Category Archives: Jesus Christ

Difficult Bible Passages, General Apologetics, Jesus Christ, Skeptics, Top Ten Posts of 2010

Are There Things that Really Bother You about Christianity? – #1 Post of 2010

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Does it bother you that the Bible is composed of 66 different books instead of one single tome?

What about the fact that there were errors made in copying some of the Bible manuscripts over the last few thousand years?

Does it cause you to doubt Christianity because there are some difficult passages in the Bible?

Do you wish Jesus didn’t say some of the harsh things he said?

Do you find it strange that the biblical authors come from vastly different backgrounds (e.g., shepherds, kings, fishermen)?  Or that they composed poetry, historical narrative, allegory, and apocalyptic letters instead of a theological/moral textbook with each point being carefully outlined (e.g., “see section 11.3.4.7 for why murder is wrong”).

Does it irritate you that Jesus only ministered for a few years and covered a limited range of topics?

Are you worried about the way the canon of Scripture developed over time in the church instead of God sending Scripture to earth in a black obelisk, like  in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Do you wish Jesus and the apostles had addressed more social ills than they did?

Listen carefully: If these kinds of things really eat at you, you have either rejected Christianity or you have erected barriers around your faith so that you can shut off your brain and not think any more.

You see, what you fail to realize is that God has chosen to use flawed and fallible human beings in the framework of human history to accomplish his purposes.  We are included in his plans and he allows us to be important actors in the drama he has written, but there is a catch with this approach: Christianity turns out to be messier than some of us would like.

Jesus is both divine and human; the Bible is both divine and human.  Both of these are tenets of Christianity, so why do so many of us want to drop the human part of the Bible and the human part of Jesus?

Jesus, as the God-man, was sinless during his life in earth, but that doesn’t mean he was some kind of emotionless Spock with no feelings and no passion.  The Bible, because it is divinely inspired, is inerrant in what it teaches, but that doesn’t mean that God had to compose the Bible as a dry textbook that dropped from the sky one day, avoiding all human interference.

Learn to appreciate the fact that God has included humanity in his plans.  The sooner you do, the better you’ll understand Christianity.

Historical Christ, Jesus Christ, Skeptics, Top Ten Posts of 2010

Did Ancient Non-Christians Write about Jesus? Part 1 – #4 Post of 2010

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Recently I was in a discussion with a skeptic of Christianity, a man who had been Roman Catholic for 55 years, and then decided that he couldn’t believe Christianity any longer.  During our conversation, he asked what historical evidence I could provide that Christianity was true, so I immediately went into the material in the New Testament.  After listening to me for a few minutes, he told me that all of that material was mythical and legendary, and he wanted to know if I had anything outside of the New Testament.

Now, this is like saying, “Aside from your multiple eyewitnesses, do you have any good evidence?”  But nonetheless, I started to provide non-Christian sources that mention Jesus, only to be stopped cold.  He claimed that there was no extra-biblical, non-Christian evidence of Jesus’ existence in the first two centuries, and that he, in fact, doubted that Jesus ever existed.

I’ve spoken to many skeptics over the years and I have heard a few of them take this position, but it is rare.  From what I know, there are virtually no reputable historians who deny the existence of Jesus.  According to historian Edwin Yamauchi, the idea that Jesus never existed is indeed extreme.  “From time to time some people have tried to deny the existence of Jesus, but this is really a lost cause.  There is overwhelming evidence that Jesus did exist.”  But rather than just make that assertion, what is some of that evidence?

During my conversation, I mentioned the Jewish historian Josephus as one important example of non-Christian evidence, but my skeptical friend confidently told me that Josephus never mentioned Jesus.  Let’s take a look.

Josephus was a very important Jewish historian, born in A.D. 37, who wrote most of his four works toward the end of the first century.  Yamauchi explains, “His most ambitious work was called The Antiquities, which was a history of the Jewish people from creation until his time.  He completed it in about A.D. 93.”   Josephus writes about James, the brother of Jesus, and Jesus himself in The Antiquities.

In the first mention, Josephus recounts how a high priest, Ananias, takes advantage of the death of the Roman governor, Festus (also mentioned in the New Testament), to have James, the brother of Jesus killed.  With the previous governor dead, and the new one not yet arrived, Ananias could take the law into his own hands.

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them a man whose name was James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

Here we have Josephus mentioning Jesus, James, and Festus, all New Testament characters.  We also have corroboration that some people were referring to Jesus as the Christ, which means Messiah, in the first century.  Yamauchi claims that no scholar “has successfully disputed this passage.”  Bottom line: my skeptical friend was mistaken.

There is more from Josephus, plus other ancient sources, and we’ll continue to deal with them in subsequent posts.  Make sure you come back!

