The Historical Jesus

our topic tonight is the historical Jesus um what can we really know about the historical Jesus uh was there a historical Jesus what can we say about the historical Jesus and what does that matter for then and what are the implications for for Christians and everyone else want to um start by providing a little bit of context by looking at um the historicity or um questions about the founders of other world religions in addition to Christianity so let's look for a second at the Historical uh gab budha so according to Buddhist tradition the religion's founder was born as an Indian Prince named sidarta Goda he's raised in a palace he's shielded uh by his father from any kind of suffering so inside the walls of the palace it's only wonderful uh and the child is not or all the way up to his young adulthood he's not um able to even see that people in old age or disease or anything like that and it's only when he gets outside of the walls and he kind of goes on a tour of the real world that he observes um you know someone bent over in old age walking with a stick and he and he sees what's that you know this somebody who has grown old in infirmity he then uh experiences or observes people who are suffering terribly from a disease and finally he also sees someone who is dying or who has died and in each one of those cases those are new realizations for him considering his sequestered life so these observations in the story uh lead Gad to buddhism's First Noble Truth which is life is suffering or um uh life is unsatisfactory however we translate that into English he then um renounces his princely status and his property so that he can instead uh uh focus on spiritual goals uh that include becoming an aesthetic which is to say um not uh not indulging in all sorts of worldly pleasures and then also mendicant in other words someone who is uh begging for um life's NE Necessities uh because you're not focused on worldly things you're instead uh focused on an other worldly and spiritual path and then there's more stories in this um General overall kind of like traditional biography of the Buddha that explain kind of the pathway that he eventually charts the middle path between extreme aestheticism you know it's the kind of uh things that some of the monks had been doing where uh where they try to eat on very little or to give up most every kind of food meat and or whatever all the different kinds of things that you do meat they did give up but anyway a middle path between giving up everything or almost everything uh and and then also just being worldly indulgent so kind of the middle path of that all right so that's kind of like just a very brief brief thumbnail uh of the story the Buddha um and we don't know exactly when uh that historical Buddha if there is a sidart Goa uh when exactly he would have lived one of the traditional or you know dates that Scholars kind of have given is let's say uh living between the middle of the 500s BCE and then to the very um let's say early 400s of the um of that Century so I'm kind of like right in that kind of time period however um the kind of maybe earliest kind of possible date for the composition of Buddhist texts is let's say in the 300s but the manuscripts of those don't actually exist until the 10000s or the I'm sorry the OTS of the BC the first century uh BCE and the kind of first real mentions we have in the historical record of the historical Buddha is during the reign of Asoka who's the Emperor of Mara one of these Indian uh one an Indian empire and he gives a series of edicts that include mentioning the Buddha um and so shoka here is essentially a a ruler who is instituting Buddhism as kind of his State religion um and so in some ways we kind of be like for Jesus the first kind if as if the really the first actual um evidence evence we have of the historic Jesus comes with the emperor Constantine who is instituting uh Christianity uh you know three centuries after more than three three centuries after Jesus's life um as the state religion of the Roman Empire obviously that's not the case in terms of Jesus we'll get to what we have in between those kind of things um the earliest biography of the Buddhist comes even later uh in the first century of the common ER the first century ad and there's actually other components of the biography that in the centuries after that um so anyway it's a kind of a long distance to get from the time period when the historical Buddha would have been alive to our sources that describe him and so like I say for that um from that kind of historical figure to maybe the earliest texts maybe it's 100 years in there or so that it separate them because we don't know exactly when the historical Buddha would have been alive so I think most historians agree there probably was a historical Buddha and it's possible that if you glean through uh the earliest texts you can reconstruct some of the basic details of the historic figures life because again it's only separated by maybe a century but when we get to that biography like I was telling it kind of this um this story of a prince who has been shielded from suffering and so forth um that's almost you know what five centuries or more separated from the historical figure um and that's too long to preserve um to have preserved historical details really in just oral tradition uh and so rather than histories um I think almost all historians agree that these are foundational myths of the religion of Buddhism and by foundational myths here I mean to say stories that are told to explain and share and experience the identity of Buddhism for Buddhists as opposed to um an actual historical story of how uh sadama actually developed the religion it's actually they're written the reverse ways we already know as Buddhists what the first Noble Truth is and so the story explains how that Insight is achieved or is written to explain that so although historians agree generally that there was probably a historical Buddha very little can be said about his actual life and like I say even the proposed dates are as far as a century apart uh so we don't even necessarily know where uh when the Buddha would have lived now where they it's a good idea um uh portraits like this one that are we are so familiar with are are very very late so this picture is from the first century I'm sorry second century of the CE of the Common Era and um it's again among the earlier anthropomorphic portraits uh the earliest representations of the Buddha in Buddhist art would just the Buddhist Footprints because he's enlightened he's gone so the biographical stories of the prince like I say shielded those are identity myths written later by Buddhists all right I wanted to also look at context for another founder so Moses so Moses is traditionally understood to be the author of The pentat or Torah which is to say the first five books of the Hebrew Bible um and as such uh Moses is very very important in the foundation story for the earliest era of Judaism what we call historians call first temple Judaism um the time the Judaism that existed prior to the destruction of Solomon's Temple by the Babylonians so according to the Bible Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to the land of Canaan uh which was a Promised Land promised to them by God but which they in turn conquered militarily um and according to uh the Book of Joshua anyway uh they exterminated most of the Canaanite inhabitants in order to do that so let's again kind of try to look at some of the dates and try to put the give ourselves a timeline framework for this so the dates again for Moses we don't really know uh in rabinal Judaism the the the rabbis uh kind of identified 1391 BC to 1271 BC uh for the dates of Moses um the famous Christian fundamental literalist Bishop Usher who tried to date everything for a short Earth chronology puts it a century or so earlier anyway we'll just put these down here to kind of show um the if we look though at the again the composition for the earliest Source text of the Torah um it's maybe in the generation immediately before uh the destruction of Jerusalem so that Babylonian captivity period which where the um the Nobles of Jerusalem are taken to Babylon and before Babylon is conquered by Persia and the Nobles are allowed to go back and refound Jerusalem and create the second temple period so that 587 to 539 BCE period so it's possible that the uh earliest Source texts for the pentat and Torah were written before that the pentan Torah as we have it were edited edited together after the Babylonian captivity and so in any event it's a fair distance from the actual dates of Mo of Moses um the manuscripts are centuries later still but um are are are many of them were witnessed for example in the Dead Sea Scrolls and so they're quite old still first century uh BCE and so forth but um anyway still fairly Mount far removed from the uh the composition moment so the time frame here between maybe the dates of when Moses would have been alive and when the text would have been written is some 600 or more years and so as with the Buddha the many centuries separating the composition of any stories about Moses from the time he supposedly lived means that the details of the story are almost certainly Mythic um and as with all text the stories as written reflect the context of the author in other words when the person is writing so that may be like I say as early as the late first temple period and it is certainly also reflecting the early second temple period in terms of when the uh the pentat the Torah is actually edited together rather than the period of time when the character was supposed to have lived that 600 years earlier when Moses would have been alive if he were a historical figure um and so why one of the reasons why though why is Moses most likely thought to be um entirely legendary as opposed to the Buddha so unlike the Fig F of the Buddha who can potentially be discerned from the teachings of the historical movement of Buddhist mendicant monks um The Exodus story as we have it in the patuk in the Torah actually contradicts the rest of the historical and archaeological record so for example The Exodus itself doesn't fit into recorded Egyptian history um Egypt has the kind of wonderful distinction of being uh the the most stable ancient society that um has just a massive amounts of uh you know records that have been kept and uh chronology and King list that go so much further back than almost anywhere else um nowhere does this has this fit into the actual Egyptian story where they talk about people who are as numerous as them uh leaving and so forth usually they would even if the Egyptians always put a good spin on their history they would at least mention they cast them out or something like that if they were going to