Today on the John Ankerberg Show, statistics show that about 70% of
Christian young people who attend church regularly in high school will drop out or
step away from their Christian faith when they leave to attend a secular college or
university.
Why are they leaving behind the faith in which they were raised?
Students who enter the university quickly realize they are not in Sunday school
anymore.
Secular professors challenge their beliefs of how Christianity began, who Jesus
really was.
Can we believe that he rose from the dead?
How did we get the Bible?
And can we really trust the information we find there?
32% of Christian students said they left their faith behind because of intellectual
skepticism or doubt.
Their faith didn't make any sense to them anymore.
Or there were too many questions they didn't think could be answered.
63% of teenage Christians said they do not believe that Jesus is the son of the one
true God.
51% said they do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
68% said they do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a real entity.
And only 33% said that the church will play a part in their lives when they leave
home.
But I believe this trend can be reversed, and so I have entitled our new television
series, What Your Son or Daughter Needs to Know Before They Go to the University,
so they don't fall away from the faith.
We will also help those watching the NBC television mini-series A.D.
who have questions about the life of Jesus, his resurrection, and how the
apostles spread the gospel.
What evidence assures us that this all actually happened and was not fabricated
by the early Christians?
My guest today, who will lead us through this discussion, is Dr. Darrell Bock,
one of the leading historical Jesus scholars in our country, and one of the
world's foremost authorities on the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts.
He is Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological
Seminary and has authored over 30 books and appeared on ABC, CNN, Fox,
and the Discovery Channel.
I invite you to join us for this special edition of the John Ankerberg Show.
Welcome to our program.
Let me ask you this question.
What are the questions that your students need to know how to answer before you send
them to the university in order for them to keep their faith in the Lord Jesus?
When you send them to a secular university or college, there are critical professors
that are talking to them about God, Bible, and Jesus, and they're not
necessarily telling them what they've been hearing in church.
And we're doing this program to try and prepare you and them for that experience,
because you don't want them to lose their faith.
And, Darrell, I'm glad that you're here today.
And I want to get right down to this thing that people have said, you know,
with the Gnostic gospels, the Nag Hammadi finds, and all of these new little books
that have come down, that these books have changed the way we believe, okay?
The gospel that's been preached for 1,900 years, okay, that's one version of
Christianity.
Now we realize there were other books in circulation and other ideas about Jesus,
and they're saying they were just as acceptable in the sense that they were
there.
So how did this specific train of orthodoxy come all the way down to us?
They're saying, well, there was a power play around the fourth century with the
creeds, and the church imposed this and threw out all the other stuff,
okay?
You're saying that's not true, and you're telling us the reasons why.
And you're saying, one of the ways that you examine these documents is to find
out, okay, you do have documents at certain times, second, third century,
talking about Jesus, using the apostles' names, all kinds of stuff.
They're not connected with the apostles, but they also aren't connected in terms of
the message, the theology that's been apparent in the early church right from
the get-go.
The theology is completely different.
And you're trying to tell us today, what's the core theology that the Bible's
presented from the get-go?
Then you can compare it with these others.
And when the Christians did it in the early days, they said, pfft, that's not
what we believe.
And they discarded those books, okay?
So tell us what's going on here.
Dr. Darrell Bock Well, what's happened is, is in 1945 we had a discovery called the
Nag Hammadi codices.
They did discover several extra-biblical gospels.
Most of them are second century or later.
They don't have any possibility even going back to the first century.
So what you've got is kind of this anachronistic move to elevate the status
of these gospels alongside what's going on in our first century witnesses,
which are the gospels that we have.
I did a book called The Missing Gospels that also worked through the nature of
these claims.
What were these books about?
What did they say?
What did they teach?
And tried to show how the pedigree that they have and the theology that they teach
in no way could possibly go back to Jesus and the apostles.
They had a theology that was problematic not just for what it taught about Jesus.
They had a theology that was problematic for what it taught about God.
Christianity emerged out of Judaism out of a respect for Judaism.
In fact, the early apostles went to the synagogue and basically said, this is the
completion of the promise that God has offered to His people from the beginning
going back to Abraham.
They accepted the core theology of the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament.