 

Essential Beliefs, Evangelism, Jesus Christ, Resurrection, Salvation

What Is the Gospel?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

You would think this question would be pretty easy to answer because the gospel message is something that Christians talk about all the time.  However, it is difficult to find the gospel explained in one place within the Bible.  There is, however, one passage where the gospel is defined, and that is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, specifically 1 Cor. 15:1-8.  Here it is:

Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.  By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

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 he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Theologian Scot McKnight summarizes some key points from this text in the December issue of Christianity Today.  First, “this is the gospel handed on to Paul (v. 3), which suggests it was the gospel the earliest apostles preached.”

“Second, the gospel saves people from their sins (v. 2-3).”

“Third, the essence of the gospel is the story of Jesus (vv. 3-8) as the completion of Israel’s story (v. 3).  Both the word Christ (Messiah) and the phrase ‘according to the Scriptures’ are central to how the apostles understood the word gospel.”

So what is the gospel?  According to McKnight, “Added together, it means this: The gospel is first and foremost about Jesus.  Or, to put it theologically, it’s about Christology. . . . ‘To gospel’ is to tell a story about Jesus as the Messiah, as the Lord, as the Son of God, as the Savior.”

Gary Habermas often summarizes these verses in this way: the gospel is the deity, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

If you’ve overlooked these verses in the past, go back and study them.  After all, we need to constantly remind ourselves of the message we are to give the world.

Jesus Christ, Theology

An Illustration of the Incarnation from the Movie Avatar

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Although I have written negatively of the overall theme and message of Avatar, there is an interesting analogy of the Incarnation of Christ that can be taken from the film.  I heard this analogy in a podcast by William Lane Craig, and I think it may help some people understand this important Christian doctrine.

Craig was debating a Muslim recently and he wanted to help the Muslim audience understand how Jesus could be both God and man at the same time.  The doctrine of the Incarnation states that Jesus is one person who possesses two natures, one divine and one human, but Muslims sometimes struggle with this concept, thinking that if Jesus is human, he cannot also be God.

Here is where the movie Avatar comes in.  The hero of the movie, Jake Sully, is a crippled human that cannot walk.  As the movie progresses, Sully is able, through technology, to take on the nature of one of the natives of the planet Pandora, the Na’vi.

Sully’s mind unites with a Na’vi body, and for the rest of the movie he is both human and Na’vi; he possesses two natures.  Like Jesus, Sully is one person with two natures.  Sully can do things in his Na’vi nature that he cannot do in his human nature, like moving his legs and physically connecting his mind with the planet Pandora.  Likewise, Jesus is able to do things in his divine nature (e.g., raise people from the dead, still storms)  that He cannot do in his human nature.

Like any analogy, this one has its weaknesses, but I thought it was an interesting way to illustrate the Incarnation using the plot of a popular movie.  If it helps you, great!  If it doesn’t help, forget about it.

Eschatology, Jesus Christ

Who Is the Real Superman?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you’ve ever listened to Ravi Zacharias, you’ve noticed he likes to quote from English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge.  One of my favorite quotes from Muggeridge has to do with his description of the frailty of nations and empires, with particular attention to those of the 20th century.  In a gripping message, he contrasts the temporality of the world’s powers with the eternality of one person.  Please enjoy the quote below!

We look back upon history and what do we see?  Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter-revolutions, wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed, one nation dominant and then another.  Shakespeare speaks of ‘the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.’

I look back on my own fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that, ‘God who’s made the mighty would make them mightier yet.’  I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last a thousand years; an Italian clown announce that he would restart the calendar to begin his own ascension to power.  I’ve heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as a wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.  I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people desired, they could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one lifetime.  All in one lifetime.  All gone with the wind.

England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.  Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy.  Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades.  America haunted by fears of running out of those precious fluids that keep her motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate.

All in one lifetime, all gone.  Gone with the wind.

Behind the debris of these self-styled, sullen supermen and imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom, and through whom alone mankind might still have hope.  The person of Jesus Christ.

Evil, Pain, and Suffering, Human Nature, Jesus Christ, Sin, Skeptics

Did Jesus Fail to Address What’s Wrong with the World?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Recently I was conversing with a skeptic of Christianity who was explaining why he had become a skeptic.  One of the most significant reasons was that he was greatly disappointed that the New Testament, and Jesus in particular, did not address a particular social institution which he considers to be particularly evil.  In his view, a God who did not address this issue at that time in history is not worthy of worship.

Other skeptics I’ve met have said similar things.  Jesus should have introduced life-saving technologies, he should have revealed the laws of physics, he should have taught people how to grow more food.

Most of the Jews of the first century were greatly disappointed in Jesus because he failed to free them from Roman occupation.  If he were the real Son of God, surely he would throw off the Roman yoke.

Why didn’t Jesus address all of these issues?