try to say that uh they wanted them to go or something like that there's no mention there's nothing in the archaeology about any such thing and indeed the time frame um when people would like to fit Moses into Egyptian history let's say around the time of rameses I second or something like that um the problem is at that point the Egyptian Empire actually owned the land of Canaan so they wouldn't have actually been going anywhere in other words that's still under Egyptian uh dominance at that time and then and then also the problem is from the other side um the archaeological uh Records the archaeological um what we have of in Canaan also uh Records that there's really no mass destruction of all the Canaanite cities there's no time period when an alien force of Israelites came in and absolutely leveled everybody uh rather what we find is uh when we look at the uh archaeological evidence and also the linguistic evidence um the ancient Israelites are in fact the same people speaking the same language with more or less the same customs and so forth as all of their Canaanite neighbors and so um what historians have concluded is that not that the Israelites were uh Interlopers who came in from somewhere else but rather they evolved as a distinct people um out of their Canaanite neighbors and that in fact you know syrians Phoenicians Canaanites Israelites they're all uh essentially the same people um but they you know they diverge alternate different identities out of that same uh common origin from being from that place okay so historians then kind of agree that Moses is therefore a legendary figure the stories that are told about him um if they were based on like I say kind of these late first temple sources they may have originally reflected the identity of a line of Israelite priests who looked to Moses as an ancestor and so um they're talking about things that he did in order to um explain and create identity their their role as priests uh within originally the northern kingdom of the Israel area and then later in the Kingdom of Judah the southern Kingdom uh and their role in and above let's say that the other priests who claimed descent from Aaron who were the priests of the temple in Jerusalem um but the Exodus story as we have it when it got edited together and became Central to the Torah as we know it when it was compiled um after the return from Babylon by the Exiles um you can immediately see why a story of people uh going coming out of Egypt and uh coming into a Promised Land why that could be Central to the identity of the Exiles as they are returning from a foreign land from Babylon and coming to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple and so on and so um Ezra who is a leader of the um Israel like Exile community that returns an official in the Persian Empire um he is one of the first people who in the book of Ezra anyway he reads uh the law for the first time and this may well be a reflecting of a story where the Torah has now been edited together possibly um possibly by Ezra or at Ezra's um you know at his command within his uh baileywick or whatever within his school and that may well be the first um kind of reading of Torah as it now now existed uh and speaks to the second temple Judaism okay so those are kind of our contexts just looking at what are we seeing for his you know historical Founders and other other uh in Judaism and and Buddhism so Jesus of Nazareth uh is generally said to have been born at the end of King Herod the Great's reign uh which is to say around 4 BCE and then after he's baptized by John the Baptist he gathers disciples he shares teachings to those disciples during a relatively brief active period of his ministry a couple years maybe maybe three and then he is generally understood to have been executed during the U administration of the Roman official pontious pilot and that would have taken place then either in the year 30 or the year 33 of the Common Era okay so let's do the gim kind of framework exercise where we have here four to let's say 33 as possible dates um for Jesus um the very earliest composition dates for some of these Christian texts may be the 40s so it may be that the Lost sayings gospel q and maybe the signs gospel and others are being composed there uh as early as that that would be the earliest kind of possible date uh other Christian texts are being written by the 50s by Paul and so forth our earliest manuscripts are only a few decades later at the beginning of the 2 Century um the earliest gospel Mark is written around 70 and then we also have this additional uh figure in the um time frame of the historical Jesus uh the ministry of this guy Paul so this is by Ministry I mean active um planting of Christian communities um by the earliest surviving Christian Author and so um Paul is active as early maybe as 31 but definitely after Jesus has died so that would only be if if Jesus died at 30 you know but maybe as late as 36 anyway somewhere within just a few years of Jesus's death uh for the next couple decades and so um the time frame here is just amazingly shorter than what we saw either for the Buddha or for Moses so um you know maybe it's 10 or 20 years before texts start getting after Jesus's death the texts start getting uh written um it's 40 years to the earliest you know biography like book The Book of Mark and it may be just two to five or so years between um uh Jesus's death and the first kind of active historical person no for c for certain known historical person Paul is actively spreading Christian teachings and writing letters and stuff that survive to us okay so in contrast then to the centuy separating the stories about Moses and the Buddha from their own time frames uh Christian sources are only a couple decades removed from the historical Jesus you know nevertheless like Socrates the historical Jesus left us no writings but unlike with Socrates um most Scholars have concluded that we don't actually have any eyewitness accounts of Jesus so Socrates didn't write anything didn't believe in that um but we have his we have the writings of his students like Plato and zenfon um and so there's you know very clear clearly writings of lots of people who knew Socrates there's also negative writings of uh of people who were contemporaries who didn't like him like Aristophanes the comic playright who who makes fun of Socrates and so forth so what do we mean by there's no eyewitness accounts doesn't isn't the isn't the New Testament filled with eyewitness accounts so although um the earliest canonical gospel uh which we call the gospel of Mark was written within 40 Years of Jesus death all four of the canonical gospels which we attribute to Mark Matthew Luke and John those attributions are actually simply traditional so later Christians um said that they they don't those books don't say I um Matthew you know the Apostle of Jesus and writing this text uh when Jesus comes and calls Matthew to be one of the Apostles in the text of the Gospel of Matthew he doesn't say and then Jesus called me there's nothing like that um the texts do not claim to be written by Matthew early Christians who were trying to figure out who might have written them um kind of just assigned these to those and those have stuck as attributions so we've explored this um at length in some of our previous lectures and so I invite you especially to go see or to go maybe rewatch if you haven't the Lost gospel CU and uh recovering the signs gospel we kind of go into a lot more detail about kind of this this kind of question but likewise our other letters and texts that are in the New Testament while often written in the names of Jesus Apostles sometimes they're also Anonymous and just attributed to an apostle um and it may well be that um that the texts are reflecting communities that might have been founded by those Apostles at some point or other or even schools that were maybe established by them so that the followers felt that they were writing with in let's say Peter's name or in Peter's Authority or the authority of James and and so forth um again Scholars do not think they were actually written by them so for example Peter is not the author of the letters of Peter nor James James's letter nor John uh John's letters in addition to the gospels and even though um lots of Christians even continue to think that the Book of Revelation is also written by the same John um John the Revelator is actually doesn't also does not claim to be John the Apostle and U the writing styles are so very different they're clearly different people it's simply a different it's a different John there's lots of people uh named John there continue to be lots of people named John to this day okay so how do we know that well anachronisms and literary criticism is the way Scholars have um have pieced these uh you know studied these for centuries and come to these conclusions so Apostolic authorship in General is discounted because the texts themselves tend to contain anacronismo figure early Christianity was evolving pretty rapidly in the first years and so we can kind of tell when they're talking about um later more Orthodox more structured more Christian ideas um than that those are anacron istic to the time periods of the first disciples I mean another example would be um you know the historical Peter as described in the stories he's got rather humble beginnings he's an Aramaic speaker he's Jewish fisherman um you know not well not not a high not an educated person who is highly literate in and able to compose you know letters in Greek it seems very unlikely that that would have would have been the case um and also the letters the letter as we can tell or not written by him so so for example The Second Epistle to Peter it's although canonically in the New Testament part of the New Testament text literary criticism in this case has pretty much conclusively demonstrated that the text is in fact a reworked expansion of the Epistle of Jude uh which again is not written by the person who says it says wrote it but anyway was written between let's say 90 and 20 CE and therefore long after that Source text is long after Peter died and indeed because the text is simply a reworking of another text and not a letter by Peter it's also clearly not by Peter so second Peter was written by somebody in the second century of the Common Era and so that's somewhere between 50 and 100 years after Peter would have died okay even though the texts though that we have are not by Peter uh John and James we actually can be confident that Peter is an actual historical figure um because we do have a known historical figure who tells us he met Peter a couple times and spent time with Peter so in his letter to the Galatians which is written somewhere between 50 and 60 of the Common Era Paul of Tarsus the first