One of those core ideas is that God was the Creator and the creation was
originally good.
In this Apocryphon of John and in Gnostic gospels that tell the story of the
creation, God doesn't create.
Underling gods do.
And they botched the job from the beginning.
So not only did God not create, but the creation wasn't very good at the
beginning.
It was bad from the very beginning.
And this dualism, this idea that the material world is inferior in comparison
to the spiritual world, is a form of Neoplatonism.
That's not Judaism.
That's not the Judaism that fed into the early Christian movement.
There is no way that material could go back to the earliest generations of the
Christian faith.
Ankerberg And if the church is accepting the Old Testament and then moving on with
the claims of Jesus and who He is as death and resurrection and being the Savior of
the world, they would have rejected that kind of theology quickly.
Dr. Craig Exactly right.
What we have is a, is a core theology that passes through two centuries of
conversation.
I need to set the stage a little bit for what we're doing.
Many of the university models will say that Irenaeus is the father of orthodoxy.
That really the concept of establishing a canon and of pushing the idea of an
orthodoxy and pushing others aside is a product that begins to emerge at the end
of the second century and then works itself out into the fourth century.
Ankerberg So about 180 in Irenaeus.
Dr. Craig About 180 in Irenaeus.
And what, what I did years ago was to sit down and go through the doctrine of God,
the doctrine of Jesus and the doctrine of salvation and go through and trace the
writings before we get to Irenaeus, the, called architect of this orthodoxy.
And, and trace and see if there was a core theology that was consistently running
through them.
And I made the argument then that there was a core theology.
And I, I think the best thing to do is to just read it.
Ankerberg Let's put it up on the screen for folks.
Dr. Craig And, and, and the reason I'm going to do this is because when you hear
it, it's, it's not going to sound like a creed on the one hand.
It doesn't sound like the Bible versus New Testament on the other.
But it is dealing with the themes that the New Testament is presenting.
Here, here I think is the summary.
There was one Creator God.
Jesus was both human and divine.
He truly suffered and was raised bodily.
He is worthy to receive worship.
Salvation was about liberation from hostile forces, but it also was about sin
and forgiveness, the need to fix a flaw in humanity that made each person culpable
before the Creator.
This salvation was the realization of promises that God made to the world and to
Israel through Israel's law and prophets.
The one person Jesus Christ brought this salvation, not only by revealing the way
to God and making reconciliation, but by providing for that way through His
death for sin.
Resurrection into a new exalted spiritual life involves salvation of the entire
person, spirit, soul, and very importantly, body.
Faith in this work of God through Jesus saves and brings a spiritual life that
will never end.
That was the orthodoxy of the earliest tradition.
And that's what this tour showed.
It meant that there were certain things that were ruled out from the get-go in
terms of orthodoxy.
God was not to be divided in such a way that He was not the Creator.
He was the Creator of all things, and that initial creation was good.
A division between Jesus and the Christ in terms of His basic person and work was not
acceptable.
Orthodoxy was that Jesus as Son of God was sent from God and came truly in the flesh
and truly suffered.
And third, redemption only on the spiritual plane was not the true faith.
Salvation included a physical dimension of resurrection and extended into the
material creation.
And this meant, fourth, that Jesus came not only to point the way to faith,
to be a prophet, to be a teacher of religious wisdom, or to be an example of
religious faith.
Rather, His work provided the means to salvation.
He was far more than a prophet.
He was worshiped and affirmed, sharing glory with God as His Son." That
is the core theology of the first two centuries.
And you can pick virtually any substantial work of the first two centuries coming out
of Christianity, out of this wing of Christianity if you take it from the
skeptical side, and you will hear and see that story.
Ankerberg.
Yeah.
So if you're saying before Irenaeus at 180, you're looking at documents going
back, you're saying you've got Jesus, you've got Him recorded in the Gospels,
you've got the letters of Paul that are even earlier than the Gospels.
Then you've got the disciples of the apostles, the guys that sat underneath the
teaching when Peter would preach, or Paul would preach, or John would
preach.
You've got those guys, their writings.
Ankerberg.
You've got the speeches recorded in Acts.
Ankerberg.
