Welcome!
A rainy night, football game at nine, we'll have you out of here in time for
that.
We're glad that you have come.
I was just amused yesterday, I heard the announcement about this and said,
you know, this year as a church we're going to focus on Jesus.
That seemed like a great idea for a church.
We're going to do that, we're going to talk about Jesus.
And we have a series of programs, the emails that I send out, or this
careful walk-through mark, I'm really excited about that.
We have other programs coming up next Tuesday, eight days from tonight,
Rabbi Murray Esring and I are going to stand up here and we're going to have a
little debate over who is the Messiah.
This is going to be great fun.
As you can only imagine.
And so plan to be here for that and other things we have coming up.
Tonight we're just fortunate again to have with us Ben Witherington.
We claim Ben, we take credit for Ben.
And Ben wouldn't be who he is without Myers Park Church.
And the University of North Carolina, which he proudly, oddly claims.
And Ben's mother Joyce is here.
Ben is...
I could go on and on.
Ben is a world-renowned scholar.
He has published 719 books and really... and he's a poet and he's a novelist and
he's many things.
But what I like best about Ben is that he not only is my friend, but even more
important than that, he is a faithful Christian.
He's a humble, devoted servant of Jesus and has given his entire life to that in
really exemplary ways.
So we are glad that he is here.
We somehow right 20 minutes ago managed to delete his PowerPoint presentation.
And let me suggest, as another PowerPoint presenter, it's not the worst thing in the
world.
You start gawking at the screen, you get to pay attention to Ben,
who's handsome and brilliant and it'll be great.
So Ben, we welcome you.
What do we mean by the phrase, the historical Jesus?
Ten years ago, you may remember a little novel called The Da Vinci Code.
What you got in that novel was not the historical Jesus, you got the hysterical
Jesus.
A non-historical figment of Dan Brown's imagination.
Even the first page in that novel was fiction, where it said, all facts about
art, archaeology and artifacts in this novel are historically accurate.
Actually, that page of the novel was part of the fiction.
How many got snookered?
Millions.
All over the world.
So when we talk about the historical Jesus, let me tell you that this is,
to begin with, a technical phrase if you're reading stuffy, scholarly,
academic monographs.
Here's what the phrase means.
It does not mean the Jesus of history.
Jesus as he actually was and we'd all like to know about.
No, that's not what the phrase the historical Jesus means.
In New Testament studies, the phrase the historical Jesus refers to the historian's
Jesus.
The Jesus that can be reasonably reconstructed using historical methods of
inquiry and coming up with what is most probably the case about the Jesus of
history.
In other words, the phrase historical Jesus refers to a scholarly reconstruction
of what Jesus was like.
What he said, what he did, what he thought about himself, how about the end of his
life.
So at best, the historical Jesus in technical lingua refers to a subset of
whoever the real Jesus was.
Now, if you've read any of the even the popularized versions of monographs on the
historical Jesus, you're bound to have come away going, huh, well, that was a
little unsatisfying.
I was really hoping they would be more forthcoming.
Now, of course, there are documentaries on the History Channel and Nat Geo Discovery
Channel, etc, etc, where you get a picture of Jesus with his hair on fire from not
very reputable scholars, but nonetheless titillating and entertaining.
That's not the historical Jesus either.
Okay, so let me tell you a little bit first about the historical method and how
it works.
The first thing to tell you is you have to deal with the primary sources.
I like to tell, ask my students a question in their very first New Testament entry
class.
I show them something that looks like this.
I say, what is this?
They raise their hand very eagerly and say, oh, that's the Bible.
I say, wrong.
Let's try again.
What is this?
Silence.
Somebody tentatively raises their hand and says, well, it looks like it's an English
translation of the Bible.
I said, right.
And guess what?
Every translation is already an interpretation.
I'm sure you've all heard the phrase, something gets lost in translation.
Right?
Well, that's all the more true when you're dealing with an ancient language like
Koine Greek.
Now, here's another fast fact.
Though the New Testament is entirely written in Greek, Jesus spoke almost
entirely in another language.
Not King James English.
Not Greek.
But Aramaic, a Semitic language that's the cousin of Hebrew.
Okay?
So now, how many linguistic steps removed are we from the historical Jesus?
Not one, but two.
Jesus spoke Aramaic.
Well, how do we know this?
Well, it's right there in our earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark.
When Jesus goes to heal and raise from the dead the daughter of Jairus, what he says
to the corpse is Talitha cumi, which means, in translation from Aramaic,
little girl arise.
There are a whole bunch of little Aramaic McNuggets in the gospel that let us know
that Jesus's primary spoken language was Aramaic.
Not Greek.
And definitely not English.
So when historians are trying to reconstruct what the historical Jesus was
like, you have to go back ad fontes to the original sources as best we can.
And the best we can do with that is dealing with the Greek New Testament
itself and the Aramaic fragments in the Greek New Testament itself.
So primary source documents.
That means, friends, not Wikipedia articles, not the Jesus that you Googled
this morning in five seconds flat, not the Facebook Jesus, the Jesus that is
discerned through diligent, careful study of original language manuscripts.
That's point number one.
Now, the second thing that the historian has to know is not just the original
languages.
He's got to know the context.
I like to put it this way.
A text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean.
You see this all the time, all the time.
I had a parishioner in my very first charge up in Randolph County.
I was serving four churches at once.
So the fourth time around, the sermon was reasonably good.
My parishioner, Glen Ray Smith, was a new Christian.
He was a cartender.
He called me up and said, Dr. Ben, I have a dilemma.
I said, well, Glen Ray, what is that?
He said, well, my friend, who's another carpenter, well, he knows his King James
better than I know any Bible.
We were talking about breeding hunting dogs, and he told me it says in the Bible
you can't breed hunting dogs.
