductions.

In my book I wrote the following:

“Logical laws apply to everyone regardless of when or where he lives, that is to say, the laws of logic transcend humanity and are objectively true. In fact, truth and logic are inextricably linked—one cannot have one without the other. Thus, if Christians claim that Christianity is true, then the affirmations of Christianity must be logical.”

Now, many people these days assert that “all religions are true!” Based on the laws of logic, however (namely, the law of non-contradiction), we KNOW this cannot be true! Consider statements made from different worldviews/religions:

Mohammad VS Jesus

Love those who consider you to be an enemy VS. Kill the infidel! (Which one is it?)

Hinduism VS Islam

“There are multiple gods” VS. “Allah is the one true God.” Both cannot be true

Buddhism VS Judaism

These religions contradict each other. They are mutually exclusive. They might both be false, but they cannot both be true. (BTW: They are both false).

Atheism VS Theism

Based on the logical law of the excluded middle, God either exists or He doesn’t. Since atheism says God does not exists and Christians, Jews, and Muslims claim that God does exist, one might not know what worldview is true, but one can KNOW – with certainty – that both views cannot be true simultaneously.

These views are mutually exclusive.

Every other view VS Mere Christianity

“God raised Jesus from the dead.” If those six words comprising that one statement is true, then some flavor of Christianity is true. CS Lewis described this as “Mere Christianity.” This leads us to what has been called “the most hated words in the Bible.” This verse is contained within today’s passage of Scripture.

READ: John 14:1-14

14 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God[a]; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.”

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know[b] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11 Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. 12 Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

Let’s pray . . .

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to the Father, but by me.”

In 1998 the great theologian and philosopher known as Madonna confidently declared (on MTV):

“All ways lead to God!”

Madonna, although I don’t remember her saying anything about Jesus at the time, was directly opposing Jesus. Well, based on the laws of logic, we must ask the question:

“Who is right!? Madonna or Jesus?”

If Madonna is right, then Jesus is wrong. But if Jesus is right, then Madonna is wrong.

In fact, just a couple weeks ago a survey was published showing that over 60% of self-described “born-again Christians in America between the ages of 18 and 39 do NOT believe that Jesus is the ONLY WAY to Heaven — and that Buddha and Muhammad also are valid paths to salvation, the Christian Post reported.

The Church (at large and across our nation) is in BIG TROUBLE!

Today, I’m going to give you reason to put your trust in the words of Jesus (as opposed to Madonna) and provide reasons as to WHY Jesus is THE ONLY WAY. In fact, all people should see that Jesus is the only way – the only way to eternal life in Heaven – for three reasons.

Reason #1: God raised Jesus from the dead!

God raised Jesus from the dead (thus, seemingly placing His divine stamp of approval on everything Jesus said, taught, and exemplified – and upon those Jesus chose to continue His teachings).

I don’t have time to unpack all of this right now, but based on the historical method – the same historical method that historians employ to find out facts about the past – the same historical method that historians have employed to find out facts about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and so many more – is the same historical method historians have employed to find out certain facts about the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth.

If you’d like to learn more please watch four videos I recorded about the historical resurrection on my YouTube channel:

Part 1- Historical Facts: https://cutt.ly/KYPicUq

Part 2- Examining the Evidence: https://cutt.ly/0YPibBB

Part 3- Hallucinations, Aliens, and Other Silly Ideas: https://cutt.ly/FYPiQ9e

Part 4- The Good News of the Resurrection: https://cutt.ly/mYPiRH5

Historians seek independent sources, such as, eyewitness accounts, both positive and embarrassing. These sources are plentiful when it comes to the life of Jesus and his resurrection. Mike Licona states that we have as much evidence of the resurrection, if not more, than we have of Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC.

He notes that even the harshest skeptical and atheistic historians admit several things as historical fact about Jesus. For example:

  1. Jesus existed.
  2. Jesus died by crucifixion.
  3. Jesus’ disciples (at least) really believed that Jesus rose from the dead, and appeared to them.
  4. The church persecutor, and Christian hunter, Saul was radically transformed into the Jesus preaching Paul.
  5. The skeptic James (the brother of Jesus) was suddenly changed into someone who was willing to die for the gospel.
  6. The tomb of Jesus was found empty by his women followers.

Licona makes his case even stronger by utilizing a “minimal facts” approach that does not even reference the Gospels, meaning that even if the Gospels did not exist these facts about Jesus remain:

  1. Paul was an eyewitness (hostile).
  2. Paul knew Jesus’ disciples.
  3. Paul taught what the disciples taught.
  4. They taught appearances to individuals and groups, to friend and foe alike.
  5. They and Paul taught (and believed) Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

Points one through four are accepted facts regarding Jesus and the fifth, although not accepted by many skeptics, remains unrefuted. So, when it comes to the historical method we need to ask the following question:

What hypothesis best accounts for all of these facts?

In Licona’s book, he demonstrates that the resurrection hypothesis accounts for all of these facts – while no other scientific hypothesis offered accounts for all of these together. The best explanation of the facts is the hypothesis which makes sense of all of them together.

The resurrection hypothesis is the only one left on the table.

For a deep dive into this study, I recommend Licona’s book: “The Resurrection of Jesus.”

Bottom line: if God raised Jesus from the dead, then some flavor of Christianity has gotta be true. And if God raised Jesus from the dead, then it seems that God has given His divine stamp of approval to the words and life of Jesus . . . and we have no reason to think He has done so for Madonna.

Thus, a rational and logical person should follow Jesus on this matter and believe what He says in John 14:6 – Jesus is the ONLY WAY and NO ONE gets to the Father except through Jesus!

So, the first reason why you should believe that Jesus is the ONLY WAY, is because we have historical evidence that Jesus was raised from the dead (that’s great reason to celebrate Easter)! This seems to be a divine stamp of approval upon the life and teachings of Jesus, and since Jesus taught that He is the ONLY WAY, we have good reason to believe Him.

But this raises the philosophical question: WHY is Jesus the only way to God? This leads us to the next point:

Reason #2: Jesus is God!

 Jesus is the only way to God because He is God.

Hold up! You might be thinking: Doesn’t saying that Jesus IS God violate the logical law of identity or the law of non-contradiction? Isn’t this some kind of a logical error?

A few months ago I led a youth group to Salt Lake City and BYU was kind enough to host our group, give us guided tour of their beautiful campus, they gave each one of us a nice BYU ball cap, and then we had a time of Q&A with one of the top Mormon leaders in Salt Lake.

One thing my Mormon friend said was that our view of Christianity had to be false because it is non-sensical to say that we worship ONE person and THREE persons at the same time.

I respectfully interrupted him and said,

“That’s not an accurate description of the Trinity, sir. We worship ONE WHAT and THREE WHOS. When one distinguishes between the WHAT and the WHOS one can see that there is no logical contradiction in saying that Jesus IS God . . . He is just not God the Father. Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, known as “The Son.” 

So, the concept of “Jesus being God” is logically coherent . . . but do we have biblical reason to think Jesus actually is the Creator of the universe? Consider what both John and Paul say about Jesus. Since we are in the Gospel of John, let’s start there and rewind to the beginning . . .

John 1: states the following:

 “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Now, I just mentioned Easter, but this is the message of Christmas — God “dwelt among us” (Immanuel)!

What I want you to see here is that The Bible refers to Jesus as “The Logos” and implies that not only is Jesus God, but also gives us some insight into the Trinity. From a theological perspective, this passage of scripture carries much weight.

Science Supports Scripture

Do you know that we actually have scientific evidence supporting this scripture?

To quickly summarize: The current scientific consensus strongly supports the theory that all nature (the stuff that scientists can test and discover) had an absolute beginning (big bang cosmology, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and the Borde, Guth, Vilenkin Theorem of 2003).

Everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the evidence demonstrates that the universe (all nature) began to exist. It follows that since nature began to exist, nature cannot be the cause of nature itself. Therefore, the cause of nature must be something other than nature (supernatural).

This is exactly what the first chapter of John is stating about Jesus – he is the supernatural cause of the natural universe, and he entered into his creation so that we could know him. Think about that! The Creator of the universe entered into the universe to save the people within the universe. This is what Christmas is all about. This is why we have good reason to celebrate Christmas.

To survey some of the science supporting scripture (and more), click here!

The Logic”

Another thing to keep in mind when reading the first Chapter of John is that the Greek word for “word” – “Logos” – is used synonymously with Jesus in the text. It is interesting to note that “logos,” in Greek, means, “the principle of reason.” This is where we get the word “logic.”

The Bible is clear that Jesus is God and seems to suggest that He is the grounding of logic and reason. You see, logic is grounded in the essence of God. Therefore, when we choose to think and behave logically, we are godly (approximating to or being like God).

On a side note: it’s quite interesting to note that Critical Race Theorists reject logic and exclaim that “appealing to logic and reason is racist!” However, God commanded us to “be reasonable” in Isaiah 1:18 . . . so, I’m gonna stay reasonable and appeal to logic no matter what anyone might call me.

See, “The Great Commission Is Racist!” https://cutt.ly/IYPiwoC

Bottom line: if you were thinking that we should not place so much emphasis on logic, then – according to John – you are not putting enough emphasis on the nature of Jesus!

Jesus is “The Logic” – the only way to make sense of reality!

With that said, what does the Apostle Paul say about Jesus in Colossians 1:16 . . .

The Preeminence of Christ

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Wow! According to Paul, if one can say that the creation of the universe “flowed” (as it were) through one person of the Trinity, it would be through the Second Person of the Trinity – Jesus Christ Himself!

The Creator of the universe, entered into the universe, to save the people within the universe. How cool is that? With that in mind, let’s talk about HOW Jesus saved the people within the universe.

This is our last point about WHY Jesus is the ONLY WAY!

Reason #3: The atonement of Jesus just makes sense.

Why did Jesus have to die? Why is the wages of sin death? Why can’t the wages of sin be five bucks or seven years of hard labor?

Why did Jesus have to die?

Before addressing that all-important question, first understand two things: 1- who we are, and 2- who God is.

According to Westminster Confession, the objective purpose of mankind is to know and enjoy God. I like to “tweak” it ever so slightly, and state: The objective purpose of mankind is to grow in our knowledge of God, to grow in love with God, and to enjoy a personal relationship with our Creator for all eternity (Hosea 6:6; Luke 10:27; Col 1:9; 1 Tim 2:4).

Or to say it this way: You were created on purpose and for the specific purpose of enjoying a true love relationship with God into the eternal future.

Scores of humanity have considered the meaning and purpose of life. The fact remains, if God does not exist, then there is no objective purpose in life (Atheism Catch-22). Christians, however, do not suffer from this sort of conundrum. In fact, we have a ready answer. We know the objective meaning and purpose of life: God created every human to knowlove, and enjoy God into the eternal future. This is why God created the universe and all of its contents. This is why you exist, so that you could know him. We were created on purpose and for that exact and specific purpose.

Like Oil & Water

By definition, God is a maximally great being and necessarily perfect in every way. Moreover, God created you to enjoy a perfect, holy, and pure love relationship with him.

But we’ve got a problem — a big problem! As a result of sin, now we as humans are anything but holy and pure. Now we are guilty, alienated, and corrupt in nature. Since we are corrupt and imperfect, we are unequally yoked with a maximally great being.

Like oil and water, now, we are “unmixable” with a perfect God. He is necessary perfection and we are infection. The two simply do not mix and that is a major problem for humanity.

So, humanity needs a savior. With a savior we can be justified instead of guilty, adopted instead of alienated, and have a purified and regenerated nature instead of a corrupt nature.

We were created for one objective purpose – to be the Bride of Christ (Eph 5:25-27) in a perfect and true love marriage. We were created to love and to be loved by our Creator. However, now, because of sin, we are infected and do not mix with necessary perfection any longer (i.e., oil and water). As a result, we are necessarily separated from God.

Our hearts were created to be “pointed” to God, but now they are dysfunctional, sick, and twisted because of this separation. Our hearts are now “curved in” on themselves, they are self-centered, selfish, and sinful. We have completely “missed the mark” (the objective purpose of human existence). This is literally what the word “sin” means in the original Greek. The “mark” is God, but we are separated from him; we do not even know God exists apart from his revelation. Due to this separation, we cannot even “aim” at God and of course we will “miss the mark” and sin.

We are infected, self-centered creatures – but we are not supposed to be. God created you for a specific purpose and gave you a job description: BE HOLY! (Namely by loving God and others.) Being holy means to be God focused instead of self-focused. The problem is, all of us have “missed the mark” and have become “infection.” Therefore, we have a damaged relationship with perfection – God.

Is Restoration Possible?

The question remains: how is a broken relationship restored? Two things must occur if a damaged relationship is to be restored: 1) The offended party must choose to bear the harm. 2) The offending party must choose to confess and repent. In our relationship with God, he is the offended party as we sinned against him. We are the offending party, and are thus powerless to restore this relationship on our own. Our works are meaningless unless God, as the offended party, chooses to bear the harm. Left to our own devices, our work does not work (Isaiah 64:6).

God is life! He is the author and giver of life. He invented it and life comes from him. In the well-known Bible verse, John 14:6, Jesus claims he is “the life.” If God is life, then separation from life is death. Since sin separates us from God (like oil and water), then, consequently, sin equals death. Therefore, in every aspect that you have life, you will die if you are separated from the source of life. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

If our relationship with God is to be restored, then God must bear the harm as the offended party. If the harm is death, then, God must die. One small problem though: it is logically impossible for a necessary being to die. God cannot die physically because he is immaterial and spirit. God cannot die spiritually because he cannot be separated from himself (although Jesus felt like it on the Cross).