The speeches in Acts.
So you've got these things.
And whether you look at what we call the 27 books of the New Testament,
or whether you look at the writings of the apostles' disciples, or you look at the
fathers that came after that, right from the get-go you find all of that which you
just said.
Dr. John Ankerberg That's right.
And the real key point here is that there is a consistency of theology running
through all these sources.
It's running over two centuries.
You can see it again and again and again.
It's expressed with some variety of terminology and with some variety of
emphasis.
But that core story is what is being told and is what is being passed on.
You'll notice it's not quite the language of the creeds, because the creeds are
going to develop what is here.
And it's not quite the language necessarily of individual passages of the
New Testament, because what we're seeing is the synthesis of what those texts are
doing out of the New Testament and the way they were conceiving kind of the whole big
picture story.
Ankerberg We're talking to Dr. Darrell Bock, and we're asking the question,
how do you know what the early Christians, right next to Jesus, what they believed He
was saying, what did they hold?
How far back can we go?
And we are looking at some of the material that is the earliest historical material
that tells us what those Christians believed.
And we're going to take a look at Romans 1, verses 1-6.
This came out in 57 AD, if Jesus died at 30.
The fact is that's 27 years after the fact, okay?
It says, 1.
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the
gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets and the
holy scriptures, concerning his son, who was descended from David according to
the flesh, he was a man, and was declared to be the Son of God in power,
according to the spirit of holiness, by his resurrection from the dead,
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Darrell, talk about this.
Bock Well, this is a doctrinal summary.
It's like 1 Corinthians 15.
It's one of three layers of early evidence that we have that everyone was exposed to
in the church.
Some of them are doctrinal summaries.
Some of them are hymns or songs.
And the third category are sacraments, things like the Lord's Supper and baptism.
They all taught the core theology.
They were there from the very early days in the beginning.
And in this text what's important is we've got Jesus at a human level, descended from
David.
And we've got him, you read, the text reads, declared.
The word is actually horizoned.
He's marked out as Son of God.
He's demonstrated or shown to be Son of God by the resurrection.
Because the resurrection is God's vindication of who Jesus is and his
claims.
Ankerberg He's recognized here.
Bock Exactly right.
Just like the horizon marks off the separation from the edge of the earth to
the heaven, so the resurrection marks out who Jesus is.
It's like a, it's like a highway placard that says, this is who Jesus is.
Take a look at what this means.
Ankerberg Yeah, it's the grabber.
I mean, the resurrection, that ought to tell you something.
Bock That's right.
Ankerberg All right.
And if somebody said, well, you know, they, they made this up in 20 years.
Bock Well, this is a doctrinal summary that goes back to this early period.
And again, we're back to the experience of Paul.
Paul's experience comes within a couple of years of the time of these events in,
in the 30s when he sees Jesus on the Damascus Road.
And his theology changes.
It's because Jesus was being preached as the one being seated at the right hand of
God.
It was because the apostles were declaring that Jesus was alive, that the tomb was
empty, that a resurrection had taken place.
And so Paul's message connects to the apostles' message at that point.
And that gap that we've talked about that runs anywhere from 20 to 60 years all of a
sudden has closed shut.
Bock Yeah.
1 Corinthians 8, again, 1 Corinthians comes out of 55 AD.
So now we're talking 25 years after Jesus passed off the scene.
And Paul writes to the Corinthians, We know that an idol has no real
existence, and that there is no God but one.
For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are
many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all
things, and for whom we exist, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom
are all things, and through whom we exist.
Now the skeptics sometimes try to twist that and get other deities in there.
What's going on here?
Ankerberg Well, what's going on, of course, is we're in a polytheistic
world, the Greco-Roman world, in which there are many gods being worshiped in the
culture.
But beyond this we have one other thing that's going on that's very, very
important, and that is we have Jesus and God put together in a Benetterian
statement in which both of them are presented as creators.
And Jesus is not a creature.
An angel is a creature.
So when someone tries to say, oh, well, the way Jesus got exalted is He went
up the ranks.
He started off as an angel and He ended up being seated at the right hand of God.
No, that can't work.