I said, Glen Ray, I don't think there's anywhere in the Bible that it says that,
but I'll look up every pee pee in reference to dog and I'll get right back
to you.
So I got out my lexicon.
I looked up all the references to dog in the New Testament.
Nothing even remotely relevant.
I knew that his friend read the King James, so I went and looked at the King
James lexicon for Old Testament references to D-O-G, right?
I went through and through, and finally I found this.
I found a verse that in the King James read, Thou shalt not breed with the dogs.
I called up Glen Ray.
I said, Glen Ray, I got good news.
I got bad news.
Which would you like first?
Oh, give me the good news first.
You're a good news kind of preacher.
Give me the good news first.
I said, those furry little four-footed tail wagging critters, you can breed all
those that you want.
Okay, Dr. Ben, what's the bad news?
The bad news is there is this verse in the Old Testament that says, Thou shalt not
breed with the dogs.
What it means is that true Israelites should not sexually fraternize with women
who were not Jews and were from another country.
He processed that for a minute.
He said, I'm feeling ever so much better now, Dr. Ben.
My wife Betty Sue's just from Chatham County.
A text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean.
And it is crucial to understand the context in which Jesus operated.
You cannot understand the Bible just by reading an English translation of it very
well.
And especially if you're trying to do the Sherlock Holmes thing and get back to the
real nub of who the historical Jesus was.
You just can't get there from here with nothing but an English Bible in your hand.
You need to know context as well as text.
Well, that's the second thing historians are tremendously keen about, understanding
the context.
Now, they have a certain method of reconstruction of a historical subject.
But one of the things they want is they want multiple sources on their historical
subject.
The more sources you have, the more likely that you're going to have more evidence
that leads to some kind of deduction about what Jesus was really like.
How many sources do we have?
You may say Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John stick with those and can't go
wrong.
You may say, well, we got four.
Well, no, we've got lots more than four.
And there's problems with the sources.
For one thing, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are interdependent.
Did you know that both Matthew and Luke used Mark?
Indeed, did you know that 95% of the Gospel of Mark is also in the Gospel of
Matthew?
And of that 95% of Mark that shows up also in Matthew, there is a 52% verbatim rate.
Now, if I have two student term papers at Asbury Seminary, and I find 95% of one
term paper in another with a 52% exact verbatim equivalent, I'm going to know
there's some kind of literary relationship there.
Don't you think?
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are not independent sources.
There's Mark used by Matthew and Luke.
But here's the good news.
Matthew and Luke also had additional information besides using Mark.
So they have extra stuff that you don't find in Mark, and they had to have gotten
from somewhere else.
Most scholars will say that we have basically five sources of information that
relate to the New Testament about Jesus.
I'd actually say we have about seven.
Guess which one is the earliest?
It's not any of the Gospels.
The earliest information chronologically we have about Jesus is Paul's letters.
Why?
Because they were written before all the Gospels were written.
Paul's letters were written somewhere between 49 and about 60-something AD.
None of the Gospels were written by then, so far as we can tell.
So Paul is an independent witness, so far as he talks about the historical
Jesus, to the Gospel writers.
But within the Gospels themselves, we have Mark, we have special M,
that's the unique material in Matthew, we have special L, that's the unique
material in Luke, we have the Gospel of John, and we have what is called Q,
which is the saying source of material.
When a historian looks at sources then, he will look at those five sources of
information about Jesus and try to compare and corroborate sources and do a process
of critical thinking about what would be earliest and what's a later version of
this saying or that deed or whatever to come to conclusions about the historical
Jesus.
If he's a good scholar, he will also look at Paul and he will look at other places
in the New Testament.
For example, did you know there are 25 examples in James, the letter of James,
that are versions of sayings from the Sermon on the Mount?
There are 25 echoes of the Sermon on the Mount in the letter called James.
Similar phrases, almost whole sentences.
James uses the Sermon on the Mount.
Not entirely surprising since James's brother was, wait for it, Jesus.
So we have a variety of sources right in our New Testament for studying the
historical Jesus.
Here's something else historians are keen on telling you.
The earliest part of the Gospels that was probably written down first is the passion
narratives.
That is the story of the last week of Jesus's life.
Now what I want to do now is I want to show you a little bit about that.
So what we're going to do is see a clip from the BBC show that Tom Wright and
several of us did called The Story of Jesus.
2000 years ago, in a remote part of the Roman Empire, someone was born who would
change the history of the world.
Jesus.
He was seen from the very beginning as this extremely radical, revolutionary
figure that was going to bring more change than they had seen since the time of the
prophets.
After a life of wandering through the hills and villages of Galilee and Judea,
preaching and healing, Jesus was betrayed, arrested and brutally put to death.
Jesus's death on the cross was hugely difficult for the early Christians.
It was extremely embarrassing to say that they were followers of a leader who had
been crucified.
But in the years after his crucifixion, Jesus's story was written down by his
followers to explain his extraordinary life and death.
These four gospels would later form a major part of the Christian Bible and
enable his message to be spread all over the world.
It's just extraordinary to come here now and see these crowds who've come from all
over the world still being drawn by the power of that moment that would change
everything.
This is a very exciting time.
We have people who are still so skeptical that they claim there's no Nazareth in the
first century.
But for hundreds of years, scholars have been trying to look behind the Jesus of
the Gospels, the divine Christ of faith, to uncover the historical figure,
a Mediterranean Jew who lived and died as a man, and according to his followers,
was resurrected from the dead.
This is absolutely mind-blowing.
I mean, they knew what we call the laws of nature just as much as we do.
They knew that dead people stay dead.
In this series, nine top biblical experts will re-examine the gospel accounts to
uncover the original meaning of the story of Jesus through the eyes of the people
for whom it was first written almost 2,000 years ago.