You are a soul (an immaterial thinking thing) with one set of cognitive faculties. God is one soul with three sets of cognitive faculties. Just as your cognitive faculties cannot be separated from you as a spiritual substance (soul), God’s cognitive faculties (all three of them) cannot be separated from his “spiritual substance.”

If God is going to bear the harm, he has to die because the wages of sin is death. God cannot die as God. Therefore, if humans are to be saved, God had to become human so he could bear the harm and experience death. We need Christmas, we need Good Friday, and we need Easter to have a restored relationship with our Creator (Happy Holy-Days)!

Why do we need Easter (the Resurrection)? It took more than just executing Jesus, because if death was punishment, if Christ is still dead, then he is still being punished. The Resurrection is proof that God is satisfied with Jesus’ atoning work. Therefore, Christianity is true!

Remember, we were created on purpose and for the objective purpose to love God with our entire being. We see this demonstrated in multiple Bible verse such as Luke 10:27 and Matthew 22:37, we are to love God with all of our mind/soul, and body/strength.

The reason why you exist is to LOVE! You were created on purpose and for the specific purpose to love God . . . AND . . .  to love our neighbors (and even those who consider you to be an enemy as our very selves!

Taken together—love God and love others—comprises the WAY of Jesus. We’re talking this morning about why we believe in the TRUTH of Jesus. But He also says that He is the WAY to live… and this is His way: “Love God and love everyone!”

The purpose of life is all about LOVE!

To do anything other than that is to miss the mark (the very definition of sin).

If we ever choose not to love God in any way that we have life, then our lives ought to be terminated because we are objectively broken. This is an appropriate outcome. If something breaks, we either throw it away, or we fix it. Now, as far as our broken relationship with God goes, we have the choice to either be “thrown away” or to be “fixed.” Because of the work of Jesus (the Atonement) all people can be “fixed” and restored — as we ought to be in an objective sense — if we choose to be.

Justice is Good

Consider the nature of God to gain understanding of these issues. Psalm 97 states, “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.” This is not referring to God’s chair; rather, this is stating the essential attributes and the essence of God. This describes who God is! In other words, if God did not exist, there would be no such thing as objective righteousness, goodness, wickedness, or justice. God is perfect love (1 John 4:8). Thus, perfect justice must be part of his essential omni-benevolent nature as well. After all, justice is good and loving.

When someone escapes justice, we intuitively know that it is a bad thing. God created the universe, and part of the fabric of His creation is a moral universe. There are also natural laws, mathematical laws, and logical laws that govern the universe. Similarly, there are moral laws that we are obligated to obey (Paul says they are “written on our hearts” in Romans 2:15).

Perfect justice demands punishment, or it is not really justice. God cannot turn a blind-eye to our sin and say, “Oh well, boys will be boys, girls will be girls, humans will be humans.” That is not justice; it is injustice and ignoring crime and ignoring evil is bad. Therefore, God cannot ignore our sin and remain worthy of worship.

If a criminal commits a crime, we know that he deserves to be punished. We also know that the punishment should be fair and that it ought to fit the crime. If a seventeen-year-old shoplifts a pack of bubblegum from the gas station, there should be an appropriate punishment – we don’t give him the death penalty! However, moral monsters like Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh, and Osama bin Laden deserve a much greater punishment than the bubblegum burglar.

Now think about our crimes; we might not be a Ted Bundy, or a Hitler; however, we have all committed crimes against the very essence of morality, love, goodness, and justice – God! Because of this fact, we do not “mix” or relate with God. One may object and state that they are generally a “good person.” This may be true; however, they are not perfectly good, and cannot “mix” with a necessarily perfect God. Our lives are broken and infected, and therefore, we need a savior so that we can have a relationship with our creator. This brings us to Jesus; this brings us to the cross.

Conclusion

Some have falsely accused God the Father of some form of “cosmic child abuse” because he took out his wrath on his innocent son, because we sinful humans made him so angry. This is bad theology (remember the doctrine of the Trinity). We worship one God (not three); Christians are monotheists. Jesus is God. It logically follows that Jesus *is* the offended party. Therefore, Jesus, at the cross, satisfied his own righteous wrath – his own justice (which is good), for us! This is amazing love! This is amazing grace (the Cross was enough)!

Do you see the beauty? The offended party (a sinless, holy, pure, and morally perfect God) became human to pay our gruesome debt, to bear the harm, to satisfy his morally perfect justice. Wow! Because God has chosen to bear the harm, now, we have a choice to make. We can either choose to accept God’s act of love on the cross, or we can reject God’s grace and deal with his justice (separation from God and all that is good). Do you want perfect justice or perfect love? Perfect love is Heaven and perfect justice is separation from the Creator of the universe (Hell).

Because of what Jesus has done, we can have a restored relationship with our Creator. All you have to do, as the offending party, is freely choose to confess, repent, follow, and fall in love with Jesus. This is the essence of the message of the Gospel.

You see, we have THREE very good reasons to believe that Jesus is the only way to Heaven, just as He claimed to be.

  • God raised Jesus from the dead (a divine “stamp of approval”).
  • Jesus is the only way to God because Jesus IS God.
  • The atoning life, death, and resurrection just makes sense – no other religion or worldview offers anything similar.

Have you put your trust in Jesus? Do you love Jesus?

Pray . . .

Outro: What is black and while and SHOULD be READ all over? Your Bible!

Spend time in your Bible. That’s a great way to fall in love with Jesus.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

How Can Jesus be the Only Way? (mp4 Download) by Frank Turek

Can All Religions Be True? mp3 by Frank Turek

Counter Culture Christian: Is There Truth in Religion? (DVD) by Frank Turek

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Timothy A. Stratton (PhD, North-West University) is a professor at Trinity College of the Bible and Theological Seminary. As a former youth pastor, he is now devoted to answering deep theological and philosophical questions he first encountered from inquisitive teens in his church youth group. Stratton is founder and president of FreeThinking Ministries, a web-based apologetics ministry. Stratton speaks on church and college campuses around the country and offers regular videos on FreeThinking Ministries’ YouTube channel.

Original Blog Source: https://bit.ly/3Gou2pR

 

By Bob Perry

Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross, then resurrected from the dead three days later. It’s not just a fairy tale. Christians believe that the Resurrection is a historical fact. It’s what sets Christianity apart from every other world religion. It is the foundation of the Christian faith. If it’s not true the New Testament is fiction, Jesus is a fraud, and Christianity is a false religion. Anyone would be a fool to believe in it. This isn’t just my opinion. It’s the Apostle Paul’s:

1 Corinthians 15:12-19 — “… if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile … [and you] are to be pitied more than all men.”

None of us wants to be foolish or pitied for our faith. And no one wants to follow, or encourage others to follow, a false religion. So what reasons do we have to believe this story? It turns out there are several.

Impact Events

Just outside the cockpit door of every commercial airliner, there is a telephone handset that allows the flight attendants to talk to the pilots. And inside the cockpit of every commercial airliner is a “Door Unlock” switch on the center console that allows the pilots to open the cockpit door without getting out of their seats.

If a flight attendant had knocked on my cockpit door at 8:45AM on September 11, 2001, and asked me if she could come up front, I would have unlocked the door while I was still on the phone with her. I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. But by 9:15AM that same morning, the passengers of United Flight 93 had already figured out that was a bad idea. They were storming the cockpit of their Boeing 757 over southern Pennsylvania for that very reason.

What changed during those thirty minutes?

We all know what changed. The collective mindset of the entire world changed. It’s called an “Impact Event” — an incident so shocking it has the power to change not just what we think, but the way we think … about everything.

Resurrection – The Cultural Backdrop

In the first century A.D., there were several different kinds of beliefs about life-after-death in the Egyptian and Greco-Roman worlds that surrounded Israel. The Egyptians mummified people with their stuff so they could use it in the afterlife. The Greeks and Romans believed in various forms of an underworld destination. But no one anywhere believed in the idea of a bodily resurrection occurring after a person died.

The Jews weren’t any different. Their views varied by theological sub-group. The Essenes’ views were similar to their neighboring pagan cultures. They believed in a single-stage disembodied immortality — a “soul” that continued on into an “afterlife.” Their view didn’t include any kind of bodily resurrection. The Sadducees did not believe in any kind of life-after-death at all. The Pharisees did believe in one form of a “resurrection.” But theirs was a group event that they thought would occur for all God’s people. The righteous would rise bodily together at the end of time.

Not Even In Myth

In other words, there were plenty of different ideas about what happened to people after they died. But the Jews and their pagan contemporaries agreed about one thing — that the idea of a bodily resurrection was complete rubbish.

“This basic tenet of human existence and experience is accepted as axiomatic throughout the ancient world; once people have gone by the road of death, they do not return. When the ancient classical world spoke of (and denied) resurrection, there should be no controversy about what the word and its cognates referred to … ‘Resurrection’ was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could work backward. Not even in myth was it permitted.”

~ N. T. Wright, The Resurrection Of The Son Of God

The New Paradigm

Then, suddenly, everything changed. Despite every commonly-held belief to the contrary, one group of people began believing in a bodily resurrection. They were the first-generation Christians. For some reason, a large group of these people turned on a dime. They started saying that a person could be resurrected. In fact, they claimed that someone had done just that. And they described a resurrected person as having some kind of weirdly transformed physical body. These Christians started using the term “resurrection” in ways they had never used the term before. They talked about it in the present tense.

The New Church

The idea of a resurrection had been a tangential doctrinal variant for the Jews. But, for some of them, it morphed overnight into the central tenet of their faith. Opinions about life after death had been all over the map. But suddenly Christians were remarkably unanimous about one thing: The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

And that changed everything else.

Their Jewish religious and Temple worship rites weren’t exempt. They went from practicing animal sacrifice to preaching on Christ’s sacrifice. They claimed that the binding Law of Moses had been fulfilled. That baptism and communion had replaced circumcision as the symbol of their faith. They even changed their weekly day of worship from Saturday to Sunday.

It was like the world had experienced some kind of cataclysmic Impact Event.

Because it had.

The Resurrection is History

These rapid, sweeping changes in thinking and habits are documented history. And that is what makes Christianity so unique. It’s not just a “faith system” or a list of rules for healthy living. And it’s not a self-help program based on having a friendly relationship with God. Christianity is based on an epic story. But the story is true. It’s historically verifiable. And the central event in the story is the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The truth of Christianity lives or dies (pun intended) on the Resurrection. If you want to falsify the Christian story, just prove that Jesus never rose from the dead. That is the point the Apostle Paul was making in 1 Corinthians 15. If the Resurrection of Jesus was not an actual, historical event, you can dismiss us Christians as fools.

But if it was, you should bend your knee to the risen Messiah.

As I’ve discussed many times, the definition of truth is “correspondence to reality.” Does what we believe about something match the way the world really is? If it does, that belief is true. And that means that if we believe the Resurrection is true we should have solid historical evidence for it from the real world. Is there any?

You bet there is.

Evidence Please

The evidence doesn’t depend on your religious point of view. It’s the same kind of evidence mainstream historians use to evaluate any kind of historic event. You take the evidence you have and look for an explanation that takes all of it into account.

The first bit of evidence is the New Testament itself. If you evaluate it in the same way you would evaluate any set of ancient documents, the conclusion is simple. The New Testament documents are historically reliable. This really isn’t even debatable. The evidence is overwhelming. But think about the origins of these documents. Who wrote them, and why?

The answer to both those questions is so obvious it blows my mind that I, as a confessing Christian, missed it for decades.

The New Testament was written by people whose lives were turned upside down by the Resurrection of Christ. Their writings weren’t just fanciful musings. The authors wrote down what they saw. And they wrote those things down because of the Resurrection,

The Resurrection came first. It’s why we have a New Testament.

So, we have highly reliable historical documents. And those documents record an Impact Event unlike any other. Billions of people have died throughout history. But the world has only reset its entire calendar system in honor of one life. That’s the ultimate kind of Impact Event. And it’s powerful evidence for the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus.

The Minimal Facts Approach

The New Testament writers experienced the Impact Event and wrote about what they saw. But they weren’t the only ones. Other historians witnessed the effects of the Resurrection too. And their accounts corroborate the New Testament authors’ stories. For that reason, there are several elements of the story that even its critics admit are undeniable. These are mainstream historians who overwhelmingly agree to the veracity of five facts tied to the Resurrection. Dr. Gary Habermas, a world-class PhD Bible scholar, calls these the “Minimal Facts.” And he has popularized an argument based on them.

Here are the five central elements of the Resurrection account that even Christianity’s opponents admit are historically accurate:

  1. Jesus of Nazareth died by crucifixion on a Roman cross.
  2. Jesus’ disciples believed that he appeared to them after he had died.
  3. Paul, the church persecutor and sworn enemy of Christianity, was suddenly changed into its greatest advocate.
  4. James, the brother of Jesus, suddenly dropped his skepticism and became the leaderof the Jerusalem church.
  5. The tomb where they buried Jesus on Friday was empty on Sunday.

Since there is overwhelming agreement to these, Habermas’ “Minimal Facts Approach” simply says that the conclusion we draw about the Resurrection must be based on an “inference to the best explanation” for all these facts.

I’m not going to get into the details of each right now, but here’s the point: The only all-encompassing explanation for all five of these facts is that that Resurrection actually occurred.

A Reason To Believe

The New Testament writers penned their manuscripts for a reason. They believed that something cataclysmic had happened. And it doesn’t make sense to say they conspired to concoct the story. Every single one of them went to his grave without recanting the story they shared. Most of them were executed for that very reason. It strains credulity to say they were willing to suffer and die in defense of a story they knew they had made up.