Christian whose author um first Christian author who's writing survive describes meeting Peter along with Jesus's disciple John and also Jesus's brother James so Paul's letter is to a group of Christian communities that he founded in galatia which is um an area in Asia Minor or Anatolia that what we now think of as turkey or what now become Turkey um the context of this letter is that rival Apostles with what Paul kind of disparages as human credentials um and we don't know exactly what those are but perhaps they have letters from the disciples in Jerusalem that say so and so who has come to you as an apostle uh comes with the authority of Peter or comes with the authority of James or something like that we don't know because Paul doesn't want to um Paul doesn't want to give these guys any he wants to just call them false and so on and and demean them by saying that his um his own calling comes from God not from any human beings and so forth anyway these rival Apostles have been preaching what Paul calls a different gospel um to the Galatians other than the one Paul has presented and he also says even though he calls it a different gospel it can't it's not really a different gospel because there's only one gospel so the they're just preaching falsehoods anyway so throughout this letter Paul is really on the defensive and it's therefore very very interesting so let me I'm actually going to read a bunch of it because uh I think that we can see an awful lot and it's kind of very critical to understanding both early christianities uh and what's happening here right at the very beginning of christianities so in the kind of a formal writing uh of a letter Paul writes at the beginning Paul an apostle you always start with your own name and then you're saying to in the Roman style Paul an apostle sent neither by human commission nor from Human authorities but through Jesus Christ to the churches of galatia so he's setting up right from the beginning I'm not being called here by I some human um qualifications I've got a bigger qualification which is from God right I am astonished uh that you Galatians here have so quick are so quickly deserting the one me who called you in the grace of God and now you're turning to a different gospel so he's he's very upset that uh anyway that these Rivals have arrived and are turning again turning uh being turned turning the churches against Paul he says am am I now seeking human approval or am I seeking God's approval for I want you to know brothers and sisters that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin for I did not receive it from a human Source nor was I taught it but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ and so he is turning here um what might have been a very big liability in the mind in the minds of the Galatians here the Galatians have been receiving these other apostles who maybe have credentials uh from the church in Jerusalem maybe from Peter maybe from um Jesus's own brother U but Paul's saying no that doesn't matter I have the I don't have human credentials I have credentials from Jesus Christ you have heard he he as he tells a little bit of his story now you've heard no doubt of my earlier life in Judaism I was violently persecuting the Church of God and I was trying to destroy it but when God was pleased to reveal his son to me when he had a vision of the Risen Christ he he that happened so that I might Proclaim him Christ among the Gentiles which is to say the non-jews and when that happened he says I did not confer with any human being nor did I go to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me but I went at once to Arabia and afterwards I went to Damascus so he's going on and just going about his business as an apostle fulfilling his calling to preach about Christ to non-jews um without getting seeking any human authority or even frankly any um any instruction from uh Jesus's pre-existing apostles then after three years then I did go up to Jerusalem to visit sephus and so cus here um this is the Aramaic word for stone which in the same way is um is Petra Peter in Greek and so the name here is for um Peter's nickname as as Paul is recounting it so the guy's original name is Simon but Jesus calls him you know the rock uh and so um he's called by that nickname here in Aramaic uh anyway because that would have been the word the way that Jesus and Peter would have spoken so I did go to visit sephus Peter and I stayed with him 15 days but I did not see any other Apostle except James the Lord's brother so here Paul is saying that after you know three years after he had his own vision of Christ and began to consider himself to be an apostle of Christ he did meet he go went to Jerusalem met with the uh Church in Jerusalem there the leaders there and among those were p pet and James the Lord's brother in what I am writing to you before God I do not lie he says then I went to the regions of Syria and cissa then after 14 years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas one of his missionary companions taking another one of his missionary companions Titus along with me then I laid before them though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders the gospel that I Proclaim among the Gentiles in order to make sure that I was not running or I had not run in vain so in other words he had a private meeting with these leaders in Jerusalem and he and he outlined before them his own kind of teachings on the gospel his feelings about um and his interpretation uh about how Christianity can be spread among non-jewish Christians my um slides are not working to advance oh here we go so now it works sorry about that so um thank you corrected that so but um so this continues he continues so he's had that meeting but even Titus so his his missionary companion who was with me um uh was not compelled to be circumcised though he was a Greek but we did not submit to them even for a moment and from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders uh what they actually were makes no difference to me God shows no partiality those leaders contributed nothing to me and so he it goes on to call James and sephus and John uh the acknowledged pillars of the church and in the later in the letter he actually uh tells a story of how when he is in Antioch with Peter he rebukes Peter so um so Paul calls sephus Peter James and John I'm sorry John and James James the brother of Jesus the acknowledged pillars of the church um and nevertheless he's forced to explain his disagreements with them over his interpretation of Christianity's uh relationship and Jewish law um and so there's this is an embarrassing story for Paul to make if Paul were making the story up he would be much more likely to CL claim that Peter James and John had given him let's say the full Authority as the Apostles of the Gentiles and indeed when the author of acts kind of retells the story the author of Acts retells it in a much Rosier way um and that's how it's Remembered in Christian tradition um but it's only because there are these like rival Apostles in galatia maybe ones that are even authorized by James um and that they're talking to the Galatians that Paul is forced to kind of tell this story and kind of lay out this disagreement and his difference of interpretation um and so anyway um because of Paul's account I think we can be pretty confident that three of the direct Disciples of Jesus were actively leading that movement in the 40s of the Common Era from Jerusalem so ident Paul identifies one of these three pillars as Jesus's brother and so as a result of um you know kind of this testimony this eyewitness testimony we're actually within two degrees and frankly just a handful of years from the historical Jesus so um I'm talk a little bit about how we also can have confirmation of a historic James so multiple attestation is one of the ways we establish historicity um and so beyond that direct experience that Paul has uh with Jesus brother James again an experience that is um is kind of of rivalry not one that um that Paul is like wanting to make up in order to uh if he makes it up you would think he would be very positive like I say the character figures also in multiple other Christian sources everything from the letters of James and Jude to Mark acts and many other uh non-conical texts of the um you know Christian texts that didn't make it into the Bible um but James is also mentioned U by the Jewish historian Josephus and when I say James here this is really confusing to anybody who's not an English speaker because um uh the Bible the New Testament uh is translated from Greek uh into English during initially during the time of King James um because the King James Bible um to um flatter the king everywhere where the the um the the name yakob or Jacob in the New Testament appears um it gets translated as James into English and so we could also be calling these guys Jacob or yakob or something like that and that's kind of what we mean by the by the name but anyway I'll keep saying James because that's how we say it in in English but anyway it's not it's a far far translation differ into English from the original name so okay who's Josephus so Josephus um lived in the later part of the first century of the Common Era he's a Jewish Noble um who defected to the Romans uh during the first Roman Jewish War so he defected in the year 67 of the Common Era so he's actually may not being a contemporary of Jesus but he is a contemporary for sure of the emerging early Christian Movement so he becomes a client of the Roman Emperor theasian and uh in who had been a general in fighting that war and then later as able to um uh seiz the throne and become the the emperor of Rome so uh under under uh uh the spaan patronage Josephus writes a number of histories of he wrotes a history of the war he also writes histories of the Jewish people and autobiography so it's a very PR prolific writer um and because of all of that text um Josephus really gives us the most detailed accounts of Jewish history that we have for the first century of the Common Era and the also has more writings about um Jewish history before that than anything outside of the Bible um and so he's very important uh source for both Jewish and um Christian history um Josephus Works provide non-Christian accounts of figures that include people like Pontius Pilate King Herod the Great John the Baptist Jesus brother James and possibly Jesus himself although um unfortunately the his component of the where he describes Jesus um that text for sure has been vandalized by a Christian scribe um and it may just he may not have ever talked about that about Jesus in that that passage itself might have just be a Christian um addition so so in order to survive the text texts have been copied uh in a manuscript tradition by