This is a story too improbable not to be true.
It's because it's not what you'd make up if you're starting a new world religion.
The climax of Jesus's life took place during one of the most important and
highly charged times of the Jewish year.
It was the holy festival of the Passover, when Jews celebrated the exodus,
in which, according to the Hebrew Bible, they had been freed from slavery in Egypt
thousands of years before.
According to the four gospel accounts of his life, Jesus was a Jew who grew up with
his parents in Galilee, a province in the Roman Empire.
As a young adult, he joined the movement of John the Baptist and was baptized by
him in the River Jordan, where he had an extraordinary visionary experience.
After John's arrest, Jesus formed his own movement and quickly gained a reputation
as a healer and performer of spectacular miracles.
Jesus was also a teacher, a Jewish rabbi with a mission to reform the world in
which he lived.
Based in a small fishing village on the shores of Lake Galilee, he wandered the
land preaching a particular message that challenged the status quo and brought him
into direct conflict with the ruling powers.
These gospel accounts of his life were full of references to events and
prophecies in the Old Testament that gave Jesus' story a greater meaning for their
original first-century audience.
That he was the Messiah they had been waiting for, the Savior who would liberate
them from all their troubles.
According to three of the gospels, the final 24 hours of Jesus' life began
when, like thousands of other Jews, he and his disciples sat down for a
Passover meal.
The normal Passover meal had a variety of symbolic elements.
There is the bitter herbs that helped you remember the bitterness of bondage in
Egypt.
There was the unleavened bread or bread of haste, which reminded what haste they had
to leave the land once they were set free.
But most importantly, there was the Passover lamb, because it was the blood of
the lamb that led to the sparing of them from the judgment that fell on Egypt.
This meal is now one of the most iconic Christian events, commemorated in
countless famous paintings as Jesus' last supper with his disciples before his
death.
It also provided a ritual that symbolized how the gospel writers believed true
redemption could now come only through Jesus, through his death on the cross,
and what would later become the central act of Christian worship, the Eucharist.
Jesus reinterprets several of the elements of the Passover.
The bread, which would have been unleavened bread, and one of the cups of
wine, in terms of his own body and his own blood.
And what is most incredible about this is that Jesus is offering his disciples the
benefits of his passion, of his death, in advance of dying.
One of the things scholars are in general agreement on is that the first part of the
Gospels to be written down were the passion narratives.
At least 33% of the Gospel focuses just on that last week of Jesus' life.
The Gospel writers knew the part of the story they absolutely had to explain and
get straight was this unexpected ending to the story of Jesus.
For ancient peoples, including Jews, believed that how a person died most
revealed their character.
After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit and testified,
truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.
Among other things, it's on this night that Jesus himself says, someone who's
sitting here and supping with us this night, my intimate band of friends,
is going to betray me.
And the disciples are asking, surely it's not I, surely it's not I.
And so, what was intended to be a joyful celebration turns into a very somber
occasion.
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree closely on the events of the Last
Supper.
But the Gospel of John includes a ritual of foot washing.
And then has Jesus making a long and passionate farewell speech to his
disciples.
This required a lot of explanation.
Crucified Messiah would have been seen as a contradiction in terms.
They weren't looking for a hero who would become a zero by dying on a cross,
the most shameful way and humiliating way to die.
Historians believe the more difficult the story becomes, the more likely it has
profound historical substance because it's not what you'd make up if you're starting
a new world religion.
Now, I hope you heard that last thing I said in the documentary.
The more difficult the tradition, the more likely it has profound historical
substance.
It's especially the last week of Jesus's life that required a lot of explanation.
And the reason is that so far as we can tell from the historical evidence,
early Jews were not looking for a crucified Messiah.
Crucified Messiah was about as much of an oxymoron as Microsoft Works.
A contradiction in terms.
So, if you look at the Gospels that we have, they have rightly been called
passion narratives with a long introduction.
That is, up to 33 percent of any of these Gospels focuses on the last week of
Jesus's life.
Now, if this were a modern biography, it would be wildly out of proportion.
A third of the whole story on the last week of somebody's life, even the
biography of JFK doesn't read like that.
But you see, here's the thing you need to understand in reading the story of Jesus
in historical context.
People in antiquity believed that how a person died most revealed their character.
How a person died most revealed their character.
Indeed, there were two bits that most revealed character according to ancients.
One is how a person was born and the other is how a person died.
Both of these bits of the story required extra explanation.
And so it is that when you read the passion narratives and the crucifixion
narratives and the resurrection narratives, there are all of these
scripture references tagged to what happens to Jesus from the moment he rides
into Jerusalem on a donkey to when he appears to the disciples on Easter
morning.
Why?
Because nobody expected it to go down like this.
And here's the other part you need to understand.
The culture in which Jesus lived in was an honor and shame culture.
Guess which was the most shameful way to die in antiquity?
Being crucified naked on a cross, which is the story of Jesus.
First century Christians would have thought it very odd that people have
turned the cross into jewelry and gold and wear it around their neck.
I mean, that would be the ancient equivalent of wearing little electric
chairs around your neck.
That's just bizarre by first century standards.
Strange.
This is the part of the story that required the most theological explanation
and elaboration.
And we know that they were doing this right from the beginning because if you
turn to the end of first Corinthians, Paul at the beginning of first Corinthians
15 in which he's going to give us a little discourse on resurrection, says this,
for what I have received, that's technical language for the passing on of sacred
tradition, for what I have received I have passed on to you Corinthians.
He's writing this in the early 50s A.D., about 30 some years after Jesus' death,
20 some years after Jesus' death.
For what I received I passed on to you of first importance, that Christ died for our
sins according to the scriptures.
Aha!