Taking all this into account, it is perfectly reasonable to say the Resurrection is a historical fact. If you can say that about any historical event, you can say it about this one.

And yes, that means a miracle occurred. So, those who deny that miracles are possible can’t just dismiss the Resurrection as being “religious.” Of course it’s religious. But it’s also historical. The evidence is clear. They can doubt all historical claims. Or they can be reasonable and rethink the presuppositions that led them to reject miracles in the first place.

Here is a short summary of some of the “Minimal Facts” about the resurrection:

… and there is plenty of evidence to support each one of these facts:

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Early Evidence for the Resurrection by Dr. Gary Habermas (DVD), (Mp3) and (Mp4)

Cold Case Resurrection Set by J. Warner Wallace (books)

The Footsteps of the Apostle Paul (mp4 Download), (DVD) by Dr. Frank Turek

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Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and an M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons

Original Blog Source: https://bit.ly/3Cp1iuE

 

By Erik Manning

I used to love sharing the minimal facts with unbelievers.  It’s easy to present in a few minutes and sounds rhetorically powerful. When I tell my friends that the facts I’m sharing are universally acknowledged by scholars, even those who are skeptical, it seems like I am not coming at them with something that only conservative evangelicals believe. And on the surface, taking an end-run around the Gospels seemed helpful because unbelievers tend to view them as dubious sources.

However, I ran into a couple of issues. One was practical. Let’s say I got the skeptic to hear me out. Does it really make sense to say: “OK, I granted for the sake of argument that the Gospels are a hot mess of contradictions and historical gaffes. I now wanna take that back and argue that they’re much more reliable than that. You should accept orthodox Christian doctrine” The skeptic might ask “um… if that were true, why’d you start out granting so much for the sake of argument?” This feels like bait and switch.

WHY MAXIMAL DATA?

Plus, once an objection like grief hallucinations or mass delusions came up, I’d eventually have to back up and present other facts that skeptical and liberal scholars didn’t acknowledge. Any imagined rhetorical advantage evaporated. This approach didn’t really save time. If I wanted to defend the bodily appearances, the empty tomb, or the early persecution of the Twelve, I couldn’t “do it all with Paul.” I’d have to learn to defend the reliability of the Gospels and Acts. There are no shortcuts.

The good news is that this can be both rewarding and faith-building. You won’t be lost for words when you’ll hear a scholarly critic like Bart Ehrman lay out a list of complaints about the Gospels. You’ll no longer have to console yourself with “well, I’m not sure how to answer that, but at least the core facts are true.” You can read the Gospels and not wonder “is this part really defensibly historical?” Learning this approach kills cognitive dissonance.

OBJECTIONS TO MAXIMAL DATA

The only drawback is that you’ll be told you hold fringy views. But again, saying that there is evidence that the tomb was empty or the resurrection appearances were physical is already considered fringy to the scholarly consensus anyway. And importantly, scholarly politics can’t trump the force of objective evidence. It doesn’t mean that something is weakly supported by non-question-begging evidence because it isn’t granted by skeptical and liberal scholars. Nor does it mean we’re making a “for the Bible tells me so” argument.

When the skeptic asks, “what about all the contradictions?” you can offer to revisit them later and continue to make your positive case, rather than conceding them for the sake of argument. And by the way, the robust reliability argument can also be made in a way that’s just as quick and easy to share as minimal facts. It goes like this:

  1. Either the disciples were deceivers, deceived, or they were telling the truth.
  2. They were not deceivers. (They had good reasons not to lie considering they’d be ostracized and persecuted)
  3. They were not merely mistaken or deceived. (We can tell this by the accounts they gave of seeing, touching, and talking with Jesus over a long period of time after the resurrection)
  4. Therefore, they were telling the truth.

There! That’s not so hard now, is it? You could make that argument on an elevator. You just need to be prepared to back it up with additional evidence. So with this in mind, I’m going to tell you about 3 modern books you can pick up for around $50 total. And then I’m going to give you three older, public domain books that you can get off the Google Play store that won’t cost you a dime.

Resource #1: The Case For Jesus – Brant Pitre

This book helps answer a whole host of questions: Were the four Gospels really anonymous? Aren’t they written far too late to be considered reliable? Aren’t the Gospels folklore? What about the lost Gospels, like the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Peter? Is Jesus only divine in the Gospel of John and not the Synoptics?

Pitre offers some neglected evidence from the early church fathers and ancient manuscripts to demonstrate that the Gospels are not anonymous, as skeptics like to assert. Furthermore, he puts Jesus of Nazareth’s divine claims in an ancient Jewish context in a way that blew my mind. You won’t look at the phrases Son of Man and Kingdom of God in the same way.

Resource #2: Can We Trust the Gospels? – Peter J. Williams

This is a super accessible book and only 140 pages. The whole thing is great, but chapter 3 is worth the price of the book alone. Skeptics often claim that the Gospels were written decades later by people unfamiliar with 1st-century Palestine. If that’s true, we’d expect to find all kinds of errors regarding Palestinian geography, names, and customs, but Williams demonstrates time and time again that the Gospel writers get these details right, including many difficult types of details. Based on the data, Williams concludes that “The resulting Gospels are not what we would expect from people who made up stories at a geographical distance.” This serves as evidence that the evangelists were well-informed, consistently trustworthy, and close up to the facts.

Resource #3: Hidden in Plain View – Lydia McGrew

Having been largely neglected for over a century, Lydia McGrew revives an argument for the reliability of the NT called undesigned coincidences. In a nutshell, an undesigned coincidence is an apparently casual, yet puzzle-like fit between two or more texts, and its best explanation is that the authors knew the truth about the events they describe or allude to. These connections are among passages in the Gospels, as well as between Acts and Paul’s epistles. These lend credence to the idea that these documents were written by eyewitnesses who knew what they were talking about.  This is relevant to developing a case for the resurrection. For if the gospels can be shown to be rooted in credible eyewitness testimony, you have to take seriously the reported nature and variety of the post-resurrection encounters with the risen Jesus as coming from the original eyewitnesses.

Seeing examples of this in action is the easiest way to understand it. You can find plenty of interviews and lectures on YouTube where Dr. McGrew shares this argument.

I’d also highly recommend her other two books if you are interested in learning more about the Gospels’ reliability. Those are The Eye of the Beholder (which is a defense of John’s Gospel) and The Mirror and the Mask, which argues against claims made by evangelical scholars that the Gospel authors felt free to present events in one way even though they knew that the reality was different. These are a little more technical than her first book, and a great place to start if you want to go deeper into the issues.

FREE RESOURCES

  1. Now, for the free resources: JJ Blunt’s book Undesigned Coincidencesand William Paley’s Horae Paulinaeare the non-updated versions of Lydia McGrew’s Hidden in Plain View. I still recommend you get Lydia’s book, because she picks the “best of” these undesigned coincidences, and she has discovered several more that are not in these older books. If you’re on a budget, these are great additions to your library. And if you’re not on a budget, get them anyway. Both of these books are still worth reading even after reading Hidden in Plain View.

Finally, get A View of the Evidences of Christianity by William Paley. I cannot recommend this book enough. Paley debunks Hume’s anti-miracle argument. He examines all the evidence that the original witnesses of Christianity were willing to undergo labors, dangers, and suffering in order to spread the gospel of the resurrection.

He goes into great detail regarding the authorship and early use of the Gospels, which includes the unanimous testimony of the early church and even some heretics. Paley takes us into the unity of the character of Christ in all four Gospels. This answers some of the “why’s John’s Jesus so different?” objections. Paley also demonstrates 41 instances where the Gospel writers make incidental allusions to history that can be confirmed outside the NT, even down to minor details. These illustrate the evangelists’ familiarity with the setting and their accuracy in recounting details. He discusses alleged discrepancies in the Gospels, prophecy, and so much more. I can’t do this book justice in a short video. Just get it. Sure, his style of writing is from the 18th-century  and his arguments could use a little updating. However, this book has mostly stood the test of time and should not be forgotten.

Just search the Google Play store for these three public domain books and you can find free versions. There are many other books I could recommend, but these are meant to get you started. I just want to assure you that this isn’t a very difficult method to learn. It took time to learn the minimal facts approach, and you can take the time to learn this. There may be extra details, but we’ve seen that extra details are needed anyway to make a strong case. We can all find less time for Twitter, Instagram, or reading the latest political news, or binge-watching Netflix. You just have to set priorities.

Skeptics have poked apart the minimalist approaches to the resurrection for far too long. We need an army of Christian apologists who can make a more robust case. You can do this.

Recommended resources for this topic:

Early Evidence for the Resurrection by Dr. Gary Habermas (DVD), (Mp3) and (Mp4)

The New Testament: Too Embarrassing to Be False by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3, and Mp4)

The Footsteps of the Apostle Paul (mp4 Download), (DVD) by Dr. Frank Turek 

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Erik is a Reasonable Faith Chapter Director located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He’s a former freelance baseball writer and the co-owner of a vintage and handmade decor business with his wife, Dawn. He is passionate about the intersection of apologetics and evangelism.

Original Blog Source: https://bit.ly/30z17Qb

 

By Ryan Leasure

This article is the first in a series of nine blog posts that will unpack the story of how we got our Bible. That is to say, the Bible didn’t just fall from heaven into our laps. Rather, the Bible is the result of a long process that starts from the mind of God and ends with to our modern English translations.

The process involves inspiration of texts, collecting certain booksrejecting other books, copying of manuscripts, evaluating thousands of manuscripts to recreate the originals as much as possibletranslating the Hebrew and Greek texts into English, and then creating translations that are readable in our modern vernacular.

As you may have guessed, this series will deal with some of the more crucial issues surrounding the Bible—issues such as canon, the apocryphathe Dead Sea Scrolls, pseudopigraphical Gospels, textual criticism, the King James only movement, and so much more. I hope you will follow along with me as we trace the fascinating history of the Bible. If you’re not already a subscriber, click subscribe so you can get updates on future posts.

That said, we begin with Inspiration.

Verbal-Plenary Inspiration

Paul writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). A few concepts are worth noting here.

First, Paul says that Scripture is “breathed out by God” (from the Greek word “theopneustos“). Technically, God “exhales” rather than “inspires” the text. In other words, he is the source behind all Scripture.

Second, notice that God inspires Scripture, not the authors themselves. This necessary distinction means that God’s inspiration extends to the final product of Scripture itself, not the human author’s day-to-day life. Meaning, the authors were fallible while their God-breathed Scripture was not.

Third, Paul notes that ALL Scripture is inspired, not just parts of it. Some have erroneously taught that inspiration only extends to the parts that touch of faith and morals. But that is not what Paul writes. When Paul says “all,” he includes the Canaanite conquests, a talking donkey, and the Levitical Code.

Biblical Authors Affirmed Inspiration

Several times throughout the Old Testament, authors acknowledged that they were writing God’s words. Consider these examples:

“Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua”(Exod 17:14).

“Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the LORD said to me, “Behold I have put my words in your mouth” (Jer 1:9).

“The word of the LORD that came to Hosea, the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah” (Hos 1:1).

“On the fifth day of the month . . . the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi . . . and the hand of the LORD was upon him there” (Ezek 1:2-3).

Furthermore, New Testament authors affirmed the Old Testament’s inspiration:

“And this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet . . .” (Matt 1:22).

“Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas” (Acts 1:16).

“But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled.” (Acts 3:18).

“David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet” (Mark 12:36).

This last quotation is from Jesus’ lips himself. That is to say, Jesus affirmed the Old Testament’s inspiration.

What About the New Testament?

When Paul writes that “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” he was most likely referring to the Old Testament since the word for Scripture (“graphe“) refers to the Old Testament when it’s used in the New Testament. We must also remember that when Paul wrote this letter, portions of the New Testament had yet to be written. Was inspiration, then, limited to the Old Testament? No it wasn’t.

Notice how Peter speaks of Paul’s letters in 2 Peter 3:15-16: “Just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” Peter appears to be lumping in Paul’s letters with the Old Testament and granting them equal authority.

First Timothy 5:18 is another crucial text on this matter. Paul writes, “For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,’ and, ‘The laborer deserves his wages.’” Paul quotes two passages in this verse and refers to both of them as Scripture. The first text comes from Deuteronomy 25:4. The second comes from Luke 10:7. That is to say, Paul thought the Gospel of Luke was Scripture on par with the Old Testament.

We even have some clues that suggest the apostles knew they were writing God’s Word. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 14:37, “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord.” Additionally, Paul declares in 1 Thessalonians 2:13, “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God.”

Peter also remarks, “You should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles” (2 Peter 3:2). The apostles, then, believed that they spoke authoritatively from God. And they could do this because Jesus promised them that the Holy Spirit would guide them in the process (John 14:26; 16:13).

Mechanical Dictation?

Peter notes, “Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:20-21). Some suggest that the Holy Spirit’s activity sounds an awful lot like mechanical dictation. But this would be a mistake. As I alluded to earlier, inspiration extends only to the final product of Scripture. Meaning, God worked within and through the human authors’ skills, personalities, and experiences as they wrote their various works. In short, the dozens of biblical authors produced their Scripture in different ways.

The author of Hebrews makes this point when he begins, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets” (Heb 1:1). Notice how he affirms that the prophets spoke “in many ways.” And Scripture makes these different ways abundantly clear. Consider a few examples:

  • Investigation/Interpretation: “Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories” (1 Pet 1:10-11).
  • Dictation: “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write . . .” (Rev 2:1)
  • Research: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus” (Luke 1:1-3).