Christian monks and so on and some of the monks um were not uh they weren't able to stop themselves from wanting to fix it so that Jesus is in there or that or that what Joseph has said about Jesus um is more in keeping with what Christians understand so a lot of Scholars think that the part about Jesus is actually there was an actual mention of Jesus that has been um has been vandalized by a Christian interp interpolation but even so that that aside that do that as it may we don't even have to get into that one um there are other passages about John the Baptist and about James the brother of Jesus that almost Scholars kind of universally um agree are actually uh non vandalized and are the way they existed in je josephus's original so I want to read the passage here that Josephus has about James the brother of Jesus so Josephus writes um this younger ananus as we have told you already took the high priesthood so he's becoming High priest this is talking about again the history of the Jews so this is the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem so ananus become took the high priesthood he's a bold man in his temper and very insolent according to Josephus he was also of the sect of the Sadducees so these are the Nobles who are the traditional priests who consider themselves to be descendants of zadok the cons descendants of Aaron so this um Priestly Elite in Jerusalem and the Sadducees um Josephus says are very rigid in judging offenders above all the rest of the Jews as we've already observed so he's talked about the different sects within Judaism before when therefore ananus was of this disposition he thought he now had an opportunity so fesus who had been the Roman procurator of Judea was now dead and albinus the future one that's being appointed was but on the road so Judea here is under Roman rule there have been uh Roman procurators who are in charge of the um of the province as it's part of a Roman Empire but they have also been allowing regular Jewish worship to continue and they they've been appointing um uh different local Jewish Nobles Sadducees to the high priesthood and so now that there is no civil Administration for a little bit of a moment that that local religious Administration you know saying well this is our time that we can um get rid of our enemies according to Josephus so ananus the high priest assembles the Sanhedrin of Judges the local uh Jewish Council and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ whose name was James and some others and when he had formed an accusation against them as Breakers of the law he delivered them to be stoned but as for those who seemed the most Equitable of citizens uh such as they were uh most uneasy at the breach of the laws they disliked what what was done they also sent to the king Desiring him to send to ananus that he should act so no more for what they had already done was not justified so so Josephus is just talking about this as getting rid of some people when they have an opportunity thecal high priest decides okay this is an enemy that's been hanging around here in Jerusalem now that there's no Romans watching us we can we can Stone them for that but that the a lot of the people in the city didn't think that this is a Justified act me just take a while over here for a second okay so James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ is essentially an un important example in this story Josephus is actually talking about Jewish politics during a change of Roman administrations so Scholars accept this as original to the text because uh a Christian wouldn't write you know uh Jesus who is called Christ the Christians would just more or less say Jesus who is Christ you know and so in other words Josephus you know knows that James and his followers call Jesus the Christ the Messiah but um but Josephus doesn't agree with the title so he's saying Jesus who Jesus who is called Christ and nor as we see is the story Christian focused it's Jewish focused or told from a Jewish Christian Perspective and so on so in other words it's very seems very authentic to um the rest of josephus's text and all it is doing is giving us a detail that um that there's a a group or here the whose leader here is James who is the brother of Jesus called who is called Christ uh who's executed then by Jewish officials um at this time period so there's another passage too that is also generally accepted or universally accepted I think by Scholars on John the Baptist and so this is comes earlier in the story um now some of the Jews Josephus rights thought that the destruction of herod's Army and this a lot of the people in Herod the Great's Dynasty all of his descendants also have the name Herod so what we mean here is Herod antus who is the son of Herod the Great so a lot of the Jews or some of the Jews thought the destruction of this herod's Army came from God and that very justly as a punishment for what he did against John that was called the Baptist for Herod Antipas slew John who was a good man Herod uh who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and incl ination to raise a rebellion accordingly he uh John the Baptist was sent as a prisoner out of Herod suspicious temper to macus the castle I before mentioned and there was put to death so we can see here anyway there's a historical figure John the Baptist who has a lot of influence over the people according to Josephus and Josephus thinks that that's why uh Herod had him put to death for political reasons to prevent there from being any kind of a uh a religious movement that might lead to Rebellion against Herod Antipas rule so like the James passage um Scholars conclude that this is authentic because it's conf it's actually confirming actually also that new testament accounts that John was a religious leader that was executed by Herod Antipas so for example in the account in Mark um Herod Antipas keeps John in prison and he ultimately beheads him at the behest of uh of his wife slash niece herodias so this is another descendant of Herod the Great a herodian princess who um was married then to her half Uncle uh and demands John the Baptist head according to the text all right in his description of John the Baptist Josephus does not even mention Jesus so in his view um je John is an important leader in his own right um and this actually is a um another kind of interesting and and and characteristic of the um in favor of talking about a historical Jesus uh even though Jesus isn't mentioned in it and that's because um it starts to bring a Criterion what we kind of call the Criterion of embarrassment um and it fits with the embarrassment that the gospel writers approach John the Baptist so John is very clearly an important leader and John baptizes Jesus and so the the role and the symbolism in The Story really makes it seem like Jesus is subordinate to John and maybe you know the actual underlying history is that and Jesus began his career as a disciple of John the Baptist and it is only after John the Baptist's execution that Jesus emerges as one of the main leaders or the main leader of that movement uh in his own right so I want to read how the gospel writers deal with John the Baptist and how they uh make sure that nobody has that interpretation that I just gave you know that perhaps Jesus had been John's disciple so in Mark which is the earliest of the four gospels we read John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the Forgiveness of sins and people from from the whole Judean Countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him in the River Jordan confessing their sins now John was clothed with camel's hair and a leather belt around his weight waist and he ate Locust and wild honey so in other words he's a athetic again just like we kind of even have seen with what the Buddha is doing and so forth he proclaims though and this is what he says right away the one who is more powerful than I is coming after me I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals I have baptized you with water but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit in those days he goes right after he says that the text says in those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and he was baptized by John in the Jordan so um anyway right from the start in Mark's narrative um uh into John's mouth we have uh a a statement a testimony that he's not going to be the leader that actually the person who's coming next is the leader um this is built upon in the in the in the gospels of Matthew and Luke both of whom use Mark as a source and so include most of Mark's narrative and then they had this so Matthew writes Jesus came from the Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him John would have prevented him saying I need to be baptized by you and do you come to me but Jesus answered him let it be so now for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness then he John consented and when Jesus had been baptized so it even puts it into the passive tense there instead of saying John baptized Jesus it now says when Jesus had been baptized you know it doesn't say by who or anything like that so in other words that's even softened there too from Mark's account um and then also Luke's account same thing so um when Herod the ruler Herod entered anus who had been rebuked by John because of herodias his brother's wife and because of all the evil things that Herod had done added uh to them by shutting up John in prison now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying and Heavens opened up so um Luke actually the author of Luke here actually includes um this detail of John being imprisoned by um Herod Antipas before mentioning that Jesus you know was baptized kind of again passively past tense it doesn't say that John baptized Jesus um but in fact actually because John gets imprisoned in this Luke's narrative or at least is mentioned about that the confusion that maybe the author is trying to have here is not that well maybe John didn't baptize him at all we're not even seeing that you know this subordination of Jesus in Luke's account and finally the um Gospel of John so this is different John than John the Baptist it's not um this is uh attributed to John the Beloved but anyway the fourth gospel um has the last and um and and least um role for for John the Baptist in this whole baptism scene so um in this account we read this took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing the next day he John saw Jesus coming toward him and declared here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world this is he of whom I said after me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me I myself do not know him but I came baptizing with water for this reason that he might be revealed to Israel and John and then John testified I saw a