If he died on the cross according to the scriptures, then this has an explanation.
God must have been in that death.
It must have been part of God's plan.
It was not just a holy unholy mess on Golgotha.
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for
our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that is he was truly
dead, he didn't merely swoon, and that he was raised on the third day according to
the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas and then the twelve and etc.
There, in very minute form, is the essence of the last third of the Gospels.
The story of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, given detailed
scripture references to explain it and theological elaboration to make it clear.
One thing most scholars are agreed on is you can't ignore the last week of Jesus's
life if you want to understand the historical Jesus.
And it's also clear that the earliest Christians didn't try to hide the fact
that Jesus was crucified.
In the catacombs in Rome, in one of the pagan catacombs, not Christian catacombs,
there is an interesting graffito which is a carving of a cross and on the cross is
nailed a donkey.
And beneath the cross there is a Roman kneeling before this image of a cross with
a donkey on it and then there's a Latin inscription which reads, Publius worships
his god.
To an ancient pagan, the idea that a god could get himself crucified and then be
worshiped was a non-starter.
This is why Paul says, in 1 Corinthians 1, I'd resolve to preach nothing but Christ
and him crucified, which is a scandal, stumbling block to the Jews, and folly to
the Gentiles.
And yet this is the heart of the message that was preached from Jerusalem to Rome
and beyond.
That this Jesus, who taught parables, did miracles, performed exorcisms,
and died violently at the end of only about the 30th year of his life,
should be proclaimed as the savior of the world, not in spite of his death,
but precisely because of his death.
This is what you call a historical conundrum.
If you're simply a secular historian, you have a hard time explaining all of
that.
Now, if we were to do a survey of historical Jesus research from about 1988
to now, what has been going on in the scholarly world has been called the third
quest for the historical Jesus.
And you have all kinds of major players.
Some of these names you will know.
Let me name some of you, those who have written big-selling books on the
historical Jesus.
John Dominic Croson, heard of him?
Marcus Borg, heard of him?
N.T.
Wright, Tom Wright, who was in this film.
There are lots of these books written on the historical Jesus.
There has been a renaissance of study of the historical Jesus in the last 30 or so
years, and it's even come to be called the third quest for the historical Jesus.
And some of this has been fertile, and some of it's been futile.
And one of the things that has happened in this so-called third quest is there has
been an attempt to expand the database of sources.
So, some scholars have branched out into studying Gnostic Gospels.
The Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip.
Now, the thing about all these Gospels are they were not written in the first century
A.D.
We know this for a fact.
There was no Gnostic movement in the first century A.D.
Indeed, Gnosticism is a movement that arose in the second century of church
history and continued for about two centuries.
None of those Gospels are original.
None of them were written by eyewitnesses.
The Gospel of Judas was certainly not written posthumously by Judas.
Are you with me now?
The Gospel of Mary was not written posthumously by Mary.
And the Gospel of Philip was not written posthumously by Philip.
These are later pseudonymous, that is, falsely attributed names that were applied
to documents written by Gnostics.
The database has been expanded.
But here's the thing.
Even when you study these documents closely, if you ask the historical
question, is there anything in this book that we don't already know from the first
century Gospels that goes back to the historical Jesus, the answer is basically
no.
In other words, all of this hoo-ha on the National Geographic channel and the
Discovery Channel and the History Channel about the Gnostic Gospels and aren't they
exciting and maybe Jesus married Mary Magdalene and she was Mrs. Jesus.
The truth of the matter is that these Gospels are later fiction.
They are fractured fairy tales.
They are not historically serious documents.
In fact, they are documents meant to propound a certain kind of theology,
not really explorations of the historical Jesus at all.
And so at the end of the day, the serious critical historian will say about such
later sources, they are later, B, they add nothing to our pool of
knowledge about the historical Jesus, and C, the way they interpret Jesus is at
odds with the way Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John interpret the historical
Jesus.
Indeed, there are flat contradictions to what we find in the historical Gospels,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Let me give you one example.
Let's take the example of Mary Magdalene and women.
There is no question that Jesus had female disciples and so far as I can see as a
historian, he was probably the first Jewish teacher to have any significant
quotient of female disciples.
Maybe James will debate this with the rabbi next week, but I think that's true.
I think the historical evidence is pretty clear on that point.
You have Mary Magdalene, you have Joanna, the wife of Chusa, you have Susanna,
and other women who were on the road again with Jesus according to Luke 8,
1 through 3.
And not only so, they were last at the cross, first at the empty tomb,
and first to see the risen Jesus.
Now this is something that no first century person who wanted to start a new
religion would make up.
Why not?
These are very patriarchal cultures and the testimony of women was not even valid
in most ancient courts.
You don't start a new world religion by saying, well we had these women,
they saw Jesus die, then they thought they saw the tomb empty, and they thought they
saw him risen from the dead.
So you should believe this.
In the first century the normal reaction to that would be, say what?
That's the fantasies of women was the normal reaction.
Indeed, that's exactly what Luke 24 says was the reaction of the dirty dozen.
That is the twelve, when the women came to them and said, he lives, he lives,
Christ Jesus lives today.
And the twelve went, women's fantasies.
It's right there in Luke 24.
Women's fantasies.
This is not how you start a new world religion, by telling tales that only women
were the first witnesses of.
Now we're at historical bedrock.
The historical Jesus had both female and male disciples.
And the female disciples were with him to the end.
Last at the cross, first at the tomb, first to see the risen Jesus.
So let's take a little snapshot for just a moment of that scene at the tomb.
Mary Magdalene is there, she's weeping, she looks in the tomb.
According to John 20, she sees a vision of two angels in the tomb at either end of
the slab where Jesus' body had been.
There's a void between them, but it's not devoid of meaning.