What the early church is confessing very early on is Jesus is in as a creator,
as a part of the divine activity that's taking place to create.
He's not a creature in and of Himself.
He was preexistent.
He was there at the creation.
He's associated with wisdom.
And this is in an early doctrinal summary that reflects the view that exists about
Jesus very early on.
Ankerberg Yeah.
Now, you folks, you like songs, right?
The early Christians liked songs before they had Scripture, okay?
And some of those songs became Scripture.
Let's give them one, okay?
It's Philippians 2, and it says, Christ Jesus, who being in very nature
God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself
nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness,
and being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to
death, even death on a cross.
Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above
every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on
earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
That was a hymn.
Dr. Reagan That was a hymn.
Well, at least we think it was a hymn.
If it wasn't a hymn, it's at least a doctrinal summary.
And the point of this text is really significant.
The last part of that passage where every knee bows and every tongue confesses is
echoing language from Isaiah 45.
Now, it just so happens that Isaiah 45 is probably one of the strongest texts in
defense of monotheism that we have in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The early church did have a Scripture.
They had the Hebrew Scriptures, but they didn't have the New Testament
yet.
So how did they teach and reflect on the theology before there was a functioning
New Testament?
That's actually the question that we're answering.
And it wasn't that this was being developed willy-nilly across a gap period.
There was an early theology on which they were reflecting, and it was there from the
very beginning.
And these hymns are hymns of praise that they were singing in the services to make
this point.
And so notice what's happened.
The God of Israel, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess.
That's what the Hebrew Scripture is saying, is now described in such a way
that Jesus shares in this glory, shares in this position, shares in this
honor.
And as a result, what we see, again, is another Benetarian statement where
Jesus is put right next to God in the midst of what it is that the church is
teaching, singing, and what they're doing in the midst of their services when
they're worshiping God.
Ankerberg.
Yeah, all these passages, He's both God and man, all right?
He's the Creator.
I mean, it's incredible.
Everybody knows about communion, the Lord's Supper, okay?
Let's go back to an early document.
What did they think it meant?
Let's take 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul talks about the Lord's Supper.
And he says, "...for I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you,
that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread.
And when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, This is My body, which is for
you.
Do this in remembrance of Me.
In the same way He took the cup also after supper, saying, This cup is the new
covenant in My blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's
death until He comes." What's going on here?
Dr. Reagan Well, this is interesting because obviously the focus is on the
substitutionary work that Jesus is performing in His death.
It goes back to the Last Supper and where Jesus instituted this practice,
indicating what His, what His life and commitment was about in His mission.
What's really interesting about this is that we actually have two versions of what
was said at this meal.
We have Matthew and Mark who say, This blood is, is the covenant in My
blood.
The word new isn't even in there.
Whereas in Luke and in Paul we've got new covenant in the language.
This shows the differences that sometimes get exploited.
But notice that this difference is not a real difference.
The only covenant that could be established that wasn't in place at the
time Jesus was speaking was the new covenant.
So all the word, change of wording done is make explicit something that was implicit
in what was said in the shorter version.
So here's an example of the differences that sometimes are played against one
another.
And what we see is how they connect and relate to one another, not that they're in
contradiction to one another.
And the second point that we're seeing here is in these sacraments we get core
theology.
Just like in baptism, what's pictured is the washing and then the return to life,
the picture of cleansing into new life so that now that I'm cleansed, the Spirit of
God can come into my life and I can now walk with God with the capability that
He's now given me as a result of being saved.
Ankerberg.
Darrell, summarize for the folks that are listening.
What's the importance of what you just said?
How should this encourage students who are looking for evidence about what the early
Christians believed?
Ankerberg.
We are saying there is a core theology that is summarized in summaries,
doctrinal summaries, in songs, hymns, and in sacraments, in the rites
that the church was engaged in.
These are practices that everyone was involved in.
This wasn't some elite over here that was being taught something or some secret,
some mysteries off to the side, which is what you get in Gnostic
Christianity.
This was something that was exposed to everybody.
It's early.
It's core theology.
It's teaching theology before there was a functioning New Testament.
And it shows that theology is early and that the core stuff was there from the
very beginning.