spirit descending from heaven like a dove and it remained on him and I myself have seen and testified that this is the Son of God so this Vision that exists in Mark of the of the spirit descending on Jesus like a dove during the baptism scene of Jesus that's in Mark that's in Matthew that's in Luke here in John this happens without anybody having mentioned that Jesus is getting baptized so in other words they preserved the um the spirit descending from heaven without explicitly mentioning that uh Jesus is baptized at all so already as we saw in Mark the Evangelist puts into John's mouth I'm not worthy in comparison to Jesus in Matthew John the Baptist initially refuses to baptize Jesus he what would it do he should be baptized by Jesus not the other way around and in Luke as I showed John is already kind of put into prison and so um again both of these the John Jesus's baptism is kind of put in passive tents it's not John baptizes him but Jesus is baptized and then finally in the gospel of uh John the Fourth gospel El the baptism isn't even mentioned explicitly anymore and so um these are increasingly kind of like strident I think apologetics as Christians are at pains to kind of explain away um this story this idea that maybe um Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist all right so talk that about a scholarly consensus about the historical Jesus so given that Jesus deciples Peter and then John the Beloved are you know and just be the Beloved part may not have been his real title but anyway there's the John that that that Paul says he met right so he says he met sephus and and John not John the Baptist are authentic historical figures and given that James is a known historical figure and um you know and he's also Jesus's brother and then given that um Jesus is B baptizer or maybe Mentor maybe previous leader who knows is a known figure and also then given the real proximity of our sources to the historical Jesus there is a scholarly consensus that Jesus existed in history so John the Baptist Jesus James the just Peter John the Beloved these are all historical figures alongside Paul all right so despite um that scholarly consensus we are in an age of dis disinformation and there are many conspiracy theories that appeal to readers um who really aren't haven't aren't aware of the sources maybe and they probably aren't trained in historical methodology um we just did a u we just aired last week a you know debunking of The Da Vinci Code some people in the comments were asking well why do you need to debunk The Da Vinci Code it's just Fiction it's not meant to be real but the problem with it is is that some of the ideas that have been um popularized in that the idea that Jesus is is married to Mary Magdalene that is absolutely baseless we can say no way that's not not the case you know there's no there's no basis for that uh nevertheless people think oh yeah Jesus must have been married to Mary Magdalene because they've read um like you what people said is a work of fiction that I shouldn't need to debunk but ended up doing so anyway this one is is presented as if this conspiracy theory is presented as if it's actual history um Joseph Atwell theorizes that Jesus is simply a propaganda idea that's invented by the Roman emperors that same Titus and Vespasian Dynasty um who are you know who are employing Josephus in order to control Judaism in the aftermath of that first Roman Jewish War so um Atwell imagines that Josephus in his own Works occasionally is inserting weird and cryptic references to the fictional Jesus um and then he is helping the Empire concoct the Christian texts to promote the idea that it's Titus the spaan son and his later emperor in 79 to 81 is actually the coming son of man that Jesus is always talking about in the text and so on um so in order to you know believe this conspiracy theory it really you have to ignore all of the texts in what they actually all say including all of Josephus um their history and then also really have to be kind of amazed at how unsuccessful Christianity was among the Jews of the first century given the fact that it has this Imperial backing I mean the amount of patronage that um that the the emperor actually did have that allowed Josephus to write all these massive texts that he wrote and in comparison the you know the really actually pity of uh of texts that are actually in the first century Christan Christian Corpus um it's it's anyway it's a Preposterous flop um uh it also doesn't create a um Christian it doesn't create make Jewish Judaism um more controllable you know by Christianity or appealing or make um a kind of Judaism that is um more consonant with the Roman Empire yet because in fact actually um what Paul and the other uh early Christians find is that actually Christianity has a lot more success among non-jews and so even though it starts as a Jewish religion actually what it does is it converts a lots of um you know Pagan Romans uh and and they continue to be you know all sorts of uh anyway Jewish Jewish people who mostly you know be become absolutely reject Christianity and ultimately organize second temple i s reic Judaism so anyway would be a phop it doesn't have any I'll have to do I guess maybe a whole real debunking of it but we can just say that there's nothing to this um there are a couple of uh of people who are not just conspiracy theorists but who um are holding to the idea that Jesus is entirely a mythical creation and that retains some Pro proponents um I think the most popular person on the internet is Richard carrier um um his work one of this he's written several books one of them is called proving history um it provides I think scientific seeming results and so one of the things that he does is he takes a theorem to make kind of an equation um that generates like odds that he's like trying to calculate and it's one of them he calculates that it's as little little as one in 12,000 odds that Jesus is his historical figure um but this methodology as all historians have kind of who commented on it and written on it is is entirely faulty there he created an equation history isn't isn't a math problem um the reason why you get numerical results out of this equation is that Richard carrier has to assign um arbitrary numerical values on the in input then you run it through the equation and you get the answer and the output and so essentially garbage in garbage out the results um are meaningless the chances that um carriers methodology has any value at 0% so I mean there's a there's a statistic anyway it's it's that doesn't mean that um there's nothing to it there's another prominent mythicist Richard I'm sorry Robert Price who's much more meth methodologically sound which means generally speaking that he kind of has to retreat to skepticism obviously the skepti skeptic Des uh defense is um is always the most defensible so when you don't make any assertions and you just say well we're skeptical that anything happened you know when he's agnostic on the historical Jesus um you know that's the most defensible position although we have to be then amazing amazingly suscep skeptical of the mythis position which is um you know comparatively just just immensely less likely so this is the reason why there's a historical consensus so for the nons scholars however um these ideas are very popular because I think separating the historical Jesus from the story book Jesus maybe the Jesus that you have heard about in Sunday schools um you know the existence of a historical Jesus does not mean those stories it does not mean the gospel accounts or history texts so just because there was historical Jesus that doesn't mean that somebody was walking on water and we have witnesses of that or any such thing not at all um the establishing a historical figure just means a very minimum of details there was a guy named Jesus of Nazareth uh you know and he was born in the you know lived in the early first century he was executed by the Romans and so forth he he uh was baptized by John the Baptist may have been a disciple of John the Baptist he um gathered Disciples of his own and so on those limited details are there that doesn't mean all the rest of this doesn't mean um that follows um so as we've shown in many past lectures actually there is good reason to believe that um much or most of The Narrative of Jesus's life in the gospels are actually typologically constructed from Old Testament antitypes and so uh the gospel writers as we say they're Anonymous they are writing in a different language they are not eyewitnesses uh they believe very strongly they're already Christians and they believe very strongly that Jesus's life uh was a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy and so when they don't know details of Jesus's life uh they feel very um able at to to write out details based on what they read that Jesus should have been doing according to old Old Testament prophecy and so we talk about this a lot in some of our previous lectures and i' point you to the lecture we did is Easter historical recent one last month prophecies and The Christmas Stories also had one on lost christianities so um if we if the only positive images or the only detailed images that we really have though are from the gospel portraits how can we construct the historical Jesus so we do have tools the tools of literary criticism um which involve then Source criticism looking at those gospel sources and so one of the things that we do as we read each individual part you know are they consonant with the rest of the historical archaeological record so um we look for multiple attestation from independent sources like we did with finding figures like John the Baptist being a religious leader before beforehand uh and and James the brother of Jesus being a religious leader after we look at the things like um where the accounts are dissimilar from early Christianity so if we know how Christianity develops if some of our early texts describe something very different from what Christians later believe well that's that dissonance is um maybe preserving something uh that goes back to the historical Jesus likewise the Criterion of embarrassment like we said um when something happens that early Christian writers you know are embarrassed about and are trying to say no no no well he wasn't John the Baptist was very clear um that uh that Jesus is greater than him and so forth um that maybe also points us to an actual historical detail and obviously historical plausability is also you know part of the way we uh historians the toolkit for historians so you know there's all kinds of things that we can list that have multiple attestation so one of the most ubiquity is Jesus association with the Galilean Village of Nazareth and that's attested throughout the sources so Jesus is often