Whenever you have angels in the Bible, they're like God's blinking neon sign.
Something important happened here.
Note, blink, blink, blink, pay attention.
What happened here?
The empty tomb does not convince Mary Magdalene that Jesus has risen from the
dead.
She is still weeping later in the story, and then what happens?
Jesus calls her by name.
Miriam, he says.
Footnote, all of the Marys in Gospels, their Aramaic name is Miriam, from which
we get the name Miriam.
They're named after the Old Testament prophetess.
All of the Marys are actually Miriams, okay?
Jesus in Aramaic says, Miriam.
She replies, Rabbouni, which does not mean husband.
It means my teacher.
It means my master, my teacher.
You will notice in John 20, Mary Magdalene doesn't say, honey, I'm so glad you're
back.
Let's read a Dobson book and jumpstart our marriage.
All of this later stuff from the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary about Jesus
having some kind of intimate relationship with Mary Magdalene is false.
Jesus was more than a little busy bringing in the kingdom of God.
He didn't have time for wife and family, and he didn't have one.
So, do we get much out of reading the Gnostic Gospels?
If the question is, what was the historical Jesus like?
No, we get no new information from those kind of sources.
But when you then look at some of the other things that have been discovered in
the third quest for the historical Jesus, we actually have learned a lot.
For one thing, we have learned something that's often neglected.
We've learned that Jesus is a sage.
Now, what's a sage?
Somebody give me a definition of a sage.
What's a sage?
A wise person.
That's right.
Have you noticed that Jesus speaks on his own authority?
You have heard it said, but I say to you.
Now, we in our radical, late, Western individualistic culture take that as
normal.
People speak on their own authority.
That's not how early Jews spoke.
Early Jews spoke like this.
I say on the authority of Rabbi Hillel who says on the authority of Rabbi Shammai,
who says on the authority of Rabbi Eliezer, quote, Jesus never does that.
He doesn't use footnotes.
He's not like my students.
He speaks with his own authority.
He speaks in the first person.
And he doesn't teach like a prophet.
Remember how the prophet spoke in the Old Testament?
Thus saith the Lord, quote, says Hosea and Amos and Isaiah and et cetera and et
cetera.
Jesus never quotes God.
Have you noticed that too?
Not only does he not quote the rabbis, he never quotes God.
He simply speaks with his own authority.
Well, if you look carefully at his teaching, one of the things that explains
this is that he is speaking as a sage.
He's speaking as a wise person and he's speaking in forms of wisdom literature.
He did his public teaching in the forms of parables, aphorisms, riddles, one-liners.
It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a member of Myers
Park United Methodist Church to get into the kingdom of God or something like that.
It's a metaphorical saying.
The whole thing about wisdom teaching is it's meant to tease the mind into active
thought, but it uses dramatic metaphors.
Jesus spoke in wisdom language, proverbs, aphorisms, riddles, one-liners,
and of course, above all, parables.
Now, other early Jews also used parables, but according to the Gospel of Mark,
he never said anything in public without using parables.
Jesus was Mr. Parabler Supreme.
He used more parables than any other early Jewish teacher we know anything about.
Indeed, there are at least 43 different parables in the Gospels.
Some short, some short stories, some almost one-liners.
There's a bunch.
Jesus was a sage, and he would have come across as a sage.
He doesn't speak like most Old Testament prophets.
There's an exception to that.
If you've studied Elijah and Elisha, you will discover that Jesus does come
across very much like those folks repeatedly.
First of all, he speaks truth to power.
You remember Elijah's encounter with Ahab, the Arab?
Remember Elijah and Ahab and Jezebel?
Jesus does speak to religious and political authorities and speaks truth to
power.
Jesus does miracles like Elijah did.
When Jesus raised people from the dead in Galilee, people said, a great prophet.
It's like Elijah, part two, the sequel.
He's back.
Now, one of the reasons people in Galilee would say that is Elijah was a northern
prophet, not a southern prophet.
Isaiah, southern prophet.
Amos, southern prophet.
We could keep going down that line.
But Elijah and Elisha were northern prophets.
And Jesus and John the Baptist both came across as rather like northern prophets in
various ways.
So has there been some fruit to the study of the historical Jesus in regard to the
nature of his teaching and the character of his teaching?
Oh, yes.
We've learned a lot in the last 30 years in various ways.
And we've learned to emphasize, put the emphasis on the right syllable.
That's the way I'll put it.
We've learned to take Jesus's teaching for what it is.
It's not chicken soup for the soul.
It is, in fact, radical eschatological teaching in the form of wisdom literature.
That's mainly what it is.
The bigger question, the so-called $24,000 question is, did Jesus have an exalted
view of himself?
Did Jesus think that he was the Messiah?
Did Jesus think that he was the divine son of God?
Did he think he was God?
This is the $24,000 question.
How did Jesus view himself?
Well, I think we've had some breakthroughs on that front, too.
We want to see another clip, brief clip from the story of Jesus, and then we'll
talk about that just for a few minutes.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus continued to preach his revolutionary message all
over Galilee and that his movement grew as he traveled from village to village and
town to town.
Historians disagree as to how long his ministry lasted.
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke suggest a period of up to one year,
but the Gospel of John implies it lasted three years or more.
All of them agree that its climax was reached when Jesus decided to go to the
Jewish capital, Jerusalem.
If we ask the question why Jerusalem is so important to Jesus, there are a host of
reasons we could give.
It's the place of festival that Jewish people from all over the world would come
to in order to celebrate Passover, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Yom Kippur, the major
Jewish festivals.
But why at the climax of his ministry would he take his disciples deliberately
up to Jerusalem?
Well, he's told them before, the son of man must suffer many things and he warns
them in advance that he, the son of man, is destined for a sudden drastic end.