Additionally, biblical authors wrote poetry, wisdom literature, letters, and prophecy. And in doing so, God worked through them in such a way as to not override their unique perspective. At the same time, he superintended the process to guarantee that his exact message was communicated. As the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy remarks, “We affirm that God in His Work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared. We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.”1

Evidence of Inspiration

Some argue that inspiration appeals to circular reasoning because we must appeal to Scripture itself to affirm inspiration. While that’s a fair critique, Christians are right to appeal to Scripture because it is our highest authority. If we appeal to, say human reasoning, then we elevate human reasoning to a higher authority than Scripture.

That said, we have good evidence for inspiration in fulfilled prophecy. I could list dozens of fulfilled prophecies, but I will only mention two briefly. First, Isaiah 53 correctly predicts Christ’s crucifixion. Of note is the fact that Isaiah says that he will “pierced for our transgression” (Isa 53:5). This method of death is significant because at the time, Jewish methods of execution were stoning or hanging. How could Isaiah rightly predict the kind of death Jesus would suffer seven hundred years in advance?

Another example is Daniel 9. While I won’t go into detail, Daniel predicts the exact timing of Christ’s arrival. More than that, Daniel says that the Messiah will be “cut off” (killed) just prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. Jesus was crucified in AD 30. The Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70.

Inerrancy

Inerrancy naturally follows from inspiration. In other words, if God is the author behind the entire Bible, it must all be true because God always speaks truth. Consider the following texts

“It is impossible for God to lie” (Heb 6:18).

“You are God, and your words are true” (2 Sam 7:28).

“Every word of God proves true” (Prov 30:5).

“Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

Notice that Jesus doesn’t just say that God’s word is true, but it is TRUTH. It is the absolute standard of truth. And lest anyone thinks this idea of inerrancy is a modern invention, listen to a few of the church fathers:

“You have searched the Scriptures, which are true and given by the Holy Spirit. You know that nothing unrighteous or counterfeit is written in them.” — Clement of Rome, 1st century

“The statements of Holy Scripture will never contradict the truth.” — Tertullian, 3rd century

“It is the opinion of some that the Scriptures do not agree or that the God who gave them is false. But there is no disagreement at all. Far from it! The Father, who is truth, cannot lie.” — Athanasius, 4th century

In short, while Scripture does not give us exhaustive knowledge of all things (how to change a tire for example), it does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.

The Next Post

The next post will consider how the Old Testament came to be. Specifically, it will address the unfolding nature of the Old Testament, its authors and editors, as well as its preservation.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

Oh, Why Didn’t I Say That? Is the Bible Historically Reliable? by Dr. Frank Turek DVD, Mp4, Mp3 Download.

Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace (Book)

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Ryan Leasure holds a Master of Arts from Furman University and a Masters of Divinity from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Currently, he’s a Doctor of Ministry candidate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Moore, SC.

Original Blog Source:  https://bit.ly/3BXULYy

 

In a previous article, I reviewed several arguments that are typically raised in support of the historicity of Jesus but, upon closer inspection, turn out to be of extremely limited evidential value. In this article, I will discuss an approach to arguing from extrabiblical sources that I consider to be much more robust. Whereas in the previous article, I critiqued appeals to direct testimony to the historicity of Jesus (which, at best, only attest to the broad outlines of the gospel story), in this article I will consider incidental allusions in the gospels that are indirectly and undesignedly confirmed by extrabiblical secular sources.

The data surveyed in the ensuing discussion are of varying evidential weights, though all are (in my assessment) significantly more probable on the hypothesis of historical reportage than on its falsehood. The case for the reliability of the gospels must also be recognized as a cumulative one, and one should not expect to be able to rest the entire case on any one of these examples. When the numerous lines of external and internal evidences bearing on the gospel accounts are considered together, one has, in my view, an extremely powerful argument for the substantial trustworthiness of the gospels – that is to say, that the gospel authors are shown to be close up to the facts, well informed, and habitually reliable. This is epistemically relevant to developing a case for the resurrection and in turn, Christianity, since, if the gospels can indeed be shown to be grounded in credible eyewitness testimony, then one has to take seriously the purported nature and variety of the post-resurrection encounters with the risen Jesus as coming from the original apostolic eyewitnesses. Having established the original apostolic claims concerning Jesus’ resurrection, we can then attempt to adjudicate whether these claims are best explained by the apostles attempting to deceive their audiences; by them being honestly mistaken, or by Jesus having risen from the dead.

One may object to the style of argument advanced here on the grounds that an individual living in first-century Palestine would presumably be expected to know these facts, or at the very least could have looked them up. However, of particular interest to our purposes here are difficult facts that the authors get right – that is to say, the evangelists betray knowledge (often very casually and incidentally) of specialized information that would have been hard to have access to unless they were close up both temporally and geographically to the events of which they wrote. I am not talking here of facts that would have been widely known and easily accessible, such as who was the Roman emperor of the time. In a world without the internet and easy access to information, writing about historical events that transpired decades before one’s time was a minefield, especially after the events of 70 A.D., when the city of Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the Romans. The numerous points of connection between the gospel history and that written of in secular sources, therefore, provide an important source of evidence for the credibility of the evangelists.

This article will discuss only incidental corroborations of the gospel accounts and will not touch upon the book of Acts, though of course evidence bearing on the reliability of Acts also bears indirectly on the credibility of the gospels since it reflects favorably upon the historical meticulousness of Luke, who authored Acts as well as the third gospel. The historical reliability of Acts will be the subject of a subsequent article (and I have also covered some examples in previous articles, for example here and here). I will also not in this essay offer an extensive discussion of historical objections to the gospels (of which there are many, some of which have been addressed previously on this site) but will instead focus solely on the positive case for the gospel history. However, a few historical objections will be considered that, upon closer inspection, turn out to provide positive evidence for the reliability of the gospels. This short essay is also not intended to provide an exhaustive list of extra-biblical evidences but will catalogue several key examples of external confirmation of the gospel accounts, with a view towards whetting the reader’s appetite for further study of this fascinating topic. For further reading, I recommend starting with part two, chapter six of William Paley’s A View of the Evidence of Christianity, to whom I owe many of the examples discussed in this essay.[1]

Joseph and Archelaus

The gospel of Matthew gives an account of the flight of Jesus and his family to Egypt to escape from Herod the Great’s attempt to kill Jesus by having all infants less than two years of age in the region of Bethlehem put to death (Matt 2:13-18). Matthew 2:19-22 picks up the story of Jesus’ family commencing their return from Egypt following the death of Herod the Great.

19 But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, 20 saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” 21 And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee.

Since Joseph received news that Herod the Great had passed away, one might have expected him to surmise that Herod the Great’s eldest son, Archelaus, would succeed him to the throne. However, in verse 22, we read that Joseph “heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod,” and consequently “withdrew to the district of Galilee.” The reader, then, may wonder why news of Archelaus’ reign in Judea caused Joseph to revise his plans and travel towards Galilee instead. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus gives us a clue. He tells us that, “he [Herod the Great] appointed Antipas, to whom he had before left the kingdom, to be tetrarch of Galilee and Berea, and granted the kingdom to Archelaus,” (Antiquities 17.188).[2] Josephus also writes elsewhere that Caesar Augustus, respecting Herod’s will (Wars of the Jews 2.93–96)[3],

“…gave the one half of Herod’s kingdom to Archelaus, by the name of Ethnarch, and promised to make him king also afterward, if he rendered himself worthy of that dignity; but as to the other half, he divided it into two tetrarchies, and gave them to two other sons of Herod, the one of them to Philip, and the other to that Antipas who contested the kingdom with Archelaus. Under this last was Perea and Galilee, with a revenue of two hundred talents: but Batanea, and Trachonitis, and Auranitis, and certain parts of Zeno’s house about Jamnia, with a revenue of a hundred talents, were made subject to Philip; (96) while Idumea, and all Judea, and Samaria, were parts of the ethnarchy of Archelaus, although Samaria was eased of one quarter of its taxes, out of regard to their not having revolted with the rest of the nation.” 

Thus, we learn from Josephus that, following the death of Herod the Great, Herod’s territory was divided among three of his sons, with Herod’s eldest son Archelaus reigning in Judea; Herod Antipas becoming tetrarch of in Galilee and Peraea; and Philip becoming tetrarch of territories north and east of the Jordan. This, then, provides some historical background to Joseph’s decision to avoid Archelaus by going to Galilee instead of Judea. We still, however, at this point lack an explanation for why Joseph learning that Archelaus reigning in Judea prompted his change of course.

Josephus elsewhere reports that “There was one Judas, the son of Saripheus, and Matthias, the son of Margalothus,” who, “when they found that the king’s distemper was incurable, excited the young men that they would pull down all those works which the king had erected contrary to the law of their fathers, and thereby obtain the rewards which the law will confer on them for such actions of piety…for the king had erected over the great gate of the temple a large golden eagle, of great value, and had dedicated it to the temple,” (Antiquities 17.6.2).[4] Perceiving that the erection of a golden eagle in the temple violated the second commandment which prohibits graven images, these men therefore “persuaded [their scholars] to pull down the golden eagle; alleging, that although they should incur any danger which might bring them to their deaths, the virtue of the action now proposed to them would appear much more advantageous to them than the pleasures of life; since they would die for the preservation and observation of the law of their fathers; since they would also acquire an everlasting fame and commendation; since they would be both commended by the present generation, and leave an example of life that would never be forgotten to posterity…” (Antiquities 17.6.2).[5] Herod’s response was to burn those who had caused this sedition alive (Antiquities 17.6.4). This was among the last acts of Herod the Great before his death in 4 B.C. (Antiquities 17.8).

Josephus tells us that, following Herod the Great’s death and the succession of Archelaus in Judea, “some of the Jews got together, out of a desire of innovation. They lamented Matthias, and those that were slain with him by Herod, who had not any respect paid them by a funeral mourning, out of the fear men were in of that man; they were those who had been condemned for pulling down the golden eagle. The people made a great clamor and lamentation hereupon, and cast out some reproaches against the king also, as if that tended to alleviate the miseries of the deceased,” (Antiquities 17.9.1).[6] These individuals, Josephus informs us, “assembled together” and petitioned Archelaus to enact revenge against “those who had been honored by Herod; and that, in the first and principal place, he would deprive that high priest whom Herod had made…” (Antiquities 17.9.1).[7] However, Archelaus was “mightily offended at their importunity,” (Antiquities 17.9.1).[8] Josephus tells us of Archelaus’ response (Antiquities 17.9.1)[9]:

“However, he sent the general of his forces to use persuasions, and to tell them that the death which was inflicted on their friends, was according to the law; and to represent to them, that their petitions about these things were carried to a great height of injury to him; that the time was not now proper for such petitions, but required their unanimity until such time as he should be established in the government by the consent of Caesar, and should then be come back to them; for that he would then consult with them in common concerning the purport of their petitions; but that they ought at present to be quiet, lest they should seem seditious persons.” 

Josephus goes on to tell us what happened as the next Passover festival rolled around, and there was an influx of Jewish pilgrims into Judea for the feast of Passover (Antiquities 17.9.3)[10]:

“Now, upon the approach of that feast of unleavened bread which the law of their fathers had appointed for the Jews at this time, which feast is called the Passover, and is a memorial of their deliverance out of Egypt…the seditious lamented Judas and Matthias, those teachers of the laws, and kept together in the temple, and had plenty of food, because these seditious persons were not ashamed to get it. And as Archelaus was afraid lest some terrible thing should spring up by means of these men’s madness, he sent a regiment of armed men, and with them a captain of a thousand, to suppress the violent efforts of the seditious, before the whole multitude should be infected with the like madness; and gave them this charge, that if they found any much more openly seditious than others, and more busy in tumultuous practices, they should bring them to him. But those that were seditious on account of those teachers of the law, irritated the people by the noise and clamors they used to encourage the people in their designs; so they made an assault upon the soldiers, and came up to them, and stoned the greatest part of them, although some of them ran away wounded, and their captain among them; and when they had thus done, they returned to the sacrifices which were already in their hands.”  

Thus, this Jewish mob, who protested the death of Mathias and Judas (who had previously been executed for their part in removing the image of the eagle from the Jewish temple) stoned the soldiers who had been sent by Archelaus to prevent an uprising. Josephus tells us what happened next (Antiquities 17.9.3)[11]:

“Now Archelaus thought there was no way to preserve the entire government, but by cutting off those who made this attempt upon it; so he sent out the whole army upon them, and sent the horsemen to prevent those that had their tents without the temple, from assisting those that were within the temple, and to kill such as ran away from the footmen when they thought themselves out of danger; which horsemen slew three thousand men, while the rest went to the neighboring mountains. Then did Archelaus order proclamation to be made to them all, that they should retire to their own homes; so they went away, and left the festival, out of fear of somewhat worse which would follow, although they had been so bold by reason of their want of instruction.” 

Thus, Archelaus’ response was to send his entire army upon the Jewish temple. He surrounded the temple with the horsemen (to prevent anyone from leaving or entering the temple) and had his men massacre three thousand Jews inside the temple. Given that these events unfolded around the time of Passover, it would have been a particularly busy time inside the temple. Following the massacre, Archelaus made a proclamation that Passover was cancelled and that the Jewish pilgrims should return to their hometowns from whence they came. It is not difficult to imagine Mary, Joseph, and Jesus making their way back north from Egypt right around this time, encountering this mass of distraught and fleeing pilgrims coming out of Judea, hearing what had just happened, and deciding to change course and go to Galilee instead, where Archelaus’ younger brother, Herod Antipas, was reigning instead.