A Christian friend of mine explained to our skeptical friend that Jesus did not come to address social institutions as much as address the condition of each person’s heart.  If men’s hearts are repaired, then social institutions will inevitably be repaired as well.

You see, in God’s program, social injustice, lack of technology, and lack of scientific knowledge are secondary to the primary mission of Jesus.  That mission was to reconcile men to God, who is the source of all good.  Jesus came to deal with each person’s sinful nature; without addressing the depraved heart within each person, nothing else matters.

Abolishing a social institution or teaching someone about physics, without first addressing their heart, is like trying to treat cancer with an aspirin.  It might take away the pain for a little while, but it does not treat the underlying problem.  Something more radical must be done to save the person.

We, of course, have abundant evidence of Christians improving the world through science, technology, and charity, of Christians promoting laws that protect life and freedom.  The Christians who advanced these projects did so because their sinful natures were addressed by Christ first.  The incredible progress of western civilization over the last 2,000 years is a testament to the Christians who had heart transplants.

The skeptic who is disappointed that Jesus didn’t address their particular issue is basically failing to understand the root problem of mankind – we are separated from an all-good God because of our sinful nature.  Man’s root problem is not technology, is not lack of scientific knowledge, is not even social injustice.

In the early 20th century, The London Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme “What’s Wrong with the World?”  Famed author and Christian G. K. Chesterton’s contribution took the form of a letter:

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

Until a person can answer like Chesterton, they won’t understand Jesus.

Church History, Historical Christ, Jesus Christ, Skeptics

Did Ancient Non-Christians Write about Jesus? Part 4

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In parts one, two, and three of this series of posts, we discussed the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, who are both non-Christians.  They each provide historical confirmation of key components of the history recorded in the New Testament.  Before ending this series, I want to look at one more writer from the ancient world who gave us a window into what Roman officials thought of Christianity.

Pliny the Younger was a Roman author and administrator.   He wrote a letter, as governor of Bithynia in northwestern Turkey, to the Roman Emperor Trajan in about A.D. 112 where he describes early Christian worship practices:

They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to do any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food—but food of an ordinary and innocent kind. [Letters 10:96]

Pliny’s letter to Emperor Trajan identifies several historical facts about early Christianity:

  1. Christians were meeting on a fixed day of the week.
  2. They worshiped Christ as God (this one sentence destroys the claim that the deity of Jesus was a late fourth century addition to Christianity).
  3. They maintained high ethical standards.
  4. They gathered to eat meals together.

Pliny’s letter also provides further evidence that Christianity had spread far and wide around the Roman Empire, and that government administrators were having to deal with them.

There are certainly other ancient non-Christian sources which speak of Jesus and early Christianity.  If you would like to do more research, there are several excellent introductory works to this topic.  Two that I used for this series of blog posts are The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel and The Historical Jesus by Gary Habermas.

If we circle back around to the skeptic that I introduced in the first post of the series, we can see that his view that the existence of Jesus is not supported by early non-Christian writers is simply mistaken.  There are certainly a small number of historians who cast doubt on the authenticity and interpretation of the writings we’ve analyzed, but I must stress that they are in a tiny minority, as far as I can tell.  The overwhelming consensus of history is that Jesus did indeed exist.

Historical Christ, Jesus Christ, Skeptics

Did Ancient Non-Christians Write about Jesus? Part 3

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In parts one and two of this series of posts, we discussed the writings of Josephus and we saw that most historians agree that Josephus did indeed write about Jesus, even if Christians may have added a few phrases later on (this is still debatable, but possible).

There are, however, others who wrote about Jesus at a very early date.  The next of these we’ll mention is the Roman historian Tacitus.  Edwin Yamauchi, the historian we’ve been quoting, has this to say about Tacitus: “Tacitus recorded what is probably the most important reference to Jesus outside the New Testament.  In A.D. 115 he explicitly states that Nero persecuted the Christians as scapegoats to divert suspicion away from himself for the great fire that had devastated Rome in A.D. 64.”

So what exactly did Tacitus say about Christians and Jesus?

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures of a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. [Annals 15.44]

Tacitus, as can be seen, is no fan of Christianity, but he provides several details about Jesus and early Christians.  Here they are:

  1. Christians were named for their founder, Christus (Latin for Christ).
  2. Christus was put to death by a Roman procurator, Pontius Pilatus (again Latin).
  3. Christus was executed while Tiberius was emperor (AD 14-37) .
  4. His death ended a “superstition” for a time but it broke out again in Judea (where the teaching originated), and made its way to Rome.
  5. Christians were hated and tortured during Nero’s reign.

Again, we see that this data lines up well with the New Testament documents, and again we see that those who deny that Jesus ever existed are swimming upstream against the current of scholarship.

One additional note about Tacitus.  There has been much speculation that the “superstition” to which Tacitus refers is the resurrection of Jesus.  We can’t be sure about this, but Tacitus may be indirectly referring to it.