He is what Dorothy Sayers calls the man born to die.
Right at the heart of Jerusalem was the Jewish temple, the holiest site for Jews.
Although almost all of it was later destroyed by the Romans, its remains are
still sacred for Jews today.
Dr. Ben Witherington is an expert in the life of Jesus.
He believes that because Jerusalem was regarded as the center of the world by
first century Jews, it is key to understanding the meaning of Jesus's life
story.
One of the things that seems clear is that Jesus is not doing, there's nothing that's
happening by accident.
He does seem to have a plan.
There's an intentionality to what he's doing.
And one of the things that's very clear about this is there's a series of
prophetic sign acts.
According to the Gospels, Jesus performed a series of deliberate and provocative
acts in Jerusalem that would help his followers understand who he believed he
was.
The first occurred as he approached the city with his disciples.
Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt
tied, on which no one has ever sat.
Untie it and bring it here.
This is the only place in the Gospels where he elevates himself above the crowd.
He sits on a donkey, he rides into town, in the middle of them already singing the
hallelujahs and hosannas.
And right at the beginning again, they see this as a royal gesture about the
king of peace, coming into his city to bring peace to the city of Jerusalem,
to return the land to its original owners.
Because Judea is an occupied province, it's run by Rome directly.
First century Jews would have known that this act of entering Jerusalem on a donkey
referred to an Old Testament prophecy about a Jewish messiah coming to free
Israel from its current misery, a concept that was central to Jewish
thinking at the time.
At that time, you had a lot of groups who weren't quite satisfied with what was
going on at the temple.
A lot of groups who weren't happy with the Roman rule.
And those people were looking forward to the anointed one and started talking about
the anointed one.
This is the one that we really believe will come and do the job right.
And so it was one of the hot potatoes that was being passed around, defining exactly
who this messiah should be and who he will be.
Jesus next entered the holiest place for Jews, the temple.
Ben Witherington believes the gospel writers saw what Jesus did there as
prophesying God's coming judgment on the corrupt temple leadership.
And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them,
it is written, my house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of
robbers.
Jesus sees this as a violation of the presence of God in the midst of God's
people.
So this is a warning, if you will, that the temple of Herod is the temple of
doom and it's going down for the count.
What we really have here is a foreshadowing of judgment that's going to
fall on the whole temple mechanism altogether.
At the very time the first gospels were being written, just 40 years after Jesus's
death, when the temple was destroyed by the Romans, this prophecy appeared to be
fulfilled.
The gospels tell us over the next few days, Jesus continued to visit the temple,
teaching and debating in the courtyards in full view of the temple authorities who
were becoming increasingly anxious about his presence.
For them to picture this Jesus coming across and ideas that he was going to take
this temple down to its foundations and that after three days raise it up was a
big threat to them because this is the place where God dwells.
For him to go inside and to upset the carts and to create the big scene that he
did there was something that would be tantamount to treason and perhaps to some
would be the prelude to his death.
From the perspective of the disciples, obviously the tension is ratcheting up.
They're thinking we are heading for a dramatic climax, here we go.
And any of them who had tendencies to think in sort of zealot-like directions
were expecting, let's get ready to rumble.
In the gospel accounts, the temple authorities then send a spy to try and
trick Jesus into publicly denying the Roman Emperor Caesar's right to tax them,
a crime punishable by death.
But Jesus demands a Roman coin with Caesar's face on it and utters one of his
most famous sayings.
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are
God's.
And they marveled at him.
Now this is a tremendously ironic saying because of course from the biblical point
of view everything is God's.
The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.
So thinking that God has a sphere and Caesar has a sphere and they're sort of
neatly divided or separatable is laughable.
And anybody who heard this saying would know that this is a riddle, a deliberate
riddle.
And it stumps the inquisitors instead of Jesus being stumped, it stumps them.
To fully understand what Jesus was doing in Jerusalem, Ben Witherington believes
that we need to examine an event earlier in his life, before he came to the city,
when he revealed who he was to his disciples in secret.
According to the Gospels, while he was still in Galilee, Jesus took his disciples
north to a pagan city called Caesarea Philippi, a place full of ancient temples
where sacrifices would have been made to pagan gods.
It was also a center for the newly created emperor cult, in which the Roman emperor
Augustus was worshiped as a son of the gods.
And then Jesus looks directly at the disciples and says, but who do you say
that I am?
Simon raises his hand and says, I know you're the Messiah, the Jewish
Messiah, the son of the living God.
So what Jesus is saying is that if you identify me in that way, but recognize the
larger cosmopolitan context, I'm not just the Jewish Messiah, I am the son of God,
not a son of the gods like Augustus, the son of God.
And my community will be built on confessions like you have just made.
And the gates of death of Hades will not prevail against it.
It's a fantastic location to help them reorient their thinking, understanding
that it's too little to say he's the Jewish Messiah.
No, he is the reality of which Caesar and these other gods are only a parody.
And he chose precisely this spot outside of the Holy Land to reveal to them and to
answer for them the who question.
But Jesus then ends the story with a mysterious plea for his disciples not to
tell anyone.
Jesus wants to reveal himself on his own terms.
And there were lots of pre-existing expectations about what a son of David or
a messianic figure would look like.
He wants to fill that category with his own content on his own terms.
He doesn't want his story resolved prematurely before he's able to conclude
it in the way he thinks God wants it concluded.
But more importantly, what we've got here that sets up that last week is Jesus not
only answers the who question for the disciples, he forewarns them that as son
of man, he must face execution at the hands of those who ought to most
appreciate him, the Jewish authorities.
Now, what I have showed you is the two bits of the story where Jesus is most
revealing of his own identity.
One is, of course, in the last week of his life during the Passion and Resurrection
events.