It may be observed that Matthew does not give the backstory to Joseph’s change in course. Indeed, Archelaus is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible. Josephus’ incidental and undesigned illumination of the text, therefore, is more probable given that the event Matthew describes is grounded in truth rather than falsehood. This is made all the more the case by the chronological markers (especially the reference to Herod’s death in both accounts) which place these events as happening around the same time as the return of Joseph and his family from Egypt.

Another interesting, though somewhat weaker, point is that Matthew states that Ἀρχέλαος βασιλεύει τῆς Ἰουδαίας (literally, “Archelaus was kinging in Judea”). In concurrence with Matthew, Josephus informs us that His claim to the throne had not been certified by Caesar, and in fact, one of the complaints against Archelaus was that he had already taken the kingship over to himself before it had been formally ratified by Caesar: “Now, Antipater, Salome’s son, a very subtle orator, and a bitter enemy to Archelaus, spake first to this purpose:—That it was ridiculous in Archelaus to plead now to have the kingdom given him, since he had, in reality, taken already the power over it to himself, before Caesar had granted it to him,” (Antiquities 17.9.5).[12] Herod the Great, by contrast, is referred to as “Herod the king” (Mt 2:1,3, c.f. Lk 1:5), which is attested by first-century coins that bear the inscription, ΗΡΩ∆ΟΥ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ, that is, “King Herod.” In fact, there was never subsequently a formally ratified king at Jerusalem, except during the last three years of the life of Herod Agrippa I (Antiquities 18.6.10 and 19.5.1). This comports with Acts 12:1, which refers to Herod [Agrippa I] the king.”

When Did Jesus Begin His Public Ministry?

John 2:18-20 recounts a dialogue between Jesus and some Jews following the first cleansing of the temple, which occurred towards the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry:

18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

The veracity of the saying of Jesus in verse 19 is supported by an undesigned co-incidence, since Mark 14:57-58, describing the scene where Jesus is on trial before Caiaphas the high priest, notes,

57 And some stood up and bore false witness against him, saying, 58 “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’”

Mark 15:29-30 also reports that onlookers of Jesus’ death on the cross shouted out, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” (c.f. Mt 27:40). It is noteworthy that Jesus never said anything about destroying a manmade temple and rebuilding it in three days but not by human hands (as per Mk 14:57-58, c.f. Mt 26:61). Moreover, though both Mark and Matthew make reference to this accusation, neither gives a pretext of the saying, or attempts to clarify Jesus’ original words. It does not, however, appear to be a saying that has been invented out of whole cloth, but is more likely a garbled version of something Jesus in fact said (especially in view of the allusion to three days, often associated with Jesus’ predictions concerning His resurrection). In John 2:19 (quoted above), however, John provides us with the original statement of Jesus, though he does not report the later misrepresentation of Jesus’ words, nor its use as an accusation. Matthew and Mark, on the other hand, report the misrepresentations of Jesus’ words and its use as an accusation, but do not give us the original saying. Thus, neither account appears to independent, neither being copied from the other. This undesigned co-incidence supports the historicity of these accounts.

There is, however, also a way of corroborating this account using extrabiblical sources. Take note of the date given by the Jews – “it has taken forty-six years to build this temple…” We can thus discern the approximate date at which this dialogue must have taken place, since Flavius Josephus helpfully tells us when Herod the Great began to rebuild the temple. It was in the 18th year of his reign, which landed in approximately 19 B.C. (Antiquities 15.11.1). Forty-six years on from 19 B.C. lands us in 28 A.D. Now, according to Luke 3:1, when did Jesus commence His public ministry? It was in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Augustus Caesar died in 14 A.D., but two years prior to that (the fall of 12 A.D.), according to the historian Suetonius, Augustus appointed Tiberius as co-emperor, in order to ensure a smooth transition of power. This is implied by the following quotation, which refers to Tiberius’ return to Rome following a stint in Germany for two years, between 10 and 12 A.D. (Suetonius, Tiberius 20-21)[13]:

“After two years he returned from Germany to the city, and celebrated the triumph which he had deferred, attended by his lieutenants, for whom he had procured the honour of triumphal ornaments. Before he turned to ascend the capitol, he alighted from his chariot, and knelt before his father, who sat by, to superintend the solemnity…A law having been not long after carried by the consuls for his being appointed a colleague with Augustus in the administration of the provinces, and in taking the census, when that was finished he went into Illyricum.” 

This indicates that Tiberius was “appointed a colleague with Augustus in the administration of the provinces, and in taking the census” after Tiberius’ return from Germany, in 12 A.D. Thus, the fifteenth year of Tiberius lands us in 27 A.D., corresponding to Jesus’ baptism and ministry commencement. The cleansing of the temple would have taken place the following Passover (John 2:13), placing it in the spring of 28 A.D. Thus, by two independent methods, and using information drawn from John, Luke, Josephus, and Suetonius, we have been able to confirm the date on which Jesus cleansed the temple. This sort of co-incidence – in particular, the undesignedness with which the pieces dovetail, is best explained by the sources being rooted in truth.

Jesus’ Teachings on Divorce

In Mark 10:2-12, we read about Jesus’ teachings on the subject of divorce and remarriage:

2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

This last statement in verses 11 and 12 has given rise to a popular objection to Mark’s account, namely, that although Jewish law made provision for a man to divorce his wife, it made no such provision for a woman to divorce her husband. Thus, it has been thought, this might betray the fact that the author of Mark was a gentile who here reveals his ignorance of Jewish law, or that our author has reworked Jesus’ teachings to make it more suitable for a Roman audience. John Donahue and Daniel Harrington, for instance, note that “This sentence is generally regarded as an addition to Jesus’ teaching that was made to address situations related to Roman legal practice whereby a woman could initiate divorce proceedings.”[14] Josephus, however, sheds some light on the significance of Jesus’ words in their original historical context. He writes that “Herodias took upon her to confound the laws of our country, and divorce herself from her husband [that is, Philip] while he was alive, and was married to Herod [Antipas], her husband’s brother by the father’s side; he was tetrarch of Galilee.”[15] This takes on a particular significance when we consider that Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee, which was the very place where Jesus had just been teaching (Mk 9:30, 33). Though Mark 10:1 states that “he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again,” the parallel account in Matthew 19:2 indicates that “large crowds followed him,” implying that he delivered this teaching to Galilean crowds. Furthermore, the verb ἔρχομαι in Mark 10:1 does not necessarily describe a completed action and verse 17 (“And as he was setting out on his journey…”) suggests that he had not yet arrived in Judea. In fact, Jesus did not even reach Jericho, which is on the outskirts of Judea, until verse 46. From these clues, it may be reasonably deduced that Jesus was still teaching the Galilean crowds, for whom a rebuke of Herod Antipas’ adulterous relationship with Herodias (and Herodias’ divorcing of her previous husband, Philip) was of particular relevance.

The surprising nature (given Jewish law) of Jesus’ teaching in Mark 10:11-12, coupled with the incidental way that Josephus illuminates the gospel account, supports the veracity of Mark’s narrative.

Why Was John the Baptist Imprisoned?

Mark 6:17-18 gives us the evangelist’s understanding of the motive behind Herod’s imprisonment of John the Baptist:

17 For it was Herod who had sent and seized John and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because he had married her. 18 For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.

Mark’s statement of Herod’s motivation in imprisoning John the Baptist contradicts the statement of Josephus, who wrote[16],

“Now, when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were greatly moved [or pleased] by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it should be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod’s suspicious temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death.” 

According to the gospels, it was not just Herod’s suspicious temper or his fear of an uprising; it was because of John’s disapproval of Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife, Herodias. Of course, these motivations are not incompatible and it may have been a combination of both. This does raise the interesting question, however, of how the evangelists should know what Herod Antipas’ motives were for having John imprisoned. A plausible answer to this is supplied by Luke 8:3, which indicates that one of Jesus’ female disciples, who had followed Him from Galilee, was “Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager.” Thus, evidently, Jesus’ followers had family in the highest ranks of Herod Antipas’ employment.

There is also another interesting feature of this text from Josephus that is of evidential value. Herod Antipas’ previous wife, Phasaelis, whom Antipas had divorced, returned to her father, Aretas IV, king of the Nabateans. This resulted in a military conflict between Antipas and Aretas IV. Josephus explains (Antiquities 18.108–115) [17],

“About this time Aretas (the king of Arabia Petrea) and Herod had a quarrel, on the account following: Herod the tetrarch had married the daughter of Aretas, and had lived with her a great while; but when he was once at Rome, he lodged with Herod, who was his brother indeed, but not by the same mother; for this Herod was the son of the high priest Simon’s daughter. However, he fell in love with Herodias, this last Herod’s wife, who was the daughter of Aristobulus their brother, and the sister of Agrippa the Great. This man ventured to talk to her about a marriage between them; which address when she admitted, an agreement was made for her to change her habitation, and come to him as soon as he should return from Rome; one article of this marriage also was this, that he should divorce Aretas’s daughter. So Antipas, when he had made this agreement, sailed to Rome; but when he had done there the business he went about, and was returned again, his wife having discovered the agreement he had made with Herodias, and having learned it before he had notice of her knowledge of the whole design, she desired him to send her to Macherus, which is a place on the borders of the dominions of Aretas and Herod, without informing him of any of her intentions. Accordingly Herod sent her thither, as thinking his wife had not perceived anything; now she had sent a good while before to Macherus, which was subject to her father, and so all things necessary for her journey were made ready for her by the general of Aretas’s army and by that means she soon came into Arabia, under the conduct of the several generals, who carried her from one to another successively; and she soon came to her father, and told him of Herod’s intentions. So Aretas made this the first occasion of his enmity between him and Herod, who had also some quarrel with him about their limits at the country of Gamalitis. So they raised armies on both sides, and prepared for war, and sent their generals to fight instead of themselves; and, when they had joined battle, all Herod’s army was destroyed by the treachery of some fugitives, who, though they were of the tetrarchy of Philip, joined with Aretas’s army. So Herod wrote about these affairs to Tiberius; who, being very angry at the attempt made by Aretas, wrote to Vitellius, to make war upon him, and either to take him alive, and bring him to him in bonds, or to kill him, and send him his head. This was the charge that Tiberius gave to the president of Syria.” 

Thus, Herod lost the war against Aretas IV. According to Josephus, many of the Jews blamed Herod’s defeat on the way in which Herod had treated John the Baptist (Antiquities 18.116–117)[18]:

“Now, some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod’s army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist; for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness… Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of this army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God’s displeasure against him.” 

The explanations that the Jews offered of Herod’s defeat at the hands of Aretas IV makes sense in view of the gospel account, which informs us that the reason why Herod had John the Baptist imprisoned was because “John had been saying to Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ And Herodias had a grudge against him and wanted to put him to death.” [19] John the Baptist was a strong critic of Herod Antipas’ adulterous relationship with Herodias, which had led to John’s imprisonment and ultimately to his execution. And it was Herod Antipas’ adulterous relationship with Herodias that led to the war between Herod Antipas and Aretas IV and ultimately to his defeat. Is it any wonder, then, that the Jews blamed the destruction of Herod’s armies on Herod’s treatment of John the Baptist? This undesigned co-incidence between Mark and Josephus again supports the veracity of Mark’s account.

The Execution of John the Baptist

Mark 6 recounts the story of the death of John the Baptist, when Herodias’ daughter, after dancing for Herod’s guests at a banquet, offered her whatever she wished. She requested the head of John the Baptist. According to Mark 6:27-28,

27 And immediately the king sent an executioner with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison 28 and brought his head on a platter and gave it to the girl, and the girl gave it to her mother.

The Greek word used for “executioner” in verse 27 is σπεκουλάτορα, rather than the more usual term for a civil executioner, which is δήμιος. The word σπεκουλάτορα is a rank of military officer, literally meaning “scout” or “courier” (English cognates include “spectate” and “spectacles”). This rank of officer also served as body guards of the Roman emperor. These officers occasionally acted as executioners (Seneca, de Ira 1.16), though this was not their distinctive office. The fact that Herod used a σπεκουλατωρ (rather than a δήμιος) to carry out the execution dovetails perfectly with Josephus’ account of the same event, according to which John the Baptist “was sent a prisoner, out of Herod’s suspicious temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death.” (Antiquities 18.119). [19] Thus, we learn that Herod Antipas was not during this time at his palace in Galilee, but rather was on a military campaign against his former father-in-law, Aretas IV, king of the Nabateans, and was therefore resident at his military fortress called Macherus. This illuminates why a military officer, rather than a civil executioner, was used for putting John the Baptist to death, and provides some supporting evidence in favor of historicity.

John the Baptist’s Baptizing on the Jordan River

In Luke 3:10-14, we read of various individuals who enquired of John the Baptist what they should do. According to verse 14,

14 Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.”

The word translated “soldiers” in this verse is στρατευόμενοι, which is a present participle, literally translated “those soldiering” or “those being soldiers.” This is in fact the only instance of this form in the gospels and Acts out of 29 occurrences of the word στρατιώτης and its inflections. The use of the present participle in Luke 3:14 suggests that these soldiers are on active duty. How, though, does this comport with the fact that this period, near the beginning of Pilate’s decade-long term, is one of peace in Palestine? The only military conflict going on at this time was that between Herod Antipas and his former father-in-law, Aretas IV, king of the Nabateans. As already discussed, Josephus indicates that Herod Antipas had a fortress, called Macherus, located in Jordan twenty-five kilometers southeast of the mouth of the Jordan river, on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, “on the borders of the dominions of Aretas and Herod,” (Antiquities 18.111).[20] Antipas hired a mercenary army to carry on the war against Aretas. These soldiers, then, are on their way down to bolster the garrison at the fortress. Thus, the soldiers would naturally pass by where John the Baptist was baptizing on their way to shore up the garrison at Macherus. Again, the subtlety of this co-incidence tends to confirm the credibility of Luke’s account.