just called of Nazareth that's how he's identified he's also sometimes called the Nazarene they're used as if they're like serd names although obviously they're not it's not a family name it's where he's from um and so as we talked about last month in the um in the Christmas story lecture only the infancy gospels associate Jesus with Bethlehem because of uh Old Testament prophecy whereas Nazareth had no other important historical associations and so uh what almost all I think all Scholars um most all scholar I think all Scholars maybe um agree that Jesus was born in Nazareth and not not in Bethlehem um that criteria of dissimilarity from early Christianity so Christian writers would like to tell Jesus story in keeping with their own practices so uh U by contrast though the gospel is record that Jesus followers did not fast so fasting became an important part of uh early Christian tradition they're P fasting in Paul's time and so on but in the uh Gospel of Matthew we read John the Baptist disciples came and asked Jesus how is it that we the Disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees one of the sects of Judaism fast often but your disciples do not fast and so um there's an apologetic that Matthew inserts Jesus said John came John the Baptist came neither drinking eating nor drinking and they say he has a demon the son of man Jesus came eating and drinking and they say look a glutton and a drunkard a friend of tax collectors and sinners uh yet wisdom has Vindicated her Deeds so this is a passage in Matthew that's actually taken from the saying's gospel q and so one of the earliest kind of sayings then is attributed to Jesus so it's not Matthew's apologetic but he pulls it from there to this and so that what kind of seems like is being saying here is that although early Christians valued asceticism and fasting so in other words um not you know maybe refraining from drinking alcohol and and not overeating and so on um critics according to Q here and as as repeated in Matthew called Jesus a glutton and a drunker and so in this sense um that may be a um something that goes back to the historical Jesus in other words that he he didn't practice you know we talked about that middle path of aestheticism that uh that the Buddha practiced so maybe Jesus's practice did not involve uh fasting so also the Criterion of embarrassment we talked about the the embarrassment of maybe Jesus being a disciple of of John another John the Baptist another is Jesus's execution in Jerusalem by crucifixion by Pontius Pilate and when that happened he was abandoned by all of his disciples that certainly isn't what was expected in second temple Judaism by almost anybody for the Messiah and so that also um is very consonant with the Contemporary record what uh Romans putting to death uh you know revolutionary troublemakers and so on uh and it also is embarrassing it also has multiple attestations so that's one of the things we can probably say about the historical Jesus uh that he was crucified so from that bear of Bones though it is very very possible to um to create competing and plausible and even academically defensible portraits and I'm just going to mention you know just a four of these very briefly but you we'd have to go into each one of these as their own um lecture to go through them all um one of them here is from John Meyer who is essentially pport um painting a portrait of a historical Jesus that is as close to the Jesus as described in the um canonized New Testament as a scholar can conceivably make it uh and so he tries to do that in a very in very elaborate study um Resa Asen in a kind of a um very popular recent book has pres presented Jesus as a zealot which is to say a political revolutionary um uh Bart man talks about uh the historical Jesus as a failed apocalyptic prophet and people like Burton Mack talk about the historical Jesus as a teacher and by analogy he talks about uh the kind of revolutionary teacher like the cynic philosophers um that are contemporary in the uh Greco Roman world so as I mentioned John Meyer's book is multivolume study he looks for the historical Jesus and he seems to find one that's close to the canonized accounts and he even holds out the possibility that reports of the supernatural go back to the historical Jesus um and so if you um I mean if you would like to preserve as much of the of the uh the gospel accounts' history as you possibly can um I think that this is a great study for you um the problem with this is even though John Meyer just goes into incredible detail about all of the methodology so he teaches us a lot about the study of the historical Jesus um he doesn't seem to apply that very consistently and so he in my opinion he doesn't just apply the methodology consistently and instead um the goal almost seems to be to get to like I say preserve as much of the canonical Jesus as possible academically um and so that he doesn't persuade me there but one of the things that does happen is every single time that he admits well there's just no way we can figure out to make this have actually happened like The Christmas Stories uh when when John Meyer admits that that's not history you can kind of say well it's hard for anybody to make the case um like I say asan um uh he has Jesus as a political revolutionary he puts a lot onto a um saying from Jesus in Matthew do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth I did not come to I did not come to bring peace but a sword um uh there's a bunch of different problems I think with this kind of focus uh res Asin is not a um doesn't have a lot of background in in uh the the long standing anyway study of the historical Jesus on the one hand um this particular uh saying doesn't have the multiple attestation and so forth and in any event the imagery of coming to bring a sword and so forth throughout the Christian New Testament the sword is always the word the sword is an analogy for the gospel so and also the zalot movement is um and it's peaked before Jesus's time so anyway it's a different or after Jesus's time so anyway so it's a different um I uh I would have to go through anyway look at that all that background but there's some problems with this book um B man has probably the most uh popular take among Scholars uh that Jesus is best fit within the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel um and specifically what had happened in the end of the second temple period the kind of prophetic um prophets that are apocalyptic prophets in other words people who are um predicting an imminent end of the world and so Bart Erman notes that John the Baptist uh in our sources seems to be an apocalyptic prophet and that many of Jesus's followers like the author of Mark and also Paul are apocalyptic uh in nature they believe in a literal apocalypse Mark believes it's happening right when he's writing his book uh during the second uh I'm sorry during the first Roman Jewish War Paul believes it's going to happen in his lifetime uh and because of that um that prism um and Bart irman says well then Jesus is also an apocalyptic prophet in between there you know because you know from the follower to the I mean sorry to the previous leader um I'm not sure I agree because the uh all of our ear some our sources are seen through the lenses of those guys the author of Mark and also through Paul uh and so they may well be imposing their kind of literal apocalypticism on the historical Jesus side by side with that literal apocalyptic tradition in first century Christianity is an idea of a of a symbolic or realized Millennium in other words the second coming of Jesus has already even happened which can be found even in the in the Gospel of John and so forth um finally among these portraits Burton Mack um talks about a cynic like historical Jesus in other words a a kind of a revolutionary uh philosopher sort of like the Buddha as well um uh U person who fits this role of a Wandering Sage as opposed to a prophet or a zealot um and so uh he doesn't necessarily argue that Jesus is influenced by the Greek cynics directly but simply that he's doing the same kinds of things um and there's some compelling things about that too but anyway that's um only that's let's say a minority of Scholars who are also following that um when we look at Jesus as a sage as opposed to a prophet um in a lot of our sayings that we have from him Jesus doesn't speak with a traditional prophetic Voice by saying things like thus saith the Lord or like an apocalyptic Prophet who talks about a vision where an angel comes to him and talks to him shows him the visions of the heavens and so forth rather Jesus tends to attempt to persuade um and so he'll start things off like what person among you would not or consider consider the LI considered that so in that sense there's a possibility that Jesus uses the tools of a sage um such as teaching in things like Parables and so on as opposed to uh um being a prophet on the other hand there also um components that are in Mark and everything else where there are apocalyptic uh prophecies and so again which of those go back to the historical Jesus it's your depends on your reading of the sources this is why there are multiple defensible academic positions and portraits that could be painted okay um the teachings of the historical Jesus because Jesus seems to have taught Parables and maxims that are relatively short in easy to transmit orally we actually may have better ability to reconstruct these than most of his life events so we may have more of the historical Jesus preserved in the teachings than in the details of his life and we've talked about that in previous lectures and I'm just going to point you to the Lost gospel Q lecture and the Gospel of Thomas lecture that we've already had and so then to conclude I just want to ask us kind of well where does this leave Christians so um and in some ways it may have been if you're watching this and and it depends on your background in Christianity or maybe your background as an ex-christian or post-christian or in a post-christian world and so on you may actually um you may think it s looks pretty bleak on the other hand I'm going to suggest actually that Christians effectively created the academic discipline of literary criticism in order to study the Bible and so this is something that they have been doing for two centuries or so um and so a lot of this has been known for a whole bunch of time so contradictions in the New Testament texts the fact that some of the texts are pseudepigraphic the fact that the texts are not eyewitness accounts that's all very familiar to Christian Scholars and ministers anybody who's attended um a an academically uh minded Seminary for over a century and in almost all of this that I've talked about has been very very well known and well studied