And the other is this very interesting story at Caesarea Philippi.
Not part of the Holy Land, part of the domain of Herod Philip, not Herod Antipas,
and at a city that was called Banias, after the Greek god Pan, and then renamed
for both Caesar, hence Caesarea, and Philip, the son of Herod the Great.
Now, why exactly would Jesus take his disciples on a hike outside of the Holy
Land to a pagan city to reveal who he was?
Here's my theory about that.
I think the reason is because there were so many different visions of what the
Messiah should be like, and Jesus does not want to be pigeonholed.
He wants to reveal himself on his own terms, and one of the ways to do that is
the via negativa.
That is, telling people who he is by explaining who he is not.
He's not like the Emperor Augustus.
He's not like these pagan deities.
No, he's a very different kind of messianic and divine figure.
But here's another clue that is so important about this.
Whenever Jesus is said, are you the Son of God, the Son of the Blessed, as the high
priest Caiaphas is reported to have said in Mark 14, Jesus doesn't reject that
suggestion, but he then turns it around and says, I'm the Son of Man.
He prefers to call himself the Son of Man.
Why?
Even in that story in Mark 8, that's what happens.
Peter says, you're the Christ, the Son of the Blessed.
Jesus says, blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah.
Flesh and blood didn't reveal this to you, and good on you.
And then immediately Jesus says, but now I need to tell you that the Son of
Man must suffer many things and be killed, and on the third day rise.
And Peter says, no way, Jose, is that going to happen to you, Jesus?
And Jesus then says to Simon, get behind me, Satan.
So in this same story, Peter goes from the penthouse to the outhouse, just like that.
He gets it right, and then he gets it wrong, almost in the same breath.
And the reason is because early Jews were not looking for a crucified Messiah.
Who is this Son of Man figure?
There were two phrases on the lips of Jesus that occurred more frequently than
all others, according to almost all scholars.
Son of Man and Kingdom of God.
Those are the two phrases that recur over and over and over again on Jesus's lips.
Why?
Well, I think it's because Jesus interpreted himself out of the Old
Testament scriptures.
And guess what?
There is only one Old Testament scripture that refers to both Son of Man and Kingdom
of God at the same time.
And that scripture is found in the apocalyptic book known as Daniel.
So I want to share just a couple of verses for you from the book of Daniel.
This is from Daniel chapter 7, and I'm going to be reading to you.
I'm going to start at the 9th verse and then read through to about the 13th verse.
Now as I look, thrones were set in place.
This is a vision of the prophet Daniel.
And the ancient of days took his seat.
His clothing was white as snow.
The hair of his head was white like wool.
His throne was flaming with fire.
His wheels were all ablaze.
A river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him.
Thousands upon thousands attended him.
Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.
The court was seated and the books were open.
This is a judgment scene.
The court was seated and the books were open.
Then I continued to watch because of the boastful words of the horn that had been
speaking earlier.
And then in beginning in verse 13 he says, and in my vision at night I looked and
there before me was one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven.
He approached the ancient of days and was led into his presence.
And this son of man was given authority and glory and sovereign power and all
nations and peoples of every language worshipped him.
And his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom that will never pass away.
His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
Now again, context is everything about this.
Because before this portion in Daniel 7, you have had the story of four beastly
empires.
Four inhumane empires.
Four evil empires that have persecuted and prosecuted and executed God's people.
But the story climaxes in this vision where you have an empire led not by a head
of a beast or a beast, but by a human and humane figure called the son of man.
And unlike these previous kingdoms, this last kingdom of the son of man is
going to last how long?
The text says olam, olam, olam, olam.
Or as Handel put it, forever and ever, hallelujah, hallelujah.
A human kingdom led by a humane person who rules forever.
Now this is a very different promise than the promise that God made to David in 2
Samuel 7.
He says, I will put you on the throne, and your son, and your son's descendants,
and etc.
That's a dynastic series of royal subjects of the heavenly king ruling in the holy
land.
But this last vision in Daniel 7 is not about a series of kings ruling,
father, son, grandson, so on.
It's about one person ruling forever.
What kind of person, friend, can rule forever and ever?
Did you notice as well what the text said that all the nations would do?
They will all what?
Worship Him.
Now if you know anything about Judaism, there is only one object of worship and it
is whom?
God.
Here is a vision of the Son of Man being worshiped as God and reigning forever and
judging the world.
This, I submit to you, is the story, the vision out of which Jesus exegeted and
interpreted Himself and His own ministry.
As it turns out, the most exalted title that Jesus could have used was not Son of
God.
Even kings in antiquity were called sons of the gods.
No, the most exalted title He could have used is Son of Man.
John Donne put it this way, "'Twas much that we were made like God long before,
but that God should be made like us much more.'" "'Twas much that we were made like
God long before, created in God's image, but that God would be made like us and
take on flesh and dwell in our midst much more.'" I have a good friend at Vanderbilt
named Amy Jill Levine.
She is a Jewish woman, New Testament scholars.
No, there's not a lot of those in the world.
She's a good friend of mine and we often do a seminar together on the historical
Jesus, so I will leave you with this.
What's interesting about this seminar when we talk about the historical Jesus and
debate this and dialogue about that and kibbutz about this, is that we start with
three propositions that are givens that we both accept.
A, a non-Jewish Jesus doesn't work.
B, a non-eschatological Jesus, a Jesus that was not concerned about the
end of the world, not concerned about the end things, not concerned about God's
final kingdom coming on earth, is also a non-starter.
And thirdly, we both agree a non-messianic Jesus is a non-starter.
This is not because she's a believing Christian, it's because she's an honest
historian.
The truth of the matter is, at the bottom of the well of history, that there is no
non-Jewish, non-eschatological, non-messianic Jesus to be found at the
bottom of the well of history.