The Office of the High Priest

One curious feature of the gospel accounts is that the high priests are consistently spoken of in the plural number (ἀρχιερεῖς) when normally (as per the prescriptions of the Torah) there was only ever a single high priest. In agreement with the gospels, Josephus also speaks of the priests in the plural number (e.g. Wars of the Jews 2.322).

Luke 3:1 indicates that Jesus’ public ministry began “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar…during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.” A parallel passage in Josephus, which likewise speaks of two individuals occupying the office of high priest, can be found in Wars of the Jews 2.243: “but he [Quadratus] sent two others of those that were of the greatest power among men, and both Jonathan and Ananias, the high priests…”[21]

William Paley also observes that, though John does not mention that both Ananas and Caiaphas held the office of high priest, “That Annas was a person in an eminent station, and possessed an authority co-ordinate with, or next to, that of the high priest properly so called, may be inferred from Saint John’s Gospel, which, in the history of Christ’s crucifixion, relates [in 18:13] that ‘the soldiers led him away to Annas first.’ And this might be noticed as an example of undesigned coincidence in the two evangelists.”[22] The reason for taking Jesus to Annas first, according to John 18:13, was that “he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was high priest that year,” but no mention is made of him also serving in the capacity of high priest.

Interestingly, Acts 4:6 refers to “Annas the high priest and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family,” thus referring only to Annas as high priest, even though he is listed alongside Caiaphas. In a similar vein, Josephus writes, “Joseph also, the son of Gorion, and Ananus the high priest, were chosen as governors of all affairs within the city,” (Wars of the Jews 2.563).[23] William Paley comments, “Yet Ananus, though here called the high priest Ananus, was not then in the office of the high priesthood. The truth is, there is an indeterminateness in the use of this title in the Gospel: sometimes it is applied exclusively to the person who held the office at the time; sometimes to one or two more, who probably shared with him some of the powers or functions of the office; and, sometimes, to such of the priests as were eminent by their station or character; and there is the very same indeterminateness in Josephus.”[24]

In Matthew 26:3, we read, “Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas.” Josephus attests to the fact that Caiaphas was high priest throughout the term of Pontius Pilate (and therefore at this time). Josephus writes (Antiquities 18.33)[25],

“He [Tiberius] was now the third emperor; and he sent Valerius Gratus to be procurator of Judea, and to succeed Annius Rufus. This man deprived Ananus of the high priesthood, and appointed Ismael, the son of Phabi, to be high priest. He also deprived him in a little time, and ordained Eleazar, the son of Ananus, who had been high priest before, to be high priest: which office, when he had held for a year, Gratus deprived him of it, and gave the high priesthood to Simon, the son of Camithus; and when he had possessed that dignity no longer than a year, Joseph Caiaphas was made his successor. When Gratus had done those things, he went back to Rome, after he had tarried in Judea eleven years, when Pontius Pilate came as his successor.” 

From clues in Josephus and the gospels, it may reasonably be deduced that, though Ananus had been deposed from his office by Pilate’s predecessor, Valerius Gratus, the Jews nonetheless continued to recognize him as the rightful high priest, even while also recognizing the line of Roman-instituted high priests, the fourth of whom was Joseph Caiaphas. It is also noteworthy that Eleazar, the son of Ananias, and Simon, the son of Camithus, are both said to have held this office no longer than a year before the appointment of Caiaphas. This illuminates the statements in John 11:49, 11:51, and 18:13 that Caiaphas was “high priest that year,” when normally the office of the high priest was a life-long occupation. Note too that this is said of Caiaphas, but not of Ananus, which is consistent with the hypothesis, which I suggested above, that Ananus was recognized as the God-instituted high priest, even while also recognizing the series of Roman-instituted high priests.

Josephus also writes of the removal of Caiaphas from this office after Pilate’s term in office was over, noting that Lucius Vitellius the Elder, Legate of Syria “deprived Joseph, who was called Caiaphas, of the high priesthood, and appointed Jonathan, the son of Ananus, the former high priest, to succeed him,” (Antiquities 18.95).[26]

Do the Jews Wash Their Hands Before Eating?

In Mark 7:1-4, we read,

Now when the Pharisees gathered to him, with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, 2 they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, 4 and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.)

In his book, Jesus, Interrupted, Bart Ehrman asserts that “Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees ‘and all the Jews’ washed their hands before eating, so as to observe ‘the tradition of the elders.’ This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual.”[27] Ehrman has in mind here Exodus 30:18-21; 40:30-32 and Leviticus 20:1-16, in which the priests are called to observe hand washing practices, but the general populace is not. But did the Jews of Jesus’ time, who were heavily influenced by the practices of the Pharisees, engage in this ritual, even though it was not required of them in the written Law? To find out, we can look at some Jewish evidence. According to a letter addressed from an Alexandrian Jew by the name of Aristeas of Marmora (who lived in the second or third century B.C.) to his brother Philocrates, “And as is the custom of all the Jews, they washed their hands in the sea and prayed to God…” Another source is the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20-50 A.D.), who writes that the law “does not look upon those who have even touched a dead body, which has met with a natural death, as pure and clean, until they have washed and purified themselves with sprinklings and ablutions” (The Special Laws 3.205).

Let’s consider some modern scholarly opinion. Susan Haber writes[28],

“The Centrality of impurity to Jewish life in the Second Temple period is supported by archaeological evidence. The discovery of mikvaot in such diverse places as Gamla, Sepphoris, Herodium and Massada suggests that in Palestine the removal of impurity was not a rite reserved only for approaching the sacred precincts of the Temple, but was common practice for Jews of all walks of life. The textual evidence suggests that the Jews of the Diaspora also purified themselves, if not through immersion, then by sprinkling, splashing or hand washing.” 

To Ehrman’s credit, Ehrman has since corrected himself on this particular issue. Nonetheless, that Mark in facts gets this right (despite the apparent discrepancy with the Torah) suggests, once again, that he is well informed and close up to the facts.

Tyre to the Sea of Galilee by Way of Sidon

A curious statement is found in Mark 7:31 that “[Jesus] returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis.” At first blush, this appears odd since Sidon is northeast of Tyre, while the Sea of Galilee is southeast of Tyre. Thus, it raises the question of why Jesus would travel north in order to go south. Some critical scholars argue that this reveals that “the evangelist was not directly acquainted with Palestine.”[29] It has even been suggested that “Mark wants to have Jesus move north, then east, and finally south to compass the whole of the southern Phoenician (Gentile) territory prior to his journey to Jerusalem in 8:22–10:52.”[30] However, such conclusions are unwarranted. Inspecting a topographical map reveals that there is in fact a mountain, Mount Meron, three-quarters of a mile high that lies directly between Tyre and the Sea of Galilee. There is a pass from Sidon that leads through the mountains to the Jordan river valley, which would supply fresh water for the journey to foot travelers to Galilee. Thus, far from revealing the evangelist’s ignorance of Palestinian geography, it in fact reveals his intimate acquaintance with it.

The Samaritans and Their Temple

John 4:1-45 recounts Jesus’ encounter with the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well. The woman says to Jesus, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship,” (Jn 4:19-20). In agreement with this, Josephus states that the Samaritans “assembled themselves together upon the mountain called Gerizzim, which is with them a holy mountain,” (War of the Jews 3.307)[31]. In verse 22, Jesus makes a particularly odd statement: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” What is the subject of Jesus’ cryptic allusion in this verse? Once again, Josephus may shed some light. He writes of the Seleucid Tyrant, Antiochus Epiphanes’ march against Jerusalem, and the actions undertaken by the Samaritans to secure their own safety (Antiquities 12.5.5)[32]:

“When the Samaritans saw the Jews under these sufferings, they no longer confessed that they were of their kindred; nor that the temple on Mount Gerizzim belonged to Almighty God. This was according to their nature, as we have already shown. And they now said that they were a colony of Medes and Persians: and indeed they were a colony of theirs. So they sent ambassadors to Antiochus, and an epistle, whose contents are these:— ‘To king Antiochus the god, Epiphanes, a memorial from the Sidonians, who live at Shechem. Our forefathers, upon certain frequent plagues, and as following a certain ancient superstition, had a custom of observing that day which by the Jews is called the Sabbath. And when they had erected a temple at the mountain called Gerizzim, though without a name, they offered upon it the proper sacrifices. Now, upon the just treatment of these wicked Jews those that manage their affairs, supposing that we were of kin to them, and practiced as they do, make us liable to the same accusations, although we are originally Sidonians, as is evident from the public records. We therefore beseech thee, our benefactor and savior, to give order to Apollonius, the governor of this part of the country, and to Nicanor, the procurator of thy affairs, to give us no disturbance, nor to lay to our charge what the Jews are accused for, since we are aliens from their nation and from their customs; but let our temple which at present hath no name at all, be named the Temple of Jupiter Hellenius. If this were once done, we should be no longer disturbed, but should be more intent on our own occupation with quietness, and so bring in a greater revenue to thee.” When the Samaritans had petitioned for this, the king sent them back the following answer in an epistle:— ‘King Antiochus to Nicanor. The Sidonians, who live at Shechem, have sent me the memorial enclosed. When, therefore, we were advising with our friends about it, the messengers sent by them represented to us that they are no way concerned with accusations which belong to the Jews, but choose to live after the customs of the Greeks. Accordingly, we declare them free from such accusations, and order that, agreeable to their petition, their temple be named the Temple of Jupiter Hellenius.’ He also sent the like epistle to Apollonius, the governor of that part of the country, in the forty-sixth year, and the eighteenth day of the month Hecatombeon.” 

Thus, in order to appease Antiochus and secure their safety, the people of Samaria offered to dedicate their temple to Jupiter, the Latin equivalent of the Greek God Zeus. This offer was accepted by Antiochus and he therefore passed through Samaria in peace. Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus said to the woman of Samaria, “You worship what you do not know”?

One may object to this example since these events transpired more than two centuries before the time of Jesus and it was likely that this was widely known at the time, presumably leading to ‘bad blood’ between the Jews and Samaritans as a result. Thus, one might argue, John’s readers would have been expected to immediately understand the reference. However, it seems that it would have been quite improbable that these events would have been widely known to John’s audience, which was comprised of both Jews and Gentiles. John’s gospel was probably composed later than the other gospels and likely after the fall of Jerusalem. The book was almost certainly written in Ephesus in Asia Minor, and it thus seems quite implausible that John would have faked this subtle reference on the assumption that his own audience would recognize it. For Jesus to assume that the woman at the well would understand the allusion would be more probable, from an historical perspective (rather like some sort of subtle cultural reference that someone might make to an audience now that would require people later to dig in order to understand).

Jesus Discloses His Identity

Another interesting feature of this episode is that the Samaritan woman is the one individual in the gospels (outside of his inner circle) to whom Jesus personally discloses His Messianic identity. In verses 25 and 26, we read, “The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am he.’” Throughout the synoptic accounts, Jesus often sternly warns people not to publicly disclose His identity or speak publicly of His miracles (e.g. Mk 1:43-45; Mk 8:27-30). In scholarly circles, this is known as the “messianic secret.” We also see Jesus frequently seeking to avoid large crowds. Those features of Jesus’ behavior are illuminated by John 6:15, which immediately follows the account of the feeding of the five thousand, in which we read, “Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” Given the popular Messianic expectation of an individual who would overthrow the Roman occupiers and re-establish a Davidic reign, Jesus naturally feared that public disclosure of His Messianic identity would result in misunderstandings and attempts by the crowds to make Him King by force. Thus, John 6:15 explains the Messianic secret in the synoptics. But why does Jesus disclose His public identity to the Samaritan woman in John 4:26? And why does he not charge her to secrecy, as He does with so many others? Later Samaritan documents explain that their view of the Messiah (whom the Samaritans called the Taheb, or restorer) was different from that of the Jews, and was largely informed by Deuteronomy 18:15-18, which speaks of the Messiah as a prophet like Moses (the Samaritans only accepted the books of Moses as Scripture). Some evidence also indicates that the role of the Taheb included teaching. Jesus therefore had no reason to worry that the Samaritans would misunderstand His claim to be the Messiah, and expect Him to lead a military revolution against Rome.