Tacitus’ testimony about Jesus raises an important question.  How did a swelling religious movement, which started at the far reaches of the Roman empire (in Judea) but reached Rome by the mid 60’s A.D., get started when its leader was subjected to one of the most humiliating and public deaths possible at this time?  Jesus was crucified as a common criminal, but people were following him.  If he was resurrected, then there would be an easy explanation, but if he stayed in the tomb, then how did this movement even get off the ground?  I have never heard a satisfactory answer to that question from those who deny the resurrection.

There is one more non-Christian I want to introduce to you, and I’ll do that in the next post.  Thank you for sticking with this series, which has gone on longer than I originally thought!

Historical Christ, Jesus Christ, Skeptics

Did Ancient Non-Christians Write about Jesus? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1, we introduced the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and demonstrated that he mentioned Jesus and his brother James in one section of his work, The Antiquities.

But there is an even more famous passage that talks about Jesus in The Antiquities.  This longer section is referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum.  Historian Edwin Yamauchi explains that this passage is more controversial among historians because there may be later Christian additions to the original text.  Historians refer to these possible additions as interpolations.  Below I will include the entire text and highlight in bold the most disputed phrases.

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man.  For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.  He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.  He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him, did not give up their affection for him.  On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him.  And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Yamauchi claims that “today there is a remarkable consensus among both Jewish and Christian scholars that the passage as a whole is authentic.”  But what about the possible interpolations (the bold text above)?  Why do some scholars think Josephus would not have said these things?

The first bold phrase appears to indicate Jesus is more than human, which seems unlikely coming from Josephus.  The second bold phrase flatly says that Jesus is the Messiah, instead of saying Jesus was called the Messiah.  Again, this seems unlikely.  Finally, the third alleged interpolation proclaims the resurrection of Jesus, not something that Josephus would likely report.  We can’t be sure about any of these phrases, and maybe Josephus did write them, but the current scholarly opinion is mixed on the subject.

What is left of the passage, though, is still a powerful corroboration of key facts about Jesus.  Yamauchi summarizes: “He was the martyred leader of the church in Jerusalem and . . . he was a wise teacher who had established a wide and lasting following, despite the fact that he had been crucified under Pilate at the instigation of some of the Jewish leaders.”  Those facts line up exactly with what the New Testament records about Jesus.

Given these two passages from Josephus, how significant are they?  Yamauchi explains: “Highly significant, especially since his accounts of the Jewish War have proved to be very accurate; for example, they’ve been corroborated through archaeological excavations at Masada as well as by historians like Tacitus.  He’s considered to be a pretty reliable historian, and his mentioning of Jesus is considered extremely important.”

So, we do have at least one non-Christian source that talks about Jesus from the first century in Josephus.  But there are additional sources that should be mentioned before we leave this topic.  Find out in the next post….

Jesus as God, Jesus Christ, Theology

If Jesus Is God, Why Did He Get Tired?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If Jesus is God, and God is uncaused, immaterial, omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal (and lots of other things), then don’t we have a problem with Jesus being a real man who lived in 1st century Palestine?  After all, Jesus grew tired, but God doesn’t get tired; Jesus sometimes didn’t know things, but God knows everything; Jesus died, but God can’t die; Jesus has a human body, but God doesn’t have a body.  I think you get the point.  How does the Christian church deal with this problem?

Well, before we get to the Christian church, one approach that has been taken by some religious groups over the last two millennia is just to give up on the idea that Jesus is God.  If he is less than God, then all these questions go away.  Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are two groups that took this approach, but they are just the latest in a long line.  The problem with this approach is that it contradicts the Bible’s clear teaching that Jesus is God (see the series of posts on how we know Jesus is God).  So this approach fails to take seriously the biblical data.

The approach that the Christian church has taken is to accept the fact that the Bible teaches that Jesus is both God and man.  In the early church, there was a couple centuries of debate about how this works, until the Council of Chalcedon came together in AD 451 to settle the issue.  Here is the creed that resulted from the Council:

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

What does all that mean?  It means, among other things, that Jesus is one person composed of two natures: human and divine.  The creed repeats the words Godhead and Manhood several times to hammer the point home.  So, whenever we ask any question about Jesus, we have to specify whether we are asking about his divine nature or his human nature.  In his divine nature, he is omniscient, eternal, and uncaused.  In his human nature, he was tired, he needed food, he didn’t know everything, and he even died.  Two natures, two sets of questions about Jesus.

The church never went so far as to try and explain how exactly Jesus’ two natures interacted; they set boundaries around what was acceptable, based on Scripture, and captured it in the above creed.  Many theologians have attempted to go further with this doctrine and explain in more detail how this is possible, but these details, to my knowledge, have never been formally adopted into creeds of the church.