uh in the past 50 years so this is not um certainly by any means something that is um I broken the bank or anything like that for um Christian Scholars and leaders if you are from a literalist tradition and you have always viewed the New Testament texts as actual history that happened exactly as written the problem for you is yes literary criticism has disproved this View and so for people who want to maintain that um the really the only recourse has been to Simply reject you know like the rational tools of tools of Truth and to Simply kind of just Embrace um magical thinking that doesn't have a um academic or U let's say logical basis and that for it it's just you believe the things you want to believe that's also a thing that people have done um that kind of fundamentalism though is a break from historic Christianity which actually was always aligned with academic thought all the way up to the enlightenment when there started to be um some breakoff and and reactions to um the main line of of thought um but there's a reason why uh uh this scientific language and the language of the church in the west are both Latin uh there's the reason why um when you go to universities um and you graduate from high school and University univ and things like that you dress up in medieval clerical robes it's because U universities are Christian foundations and grew out of the Christian uh Cathedral system and so throughout um you know again Antiquity in the Middle Ages it's Christian monks and so on that are actually preserving all of the texts and are the scientists and are the thinkers and all that kind of thing so it wasn't that they were believing stuff that was opposed to everything that was known or the the extent of knowledge of the time it was actually everything they believe was entirely consonant with that and it is only uh in modern times where there has been this kind of Divergence especially in the emergence of a fundamentalist Christianity that um there's become this disconnect for Progressive Christians though the gospels are not histories but rather they're stories that are lived in the living life of the church and they shape the church's identity in practice so the Jesus of scripture not of his history informs them that lived experience um which happens in in the present of the church and then I would also say that because the gospels are written to include symbolic meaning that's what makes them meaningful um they're not simply writing something that simply happened to happen they're actually U an intentional uh an intention an intent by the evangelists and apostles and other writers to um convey meaning uh about how to live life meaningfully and also about our relationship to the Divine to the one to the source and so forth so as we're now wrapping up um I have a couple questions for discussions but I want you to please ask your own questions um and I'm going to take a as you're thinking of your question I'm going to take a glass of water and I'm going to get my phone so I can see your questions right okay and so I'll just put this one into your heads um before while you're thinking about this well I'm going to think about your questions so even if history could prove that the historical Jesus performed some Supernatural physical Miracle like he was able to walk on water or something like that so what would that actually prove in a cosmic sense so um history can't prove that kind of thing and even if we had an eyewitness account which we do not um that wouldn't prove anything but anyway even if it was proved though that there was a supernatural physical miracle that actually happened so what would that prove okay we'll just think about that and we'll come back to it I want to hear the questions you're asking so so Wanda Mercer wres what do the experts use to determine what are the real words of Jesus and so um so you have to use those kinds of criteria that I talked about and um and a couple of them are going to lead you in different directions so um first in the methodology though is multiple attestation from distinct sources so when I say a multiple attestation that means do we have that saying of Jesus in multiple texts but they also have to come from distinct sources that are not the same source so when we see that um the same saying of Jesus is contained in both the gospel of Mark and the gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke that isn't necessarily a multiple attestation because we know that the authors of Luke and Matthew had Mark to look at and they might just be copying directly out of Mark they often are however they also they also have access to another uh lost Source q and so sometimes there is a multiple attestation of a saying so Matthew will have it like twice in the Matthew's gospel uh and once is coming from Mark and once is coming from this unknown source which callers call Q and so that's a second attestation of the same Source even though it's a doublet in Matthew so it's repeated in Matthew um and then it could be that's also in the Epistle of James and it could be that that's also um in some their source so so that's certainly like one of the one of the leading um Criterion that everybody agrees on uh and then and then after that there's a couple things that have to sort of start to happen so you so essentially um um when you're trying to fit it in with the rest of the historical record um you privilege certain things depending on your vision of how Jesus is so the more you think like Bart Man does that it's he's an apocalyptic Prophet pretty much all the things that the sayings that are kind of in that camp um have a little bit more privilege to them whereas if you piece together the other ones that are kind of implying um that Jesus is a is a sage that is um is is espousing essentially kind of a a mendicant uh you know uh Community where PE where the poor are privileged in what he's calling a kingdom or something like that um then then all of those are the more important sayings you know and so those kind of get privileged um so th that's part of it but and another one of the tools as PE as Scholars are saying well which ones are more authentic are going to be things like um again that Criterion of embarrassment so would a person not want to admit that why would you write that if that wasn't you know wasn't the original one um the more difficult reading so a lot of times it's an uncomfortable reading and we're so like you know if you're saying um it's it's more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven or something like that that's a difficult teaching you know and so and uh and it's one that there's a quick apologetics of where people immediately try to say well no there was a gate in Jerusalem that was called the eye of the needle and the camels uh could hardly get through that's not true that's a that's an apologetic that people have to soften a tough teaching um you know that same teaching blessed of the poor that's in uh uh it's changed in Matthew to blessed of the poor in spirit because in other words it's a tough teaching to say the poor are blessed so that that Criterion that's a difficult reading that makes it more likely because why would you know because it people would prefer an easier reading usually and so on so those are some of the ways that Scholars get at it so all we can say though is for the historical Jesus we can only ever report approach the historical Jesus dimly and say this one this one is most likely based on those criteria this is very unlikely to have been said by Jesus and is most likely the invention of the uh Anonymous gospel writer who is just trying to move the story along here Jesus probably didn't say that and that couldn't probably be transmitted orally um does the saying is the saying able to be transmitted orally and so forth those are some of the ways that historians use to access what we might say or like you say the real words of Jesus as you say Okay Ron Wagner asks could it be that no earlier writings of the Torah survived earlier than the first known writings um and so so you mean to say that um the manuscripts and so uh um so I I showed on those timelines often um how far we have to maybe when let's say the the first texts or teachings of Buddhism how many centuries those are and before we actually have the first manuscript to survive so the reason why um the reason why man so manuscripts we often don't have the earliest manuscripts so in a manuscript Trad tradition um uh you have to copy and copy and copy and so and so it isn't necessarily a big deal um that we don't have um so we have a big gap in a manuscript tradition the Dead Sea Scrolls did a very good job of proving proving how good text transmission actually is so before the Dead Sea Scrolls we didn't have a very good um I think very early manuscripts of the actual Hebrew uh and uh we had a lot of early manuscripts in Greek because Christians were copying it more and had more had newer ones and so on uh but the Dead Sea Scrolls when they're found um not only they jumped us centuries earlier into the Bible and it turns out that the um the scribes are doing a very good job of of not introducing errors you know and so those bring us there um the way that we know that the way that Scholars can kind of tell that um that the texts are older than our manuscripts are if they um reflect a time and place in history that is earlier than when the manuscript is and so for example in those Buddhist texts they're using an earlier form of the language that they're written in um and they're describing like an earlier kind of historical context and so the same thing we could say for uh the Torah so those Dead Sea scroll fragments and things like that are not when it's written they're at least around probably in other words they're at least a few centuries early at the um at the latest around let's say the time of the Exile community that maybe some of those are actually just being written then um and the way you can kind of tell that is that they are um again having a more archaic form of the language they're describing a form of the religion that is different from the Contemporary texts that are being written the Contemporary texts that are being written are these um more apocalyptic uh uh prophecies and so on and these are representing kind of an earlier uh form of second temple Judaism and there's a bunch of um we've done a a documentary hypothesis lecture so I'd send people to look at that um there is a bunch of weird archaic stuff in the Torah that um that makes it look like there's uh it has been combined from a bunch of different sources um some of which may be earlier than the Exile um uh and so that's and because again it's it's describing a a form of the religion and ideas and context and things like that uh written from that perspective that