No Friend of Caesar

In John 19:12, we read of the taunt of the Jewish crowd against Pontius Pilate, when Pilate had sought to release Jesus, against the will of the crowds:

12 From then on Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.”

The first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, gives an account of a previous episode, which may illuminate why this was a sore point for Pilate, in which the Jews had complained to Tiberius Caesar about certain shields that Pilate had had erected in Jerusalem, resulting in Tiberius having written a sharply worded letter to Pilate demanding that the shields be removed (Embassy 299–305)[33]:

“I can quote in addition one act showing a fine spirit. For though I experienced many ills when he was alive, truth is dear, and is held in honour by you. One of his lieutenants was Pilate, who was appointed to govern Judaea. He, not so much to honour Tiberius as to annoy the multitude, dedicated in Herod’s palace in the holy city some shields coated with gold. They had no image work traced on them nor anything else forbidden by the law apart from the barest inscription stating two facts, the name of the person who made the dedication and of him in whose honour it was made. But when the multitude understood the matter which had by now become a subject of common talk, having put at their head the king’s four sons, who in dignity and good fortune were not inferior to a king, and his other descendants and the persons of authority in their own body, they appealed to Pilate to redress the infringement of their traditions caused by the shields and not to disturb the customs which throughout all the preceding ages had been safeguarded without disturbance by kings and by emperors. When he, naturally inflexible, a blend of self-will and relentlessness, stubbornly refused they clamoured, ‘Do not arouse sedition, do not make war, do not destroy the peace; you do not honour the emperor by dishonouring ancient laws. Do not take Tiberius as your pretext for outraging the nation; he does not wish any of our customs to be overthrown. If you say that he does, produce yourself an order or a letter or something of the kind so that we may cease to pester you and having chosen our envoys may petition our lord.’ It was this final point which particularly exasperated him, for he feared that if they actually sent an embassy they would also expose the rest of his conduct as governor by stating in full the briberies, the insults, the robberies, the outrages and wanton injuries, the executions without trial constantly repeated, the ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty. So with all his vindictiveness and furious temper, he was in a difficult position. He had not the courage to take down what had been dedicated nor did he wish to do anything which would please his subjects. At the same time he knew full well the constant policy of Tiberius in these matters. The magnates saw this and understanding that he had repented of his action but did not wish to appear penitent sent letters of very earnest supplication to Tiberius. When he had read them through what language he used about Pilate, what threats he made! The violence of his anger, though he was not easily roused to anger, it is needless to describe since the facts speak for themselves. For at once without even postponing it to the morrow he wrote to Pilate with a host of reproaches and rebukes for his audacious violation of precedent and bade him at once take down the shields and have them transferred from the capital to Caesarea on the coast surnamed Augusta after your great-grandfather, to be set up in the temple of Augustus, and so they were. So both objects were safeguarded, the honour paid to the emperor and the policy observed from of old in dealing with the city.” 

Philo’s account thus provides a backstory that illuminates why the taunt of the Jewish crowd, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend,” was such a sore point for Pilate and why it led to him acquiescing to the crowd’s demands that Jesus be crucified.

The Test of Personal Names

What can the naming patterns of the gospels tell us about their historical credibility? In his ground breaking work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, British New Testament Richard Bauckham lays out an array of evidences for the trustworthiness of the gospels.[34] Though I do not endorse all of the arguments of the book, it is a scholarly treatise of the evidence for the gospels as eyewitness testimony that is well worth reading. Among the arguments adduced in this volume is the test of personal names, which is covered in chapters three and four of the book. Bauckham’s analysis is based upon a lexicon compiled by Tal Ilan and containing three thousand Jewish names derived from ossuaries and documentary sources.[35] Bauckham explains that “The chronological period it covers begins at the Hellenistic conquest of Palestine and concludes at the end of the Mishnaic period. Thus its sources include the works of Josephus, the New Testament, the texts from the Judean desert and from Masada, ossuary inscriptions from Jerusalem, and the earliest (tannaitic) rabbinic sources.”[36] One may complain that the range of the lexicon’s coverage is from 330 B.C. to 200 A.D. is too broad. Bauckham responds to this concern by noting that “this possible disadvantage for the New Testament scholar in Ilan’s collection of data is offset by the facts that in many respects the practices of name-giving seem to have remained fairly constant over this period and also, importantly, that a large proportion of the data actually comes from the first century CE and early second century (to 135 CE), just because the sources for this shorter period are much more plentiful than for other parts of the whole period.”[37] Bauckham further remarks, “It may come as a surprise to many readers that we know the names of as many as three thousand Palestinian Jews who lived during the five centuries covered by Ilan’s Lexicon. In most cases we know at least a little more about these persons, even if it is only their relationship to another named person. This material obviously provides a very rich resource for the history of Jewish Palestine and, among other specific parts of that history, the history of the beginnings of Christianity. The availability of the information in the comprehensive and systematic form of the Lexicon now makes the use of this resource much more possible and accurate.”[38]

Bauckham argues that there is a remarkable correlation between the frequency of names found in the Gospels and Acts and the frequency of names found in writings outside of the New Testament. This argument is also developed by Peter J. Williams, of Tyndale House in Cambridge, in his popular book, Can We Trust the Gospels?[39] The top 2 men’s names (Simon and Joseph) in first century Palestine outside the New Testament have a frequency of 15.6%. The frequency of those two names in the gospels and Acts is 18.2%. Taking a slightly bigger data set, the frequency of the top nine men’s names outside the New Testament is 41.5%; whereas the frequency in the Gospels and Acts is 40.3%. The frequency of the top two women’s names (Mary and Salome) outside the New Testament is 28.6%; the frequency in the Gospels and Acts is 38.9%. The frequency of the top nine women’s names outside the New Testament is 49.7%; and 61.1% in the Gospels and Acts.

The top 6 male Jewish names in first century Palestine are:

1) Simon/Simeon

2) Joseph/Joses

3) Lazarus/Eleazar

4) Judas/Judah

5) John/Yohanan

6) Jesus/Joshua

The frequency of New Testament individuals with those names, according to Bauckham, is 8, 6, 1, 5, 5 and 2 respectively, which he claims represents a correlation between the naming frequencies in the New Testament and those external to it.[40] Bauckham also observes that the rankings of names in Palestine does not correspond with the rankings of those names in other regions. For example, the rankings of male Jewish names in Egypt during that same period are:

1) Eleazar (ranked 3rd in Palestine)

2) Sabbataius (ranked 68= in Palestine)

3) Joseph (ranked 2 in Palestine)

4=) Dositheus (ranked 16 in Palestine)

4=) Pappus (ranked 39= in Palestine)

6=) Ptolemaius (ranked 50= in Palestine)

6=) Samuel (ranked 23 in Palestine)

Bauckham concludes[41],

“The evidence in this chapter shows that the relative frequency of the various personal names in the Gospels corresponds well to the relative frequency in the full database of three thousand individual instances of names in the Palestinian Jewish sources of the period. This correspondence is very unlikely to have resulted from addition of names to the traditions, even within Palestinian Jewish Christianity, and could not possibly have resulted from the addition of names to the traditions outside Jewish Palestine, since the pattern of Jewish name usage in the Diaspora was very different.” 

I am afraid that, in my assessment, Bauckham overstates this part of his argument. My main concern is that too few names are used in the gospels to make the results of a statistical analysis meaningful. Furthermore, there are important anomalies that Bauckham fails to acknowledge or account for. For example, according to the data cited by Bauckham, the name Jesus is the sixth most popular Palestinian male Jewish name. However, besides Jesus of Nazareth, no other Jesus is named in the gospels. In Acts 13:6, there is a Jewish false prophet, named Bar-Jesus (“son of Jesus”) but he is not in Palestine but on the island of Cyprus. Moreover, the name Lazarus is ranked #3 in Palestine but there is only a single individual by that name in the gospels and Acts (I am not counting the individual by that name who appears only in a parable). Similarly, Matthew is ranked #9 in Palestine but there are only two individuals by that name in the gospels and Acts. On the other hand, James is the eleventh most popular Jewish male name in Palestine but there are five individuals by that name in the gospels and Acts (more than for higher ranking names such as Matthew, Ananias, Jesus, or Lazarus).

Thus, in view of the foregoing considerations, the argument, as Bauckham offers it, I believe to be overstated. I would, however, argue that the very fact that we have such a small sample in the gospels and Acts entails that the exact relative proportions with which these names appear do not have to be precise. If one finds that the Gospels have none of those distinctively Egyptian names (such as Sabbateus) and that the large majority of their names come from the most frequent names in Palestine at the time, for such a small sample, that does carry evidential force. This is all the more the case when one finds that, when the gospels mention several people by the same name (Simon and Mary being two notable examples), which were very common names in Palestine at that time.

Furthermore, a more promising argument, I think, lies in a related feature of the text, also discussed by Bauckham [42] and by Williams[43]. Consider the following excerpt from Matthew 10 (verses 2-4) where we are given the names of the twelve disciples. Where these names feature in the top eighty names, their ranking is given in brackets:

Simon (1), called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James (11) the son of Zebedee, and John (5) his brother; Philip (61=) and Bartholomew (50=); Thomas and Matthew (9) the tax collector; James (11) the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus (39=); Simon (1) the Cananaean, and Judas (4) Iscariot, who also betrayed him.

Notice that there is correlation between those names that have a high ranking and those names that are assigned a qualifier, a pattern that is sustained throughout the gospels (consistently in quoted speech, though not always in the narration after characters have already been introduced). The lower-ranked names do not have a qualifier. Thus, this correlation between the frequency of a name and the use of a disambiguation to distinguish them from other people bearing the same name reflects what we would expect if they were written by eyewitnesses with a close connection to the time and place of the events that they narrate. This is not a pattern that would have been at all easy for a forger to create.

Conclusion

To conclude, there is ample evidence from extrabiblical sources that the gospels and Acts were composed by individuals who were close up to the facts, well informed and habitually reliable. This is epistemically relevant to the resurrection of Jesus since, if the gospels and Acts do indeed go back to the earliest apostolic eyewitnesses, then we have strong reason to believe that the nature and variety of the post-resurrection encounters with the risen Jesus reflects the testimony of Jesus’ original followers. We may then evaluate those claims to determine whether they are best explained as a result of the claimant being honestly mistaken, deliberately deceptive or truthful and informed. Readers who are interested in further investigation of the claim of the resurrection may wish to check out my writing on this subject, which you can find here.

Footnotes

[1] William Paley and Edmund Paley, The Works of William Paley, vol. 2 (London; Oxford; Cambridge; Liverpool: Longman and Co.; T. Cadell; J. Richardson; Baldwin and Cradock; Hatchard and Son; J. G. & F. Rivington; Whittaker and Co.; Hamilton, Adams & Co.; Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.; Smith, Elder and Co.; E. Hodgson; B. Fellowes; R. Mackie; J. Templeman; H. Washbourne; Booker and Dolman; J. Parker; J. and J. J. Deighton; G. and J. Robinson, 1838).

[2] Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), 463.

[3] Ibid., 603.

[4] Ibid., 461.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 465.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 465-466.

[11] Ibid., 466.

[12] Ibid.

[13] C. Suetonius Tranquillus, Suetonius: The Lives of the Twelve Caesars; An English Translation, Augmented with the Biographies of Contemporary Statesmen, Orators, Poets, and Other Associates, ed. Alexander Thomson (Medford, MA: Gebbie & Co., 1889).

[14] John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, ed. Daniel J. Harrington, vol. 2, Sacra Pagina Series (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002), 295.

[15] Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), 485.

[16] Ibid., 484.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid., 613.

[22] William Paley and Edmund Paley, The Works of William Paley, vol. 2 (London; Oxford; Cambridge; Liverpool: Longman and Co.; T. Cadell; J. Richardson; Baldwin and Cradock; Hatchard and Son; J. G. & F. Rivington; Whittaker and Co.; Hamilton, Adams & Co.; Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.; Smith, Elder and Co.; E. Hodgson; B. Fellowes; R. Mackie; J. Templeman; H. Washbourne; Booker and Dolman; J. Parker; J. and J. J. Deighton; G. and J. Robinson, 1838), 210.

[23] Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), 633.

[24] William Paley and Edmund Paley, The Works of William Paley, vol. 2 (London; Oxford; Cambridge; Liverpool: Longman and Co.; T. Cadell; J. Richardson; Baldwin and Cradock; Hatchard and Son; J. G. & F. Rivington; Whittaker and Co.; Hamilton, Adams & Co.; Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.; Smith, Elder and Co.; E. Hodgson; B. Fellowes; R. Mackie; J. Templeman; H. Washbourne; Booker and Dolman; J. Parker; J. and J. J. Deighton; G. and J. Robinson, 1838), 210.

[25] Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), 478.

[26] Ibid., 483.

[27] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them). (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 287.

[28] Susan Haber, “They Shall Purify Themselves”: Essays on Purity in Early Judaism (Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 130-131.

[29] Dennis E. Nineham, The Gospel of St. Mark (Harmondsworth, Middlesex [England]; New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 40.

[30] John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, ed. Daniel J. Harrington, vol. 2, Sacra Pagina Series (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002), 239.

[31] Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), 653.

[32] Ibid., 324.

[33] Philo, Philo, trans. F. H. Colson, G. H. Whitaker, and J. W. Earp, vol. 10, The Loeb Classical Library (London; England; Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann Ltd; Harvard University Press, 1929–1962), 151–155.

[34] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, Second Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017).

[35] Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Palestine 330 Bce – 200 Ce (London: Coronet Books, 2002).

[36] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, Second Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 68.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Illinois: Crossway, 2018), 64-77.

[40] Richard Bauckham, Jesus, and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, Second Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017), 85–88.

[41] Ibid., 84.

[42] Ibid., 78–84.

[43] Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Illinois: Crossway, 2018), 66-68.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

The New Testament: Too Embarrassing to Be False by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3, and Mp4)

Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

Oh, Why Didn’t I Say That? Is the Bible Historically Reliable? by Dr. Frank Turek DVD, Mp4, Mp3 Download

 

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Dr. Jonathan McLatchie is a Christian writer, international speaker, and debater. He holds a Bachelor’s degree (with Honors) in forensic biology, a Masters’s (M.Res) degree in evolutionary biology, a second Master’s degree in medical and molecular bioscience, and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. Currently, he is an assistant professor of biology at Sattler College in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. McLatchie is a contributor to various apologetics websites and is the founder of the Apologetics Academy (Apologetics-Academy.org), a ministry that seeks to equip and train Christians to persuasively defend the faith through regular online webinars, as well as assist Christians who are wrestling with doubts. Dr. McLatchie has participated in more than thirty moderated debates around the world with representatives of atheism, Islam, and other alternative worldview perspectives. He has spoken internationally in Europe, North America, and South Africa promoting an intelligent, reflective, and evidence-based Christian faith.

Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/LEXQYZJ

 

By Ryan Leasure

It’s not uncommon for Christians to throw shade on the Old Testament. These Christians say they love Jesus, but they could do without those primitive Jewish texts. In fact, many Christians suggest that much of the Old Testament is ahistorical. Events such as the flood, Jonah being swallowed by a big fish, or the fiery judgment of Sodom and Gomorra never happened. And then there’s the infamous quote that Christians simply need to “unhitch themselves from the Old Testament” because much of it is embarrassing or difficult to understand. Why can’t we just focus on Jesus instead?

We can certainly sympathize with these sentiments. After all, the flood and Sodom’s judgment seem pretty incredible and kind of harsh to boot! Wouldn’t it just be easier to disregard this ancient corpus? This position seems reasonable until one realizes that the same Jesus these Christians adore also happens to hold the Old Testament in high regard. Not only does he affirm the Old Testament’s inspiration, he also affirms its historicity and authority.

The Old Testament is Inspired

Historically, Christians have affirmed the verbal plenary inspiration of the Bible. That is to say, they recognize that every word of Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16-17). At the same time, God spoke through human agency. Therefore, Scripture not only has a divine author, it has human authors as well.

Jesus affirmed the human authors of the Old Testament. Repeatedly, he recognizes that Moses is the one who gave the Law (Matt 8:4; 19:8; Mark 1:44; 7:10; Luke 5:14; 20:37; John 5:46; 7:19). He’ll say things like “do what Moses commanded” (Mark 1:44). Or “Moses said, Honor your father and your mother” (Mark 7:10). With respect to other Old Testament authors, Jesus declares, “Well did Isaiah prophesy . . .” (Mark 7:6). Also, “David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared . . .” (Mark 12:36). And “So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel . . .”(Matt 24:15). It’s worth noting that just about all critical scholars call into question the authorship of these individuals in clear contradiction to Jesus.

At the same time, Jesus affirms that these individuals wrote divinely inspired Scripture. As was just alluded to, Jesus noted in Mark 12:36, “David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared, . . .” In other words, David wrote, but his writings were the result of the Holy Spirit’s work (2 Pet 1:20-21). He also declared “Well did Isaiah prophesy . . .” (Mark 7:6). The mere mention of prophecy suggests that Isaiah wrote from God. Prophecy, after all, is by definition “a word from God.” The same could be said for Matthew 24:15 when Jesus refers to Daniel as “the prophet.” Moreover, when speaking to the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus asserts, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). He then goes on to clarify that the commandment of God was what Moses wrote in Exodus 20.

As John Wenhan notes, “To [Jesus], Moses, the prophets, David and the other Scripture-writers were truly inspired men with a message given by the Spirit of God.”1

The Old Testament is Historically Accurate

While many are willing to grant the Old Testament’s inspiration, many of these same individuals deny that it’s historically accurate at every point. They might affirm its historical nature in general (God created the world, called Abraham and the Jewish people, the Jews were exiled, etc.), but they balk at some of the more challenging texts (the flood, Sodom, Jonah, etc.). That said, Jesus has no qualms about affirming the historical nature of the Old Testament—even the most difficult texts to believe. Here are a few examples:

He believed that Cain killed Abel (Luke 11:51), that God sent a flood but spared Noah in the ark (Matt 24:37-39), and that God destroyed Sodom because of their wickedness (Matt 11:23-24). He even adds, “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32). Additionally, Jesus believed that God sent down manna from heaven (John 6:31), the Israelites were healed by looking at the serpent (John 3:14), and that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish only to be regurgitated three days later (Matt 12:39-41).

The last text about Jonah is especially significant because it demonstrates that Jesus didn’t simply view these events figuratively. For the end of the text reads, “The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matt 12:41). It’s hard to imagine how Jesus could assert that Ninevah would rise up in the final judgment against the people who rejected him if they were make-believe. The same could be said for Jesus’ statement in Matthew 24:37: “For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” In other words, just as God’s judgment was poured out in the days of Noah, so it will be again in the final judgment.

Again, Wenham remarks, “It is evident that [Jesus] was familiar with most of our Old Testament and that he treated it all equally as history.”2

The Old Testament is Authoritative

Because Jesus believed the Old Testament was divinely-inspired, he also affirmed its full authority. He demonstrated this authority by appealing to the scriptures dozens of times.

When asked what were the greatest commandments, he declares that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your mind. . . And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:37-39). Jesus said that these two commands (Deut 6:4-6; Lev 19:18) sum up the totality of the Old Testament and are the guide to all ethical matters.

When facing temptation, Jesus appealed to the authority of Scripture to do battle against Satan. He repeatedly declares, “it is written, it is written, it is written” (Matt 4:1-11). Even as he was facing death, the final words on his lips were words from the Old Testament (Psalm 22:1; 31:5).

Jesus appeals to Genesis 1-2 when speaking about marriage and divorce. He asks, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matt 19:4-6). By alluding to Genesis 1-2 here, Jesus asserts that his position on marriage and divorce is rooted in the authority of the Old Testament text. By contrast, Jesus’ opponents rooted their position in different Rabbis (Shammai and Hillel).

When disputing with the Sadducess about the resurrection, Jesus scolds them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matt 22:29). In other words, the Scriptures give us the definitive, authoritative word about the resurrection. Jesus goes on to question them, “Have you not read what was said to you by God, I am the God of Abraham . . .?” (Matt 31-32) Again, Jesus appeals to the Old Testament text to assert God’s power over the resurrection.

Jesus goes so far as to state that “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). For Jesus, Scripture is so powerful, nothing can undo it.

Jesus and the Old Testament

All the evidence taken together suggests that Jesus held a high view of the Old Testament. Those who claim to hold Jesus in high regard but reject some of the Old Testament’s teachings are being inconsistent. If you hold Jesus in high regard, you must hold the Old Testament in high regard as well. As John Wenham notes:

“To Christ the Old Testament was true, authoritative, inspired. To him the God of the Old Testament was the living God, and the teaching of the Old Testament was the teaching of the living God. To him, what Scripture said, God said.” 3

*For more on this topic, see John Wenham’s book Christ and the Bible.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Old Testament vs. New Testament God: Anger vs. Love? (MP3 Set) (DVD Set) (mp4 Download Set) by Dr. Frank Turek 

Jesus, You and the Essentials of Christianity by Frank Turek (INSTRUCTOR Study Guide), (STUDENT Study Guide), and (DVD)      

 

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Ryan Leasure is a pastor at Grace Bible Church in Moore, SC. For more on his background and interests, click here.

Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/rQYMyUQ

 

By Erik Manning

If you want people to trust their leaders, you usually would try to paint them in the best light possible. You don’t go out of your way to undermine their authority. But that isn’t what we see at all in the Gospels. Those who would eventually lead the church often look impulsive, incompetent, boastful, and stupid. If the Gospels are supposed to be PR for the apostles, their propaganda team was a dismal failure.

This kind of information is what NT scholars call the criteria of embarrassment. In his book, Marginal Jew, Meier writes:

The point of the criterion is that the early church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator or weakened its position in arguments with opponents. 

Marginal Jew

Those Faithless Disciples

Let’s look at the Gospel of Mark since most believe it is the earliest Gospel. Mark tells us that the disciples were often faithless. When encountered by a storm when crossing a lake, the disciples panicked. (Mk 4:35-41) They brazenly accused Jesus of not caring about them, and Jesus rebuked them for not having any faith. They were also terrified to see Jesus walking on the water only two chapters later. (Mk 6:50)

When a man brought his demonized son to his followers, the disciples were too incompetent to give the boy any help. Jesus chided them for their lack of faith. (Mk 9:17-19) Mark also tells us that Jesus’ own family thought that he was nuts. (Mk 3:21) Later we read in Acts, 1 Corinthians, and Galatians that James and Jesus’ other siblings became leaders in the church. (Acts 15, 1 Cor 9:5, Galatians 1-2) So far, the future heads of Jesus’ church look like a sorry bunch.

The Disciples Were Slow 

Mark also tells us that the disciples were extremely slow on the uptake. They asked questions about Jesus’ parables that he expected them, of all people, to understand. His main points were often lost on them. (Mk 4:137:18)

Jesus had previously fed a crowd of 5000 and later 4000 with a few loaves and fish. Shortly afterward, Jesus said that they should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. What did the disciples do in response? They fussed with each other because they forgot to pack bread for their boat trip across the lake. Jesus had to remind them that food was neither his point nor an issue. That should’ve been obvious by then. (Mk 8:14-21)

The Disciples Were Rude

The disciples were notoriously bad-mannered. As I mentioned earlier, they accused Jesus of not caring about them when he was sleeping during the storm. Peter had the genius idea of rebuking Jesus when he said he was going to sacrifice himself. Jesus called Peter Satan in response, so yeah, that didn’t go over big. (Mk 8:31-33)

When people brought small children to be blessed by Jesus, like ogres, his disciples tried to run them off. (Mk 10:13-14) When the woman anointed Jesus’ feet with costly perfume, Mark tells us that “they rebuked her harshly.”  Not a smooth move. Jesus emphatically told them to leave her alone. She had more value for Jesus than they all did put together. (Mk 14:4-9)

The disciples fought over who was the greatest, and John and James had the brass to ask Jesus if they could sit at his right and left hand when he came into his kingdom. (Mk 9:33-3410:35-37) They clearly didn’t understand the kind of servant-leadership that Jesus was modeling.

The Going Got Tough, The Disciples Ran

In Jesus’ darkest hour, they bragged about being willing to die before abandoning him. (Mk 14:31) While Jesus was praying they all fell asleep. (Mk 14:37-42) And when he was arrested, they all fled. (Mk 14:50) Peter ended up denying him three times when pressed by a servant girl (Mark 14:66-72), and they all were AWOL on the day of the resurrection. (Mk 16:1-9) Even though Jesus repeatedly told them he’d rise again three days later. (Mk 8:31-329:30-3210:32-3414:28) Even atheist scholars like Gerd Ludemann use the criteria of embarrassment when arguing for the historicity of Peter’s denial. (The Resurrection of Christ, p 162)

Finally, who actually showed up at the tomb? The women (Mk 16:1). They were the first eyewitnesses to the empty tomb. This is itself an embarrassing detail, as a woman’s testimony in the 1st-century context carried very little weight.

  • “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex” … (Josephus, Antiquities, 4.8.15).
  • “Any evidence which a woman [gives] is not valid (to offer)” … (Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 1.8c).

Luke tells us that the disciples thought the women’s testimony was “nonsense.” They didn’t believe them. (Luke 24:11) 100 years later Celsus would mock the Christians for believing the tales of a hysterical woman. (Contra Celsum 2.54)

Again, if this is supposed to be Christian propaganda to make their leaders look good, or make the resurrection story more plausible, the Gospel writers caused problems for themselves. In the words of scholar NT Wright:

“As historians, we are obliged to comment that if these stories had been made up five years later, let alone thirty, forty, or fifty years later, they would never have had Mary Magdalene in this role. To put Mary there is, from the point of view of Christian apologists wanting to explain to a skeptical audience that Jesus really did rise from the dead, like shooting themselves in the foot. But to us as historians, this kind of thing is gold dust. The early Christians would never, never have made this up.”

The Resurrection of the Son of God

Embarrassing Details In Acts

And it’s not like things are hunky-dory in the Book of Acts, either. You know, that book about the apostles taking over after Jesus. You would think Luke would make them look like they finally got their act together. Instead, we see that Paul and Barnabas got in a big tiff over bringing Mark (the future Gospel writer!) because Mark got homesick and left them in the middle of ministry earlier. (Acts 15:36-40) Mark is later mentioned in Paul’s letters, so apparently, things got patched up later. (Philemon 24)

There was also racist bickering going on in the infant church in Jerusalem because the Hellenized Jewish widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. (Acts 6:1)

And even though Jesus told them to take the Gospel to the entire world it took a special vision for Peter to finally understand that it was OK to preach to those unclean Gentiles seemingly years later. (Acts 10)

What Real Christian Propaganda Looks Like

Luke and Mark hardly make the apostles out to be saints. Now compare this to other Christian propaganda. Eusebius wrote a biography of Emperor Constantine that was very charitable, to say the least. He slyly omits that Constantine had his own son Crispus and his other wife Fausta killed. Eusebius instead makes Constantine out to be a super saint. Now that is what real propaganda looks like.

It is hard to imagine the early Christians inventing embarrassments for themselves when they already had enough problems from persecution! And yet, it is difficult to read the Gospel of Mark without getting a negative impression of the apostles. Again, this is the earliest of the Gospels according to most scholars. Eyewitnesses would still be around, including some of the apostles. These negative statements are strong indications that these things were really said. NT scholar C.E.B. Cranfield concludes:

“The fact that the perplexing and offensive material…was preserved at all and reached Mark says much for the general reliability of the sources used by him.”

These self-damaging materials are one more reason why we can trust the Gospels. This kind of evidence doesn’t by itself prove that the Gospels are reliable, but it does lend some support to that view. It’s one part of a much larger cumulative case.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

The New Testament: Too Embarrassing to Be False by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3, and Mp4)

Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

 

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Erik Manning is a Reasonable Faith Chapter Director located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He’s a former freelance baseball writer and the co-owner of the vintage and handmade decor business with his wife, Dawn. He is passionate about the intersection of apologetics and evangelism.

Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/MQacEd6