And that's also what the Gospels say.
Thank you very much.
If you want to ask a few questions, we've got time and there's still time for
the tide to roll and other things to happen.
Sure, but they did not see Messiah as a divine figure.
No, they did not view the coming Messiah.
They saw him as an anointed one of God, like a Davidic king.
They saw him as a royal, anointed figure, like King David would be.
But they did not anticipate a divine Messiah.
So what Jesus was actually telling them was more radical than anything they had
expected.
And you know, one of the things I love about the Gospels is that Jesus doesn't
come to meet our expectations.
Nor did he come to meet the early Jews' expectations.
He came to meet their needs.
There is a difference.
Good question.
Next question.
I will repeat the questions so you can hear them.
Yes, back here.
The
question is, how much overlap is there between the teachings of Jesus and other
early Jewish teachings?
There is some.
There are two early Jewish teachers that were contemporaries of Jesus that he does
sound like.
He doesn't sound like rabbinic figures like Rabbi Hillel or Shammai or Eliezer.
He does sound like a couple of the Jewish sages, Honi the Circle Drawer and Hosni.
They also taught in parables.
And Honi the Circle Drawer also called God Abba, which is very frequent on the
tongues of Jesus.
It's an Aramaic way of referring to God as Father, okay?
So there is some overlap, but not a lot.
Neither Honi nor Hosni presented themselves as any kind of messianic figure
and wouldn't want to have been seen that way.
But did they use parables?
Yes.
Did they use extended metaphors?
Yes.
Did they use colorful images in their teaching?
Yes, they did.
So there are some similarities.
Yes?
You mentioned Paul in Corinthians, having spoken to the Jesus who died,
was buried, and rose again according to Scripture.
Are you referring that Paul was looking at Daniel, was looking at other scriptures
that were told?
Yes.
You notice where he puts the emphasis.
He says he died according to the scriptures, and it also says he rose
according to the scriptures.
That little phrase is not tagged on to the burial, which is interesting, okay?
I think he's thinking of Isaiah 53, honestly, which is the most clear
depiction of a suffering messianic figure in the Old Testament.
I think it's probably maybe a combination of Psalm 22, which also talks about a
suffering figure that may have been crucified, and Isaiah 53.
So yes, I don't think he's reading that in light of the Son of Man material.
I think he's reading it in light of Isaiah and other texts.
When Jesus ascended and the scriptures said he would come in like fashion,
again, how do you interpret that?
Our question is, how do I interpret the texts that refer to Jesus coming back from
heaven to a theater near you?
I take it to mean exactly what the church historically has said it would mean.
It's talking about Christ coming at the end of human history to judge,
to raise the dead, and to judge the world.
And in fact, that's part of that vision in Daniel 7, isn't it?
Because as I said to you about Daniel 7, the Son of Man is given the authority and
plenipotentiary power from the Ancient of Days, a.k.a.
God, to judge the world, to judge the nations of the world.
Well, that hasn't happened yet.
If you read your newspapers or watch the news, the world has not yet gotten the
memo that they're going to be judged.
But someday, Jesus will come and take care of that.
Is Albert Schweitzer insisting in the quest of the historical Jesus that Jesus
will be coming back quickly, like within the possible lifetime?
Right.
His question is a very good one.
One of the first books to study Jesus as a historical figure in the early 20th
century was by Albert Schweitzer, later a missionary to Africa.
And the name of his book was The Quest for the Historical Jesus.
That's an English translation of the German title.
What he asks about is something that Schweitzer said.
Schweitzer said Jesus predicted that he'd be back really soon after his death.
And he wasn't referring to the resurrection, he was referring to what we
call the second coming.
And bless his heart, Jesus was wrong.
Schweitzer said that Jesus wrongly predicted the timing of his second coming.
I don't think he did that at all.
In fact, in the gospels, we have clear evidence he didn't do that.
Mark 13, 32 says, of that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in
heaven, not even the Son knows, only the Father knows the timing of the
second coming.
So I think Schweitzer was simply wrong in the way he read the Jesus tradition.
And by the way, if Jesus says nobody knows on earth when he's coming back,
please don't pay any attention to these theological weather forecasts that you
hear from time to time.
Here's what I would want to say to you.
God reveals enough of the future to give you hope, but he doesn't reveal so much
that you don't have to live by faith every single day.
The prophecies about the future do not come with a timetable.
That's about as simple as I can put it.
The prophecies about the future are about the certainty that in the end,
God's way will win.
That's what it's about.
Justice will be done.
Mercy will be had.
Resurrection will appear.
Reconciliation will take place.
New creation, new heaven, new earth.
All these images reassure us that in the end, God is going to have the last word
just like he had the first word.
But it tells us nothing about the timing of these events.
You see, what I think prognostication and calculation is about is about us trying to
get a hold of and control of the future.
Because if we knew for sure that Jesus was coming on December 4th according to the
Mayan calendar in 2012, maybe you've heard about this, right?
If we knew that for sure, do you think that would change human behavior if
everybody suddenly believed that was the case between now and the end of this year?
Oh, I think it would.
This is precisely why God is not going to give us this kind of information.
He wants us to live by faith and live in hope.
And Ben just referred to the last word, and so it shall be.
What a blessing this has been, Ben.
Thank you so very much.
Join me.
Before you disappear, somebody did ask me about this DVD.
It is now available on Amazon.
It's called The Story of Jesus.
For my money, it's the best documentary ever done on the life of Jesus.
And it is the first one that ever stars a Jew playing Jesus.
The Jewish man who plays Jesus, who can speak Hebrew and speak Aramaic,
is named Salva Washington from London.
And his first name means saved.
Salva is his name.
How appropriate, a Jew playing Jesus named saved.