How do we know that Jesus Christ actually lived, was a historical person?
Dr. Reagan Well, we have pretty good evidence outside anything in the Bible
from Josephus in a saying in the Antiquities.
It's in book 18.
And in this excerpt, which is disputed because there are things that are said in
it in the way it's been passed on to us that a Jewish person wouldn't say,
things like, He was the Christ.
And it also has a confession of resurrection in there.
Josephus wouldn't have written that but most people who look at this citation say
that it does tell us Jesus existed.
He had an unusual ministry in which He performed unusual deeds.
That He was crucified during the time of Pilate at the instigation of the Jewish
leadership.
And that He created a following as a result of that death.
Now those are pretty basic core facts.
But since there are some people who argue that Jesus Christ never in fact existed at
all, it's an important piece of evidence coming from a Jewish historian writing
about this period of history.
Ankerberger, Yeah.
Let's just put up our old buddy Gary Habermas and his book, The Historical
Jesus, where he goes back and he looks at at least 17 non-Christian sources about
the life of Christ and comes up with 129 facts, okay, before you get to the New
Testament.
And they're in agreement with the New Testament or they're substantiating what
the New Testament says.
Then we need to say you have proof from the historical records.
The earliest historical records are?
Ankerberger Well, the earliest historical records that we have are the materials
that we see in the New Testament.
These are your gospels.
This is the book of Acts, things that are said in the epistles of Paul and the other
epistles.
So there are several materials that have come from the first century that are
incorporated into our New Testament.
And what's important in talking about them this way is they are historical documents.
They tell us what people in the first century believed.
We're not talking about these documents yet at the point of saying these are
inspired, these are the Word of God, but that their content is reflective of
what first century people who allied themselves to Jesus actually believed.
Ankerberger Yeah, in fact, when I came to Christianity, the fact is I did not stop
and say, here's a book that fell out of heaven that's inspired and inerrant,
okay?
I came to these books like I came to Herodotus or Catullus or somebody else in
ancient history.
And I said, does this give me solid information about this time period and a
person in this time period?
And so I'm saying if you start there, the idea of inspiration and inerrancy
comes a little later down the pike after you accept a couple other things.
But you don't start there.
You start with, do we have historical information that's solid?
Okay, all of these sources plus other sources then say, from a group of people
that follow Jesus.
Everybody says people are following Jesus for whatever reason, okay?
From that group He picks 12 apostles, alright?
Tell me how we know He picked 12.
Ankerberger Well, we have a pretty clear tradition that 12 were selected.
In that group we have Judas, which means that Jesus selected someone who eventually
would betray Him.
Sometimes people will say, well, the number 12 is made up.
It parallels the 12 tribes of Israel and it's just a way of getting a nice literary
mix so that the following of Jesus mirrors the situation in Israel.
But if you were making it up, remember that if you say you get to make it up that
means you get to make the rules.
If you're making the rules you wouldn't pick, you wouldn't have the Son of God
pick someone who's going to betray Him.
So this is called in critical studies the criteria of embarrassment, that there's
something that doesn't quite fit.
And because it doesn't fit it's more likely to have happened than to have been
made up.