Ankerberg.
All right, next week we're moving on.
We're going to ask another question.
Think about it.
Jesus passes off the scene.
You've got the twelve apostles and, and there's no New Testament.
How did the early Christians after Jesus come to the conclusion, where did they get
the intuition that the letters, the books of the apostles could be equated
equally with the Scripture in the Old Testament?
How did we develop this canon of the New Testament, the 27 books?
That's a fascinating topic.
I hope that you'll join us next week.
Stay tuned for scenes from next week's program.
Now, if you would like to have all of the information in our new series called
Questions the World Will Ask About Your Faith, all three television programs in
this series are available on DVD for a gift of $39.
It contains the information your son or daughter needs to know before they leave
home and go off to attend a secular college or university.
It features one of the world's leading historical Jesus scholars, Dr. Darrell
Bock.
In this series, we'll help those watching the NBC television miniseries,
A.D., who have questions about the life of Jesus, His death and resurrection,
and how the apostles spread the gospel to the world.
What evidence assures us that this all actually happened and was not fabricated
by the early Christians?
And what evidence shows Jesus clearly claimed to be God?
How do we know Jesus really rose from the dead and actually appeared to over 500
people?
Can the resurrection appearances be explained away by psychological theories?
All three programs in this series are available on DVD for a gift of $39.
We also taped a second series called So You Don't Fall Away from the Faith.
In this series, we explain how did Christianity begin?
How do we know that the information in the New Testament books is the best historical
evidence there is for what Jesus said and did?
Then how do we know can trust what we are told about Jesus?
Was the message Jesus preached changed over time by the early Christians?
Or has Jesus' core message remained the same until our day?
How did the early Christians come to believe that the apostles' books and
letters were to be considered scripture, equal in authority with the Old Testament
scriptures?
And who decided which books would become part of the canon?
The three programs in this series are also available on DVD for a gift of $39.
Then third, we are making available two new study guides with extensive notes that
parallel our two television series.
Each study guide is available for a gift of $8 or for five or more copies for $5
each.
And finally, I'm going to include three other important series in this package.
First, the battle to dethrone Jesus.
Could the apostles and companions of the apostles have written a completely new
story about Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?
During the early period of time when the early Christians did not have the New
Testament, how did they know what was true Christian belief and what was not?
Well, the four programs in this series with New Testament scholars, Dr. Daniel B.
Wallace and Dr. Darrell Bock, answer all of these questions.
Second, our series, What About the Missing Gospels and Lost Christianities?
Is the traditional Orthodox Christianity that we were taught in church true
Christianity?
What about the missing gospels and alternative Christianities that
archaeologists have discovered?
What do books like the Da Vinci Code, which sold more than 81 million copies,
and other popular literature teach about Jesus?
What historical evidence refutes their assertions?
And then third, a response to Bill O 'Reilly's book, Killing Jesus,
Part 1 and Part 2.
My guests again are historian, Dr. Gary Habermas and New Testament
scholar, Dr. Darrell Bock, who critique Bill O'Reilly's view of Jesus that's
portrayed in his book and in his upcoming movie, which Bill O'Reilly says will break
new ground in chronicling the life of the most famous human being who ever lived.
Now, all six of these television series, containing 22 half-hour programs,
plus the two study guides, are available for a special package now by calling us at
1-800-805-3030.
That's 1-800-805-3030.
Or you may also order these materials at our website at jashow.org.
Next week on the John Ankenberg Show...
Ankerberg says our apostles are dying off and we no longer have their living word
that can function in an oral context.
We're now going to inscripturate their testimony.
So we get Matthew and John writing as apostles, presenting that material and the
material that comes through them.
We have Mark representing Peter.
We have Luke representing really the whole church in many ways.
And that's where our gospels come from.
We have the epistles that are written to deliver the testimony as Paul is seeing it
and preaching it.
We have Peter's material that comes from obviously one of the close apostles.
We have John's material that comes from him.
They become witnesses and their witness is inscripturated in what becomes the New
Testament and the Word of God.
And to learn how to start a relationship with Jesus Christ, go to our website at
jashow.org and click on Pray to Accept Jesus Christ as your Savior.