is let's say um from the time period of the reign of Hezekiah and Josiah and so forth the very end of the first temple period so um that's why we maybe think that um that again the manuscript isn't isn't what it is um so uh uh Michelangelo Sanchez writes how did Paul's historical uh letters worked or were they literally sent by some sort of mail um were they sent to a particular person or were they more like open letters so um so so the way it works is um Paul does seem to have um have had kind of like a program and maybe even a um there might have even been kind of even a bit bit of a writing school as he is um making these to be read generally not just as a private correspondence so at the very minimum um um it's being read or it's meant to be read by the entire uh Christian Community of the church that he is specifically addressing and in some cases um we can tell he's kind of addressing that church Community because he's talking about talking to individual leaders and members often women leaders who are kind of patrons of these communities um and he's and he's saying hi to them individually and talking about uh how they're doing and so forth um and so in those cases it's probably to that that Community specifically and he's often addressing their very specific issues this one in Galatians he's talking to multiple churches in the galatian area so um so it's not just for one but it's kind of meant to be read by everybody that's in that area in some of the cases though it is like you say an open letter and so um I'm I'm trying to think of which one it is but anyway at least one of them um I don't want to name one of the names without I'm because I'm not not coming to me right now but any at least one of them is was originally thought to be like Paul's to Paul's letter to the so and so and and then they he just leave in the blank and then people fill in whatever whatever uh name their own name you know of their town you know in order to have it be to them because we actually have manuscripts that have the same letter to different um to different towns and those letters don't carry any of those kind of personal things where he's talking about anything specific it's more like a general a general letter so that would be more like an open letter that's meant to to be read um how were they preserved uh why do only his letters survive so um so it does seem like um uh very early on uh Paul was you know viewed Paul was the founder of a lot of these communities and so it does seem like these were important instructions that people uh in those churches went back to in order to answer some of these questions and other things um so the way that the way these letters are read oh I didn't say how they were sent so a lot of cases Paul says I'm sending my you know my companion to you he's going to deliver it to you um so reading at the time um at the time of Paul's they really hadn't invented silent reading nobody would go into their own room and just read you know without talking out loud uh in Paul's day what would happen is that very few people even in the church would could read some of them could read and so what they would do is part of their part of their Gathering or worship service they would read scripture together where to say someone would be reading and then at some point or other they also would have started reading um Paul's letter together and so when the letter came the first time they would have the person we know one person would have read it and everybody would have assembled to hear uh and so it's a public thing reading is a public thing and so it would have been part of that uh and so why is it preserved in some cases those were viewed valuable um Paul is started to be viewed as authoritative and so um so when the first kind of um so Christians don't have a new testament they're not trying to make a new Bible or things like that at first but then in the second century and so on people start collecting um these early authoritative texts uh and and they start to kind of create their own kind of Christian Canon what becomes the emerging New Testament and so these are just some of the early letters are important and say why did why only his survive did not only his that survive we do have lots of other letters a lot of them made it into the New Testament um and there's a bunch of other early important letters uh polycarp and so on other early leaders who whose letters survived but who didn't make it into the New Testament but Paul's just the earliest who survived um Germaine Jenkins why does Paul pretend to have more Authority than everyone else well I Paul uh Paul um was had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder I think he did um he was concerned in some cases that uh people didn't recognize that he had his authority he he felt that he um he very fervently believed that he had a um had a vision of the Risen Christ and that that uh gave him a very special sense of calling and specifically his calling was to um to go to non-jewish people and share the good news Christianity is a universal religion this is not just for uh the Jews here you can all be part of this and in Paul's understanding you don't have to obey all these Jewish laws because uh Jesus uh fulfills the laws and so it's a new kind of take on it and so um he feels very very very strongly about it and so um I don't know if he thinks he has more Authority than anybody else he calls himself a servant and he's the least and so on but he has to kind of um he feels the need to um to give his bonafides when people who have authority from maybe from the church in Jerusalem when people have letters that say you know from from Jesus's own brother that say this is this is one of my um disciples this is one of the people who an apostle sent from my side uh you know from you know alad you know if if other people have those kind of letters um Paul felt very much to he had to make the argument that doesn't matter that's just human stuff I'm talking about a direct connection with god um uh mly bun says is it fair to say that Paul's interpretation of Jesus teachings is more influenced by platonic ideals than the other Apostles if so are there specific ideas that we can identify um so it's it's hard to know what the other Apostles we don't have so we so so when we talk about Apostles um we have to understand that uh that we we make we often make a um confusion in Christianity between the 12 and apostles so a lot of times we just call the 12 apostles actually Paul Paul was never one of the 12 he is not part of that group that's called the twel he does consider himself to be an apostle not everybody considers himself to be an apostle but the Apostle is a um is a is essentially an a uh a calling in the early Christian Movement um where people in twos um and and Paul says it's often um an apostle and his wife who is an apostle so it's often a male and a female Apostle in a normal circumstance but Paul doesn't have a wife he doesn't uh think people should get married he thinks people should be celibate and so he has male Apostles as opposed to Companions as opposed to what he says the other Apostles are probably doing um um and so and so this is way more than 12 these are the people who are missionaries who are going two by two all around uh uh and spreading the gospel they're planting churches and so on um people who are called to prophesy by the word who called to spread the good news and so forth um and they're also Al called not to stay in any one place too long because they're also supposed to be mendicants they're supposed to live uh without you know uh by not by not planning for tomorrow or taking scripp or purse and this kind of a thing and so it's actually a tough tough role to do because um you you require you have to do like like the same thing with the m Buddhist monks you have to beg for your your sustenance in order to um to do that um and so anyway so in terms of the so if you're meaning what are the other 12 are they are they influenced by platonism we don't really have any of the um um the firsthand thinking of any of the others other Apostles other than Paul because again we only have things that are written in their name later so um so James the brother of Jesus even though he's the leader of Jesus's group in Jerusalem after Jesus's death he's also not one of the 12 um but he is remembered anyway as James the which is to say James the rule follower and so he has a very different um view about the need to um maintain Jewish law than Paul has including among non-jewish Christians so they should also uh be practicing it they should also be um following law and so because he's um G James the just is a Galilean because you know uh he's from you know as a Jewish background he's probably not a wasn't a native Greek speaker and so on he's probably not like Paul educated in all of these Greek ideas Paul is probably yes much more exposed um just by the fact that he's he's eloquent in Greek he's trained in Greek rhetoric he uses um uh all kinds of U you know kind of this Greek rhetoric which is takes itself back to uh the sophists and and and Socrates and so on he makes use of that in his writings so he's educated and so he is probably more influenced by it um in terms of um in terms of overall the platonist ideas we're going to have a whole lecture on on on platonism and Christianity so so it's it's there um probably as early as all of this yes but there's also um a lot of platonist ideas that are in the Gospel of John for example um uh and and and then Christianity gets even more platonic uh By the time by the time we get to St Augustine for example okay user from Egypt how can we know that some of the accounts in the writings of Paul like his account with the other disciples are legitimate and not just Fabrications of the author well so the argument that I made is that Paul in talking about um meeting sephus and John and James is really talking about conflict with them and he's very and he rebukes them and he's uncomfortable with them they're arguing against his interpretation he's having a big fight with them um like I say if he was going to make that I that's that's the Criterion of embarrassment this is a uncomfortable thing to have had to admit um why would you say that you know in other words I if I'm going to make it up that um that these other if I'm just making up um either hisor James you know that Jesus had a brother why wouldn't I write U you or you know Peter doesn't exist exist and and I'm just going to be making them up why wouldn't I say well Peter um gave me the keys you know so he as long as he's a madeup character he Jesus gave him the keys to be in charge of everything and then Peter handed them to me or uh that James again like I say the brother of Jesus himself ordained me to be the Apostle uh to all the Gentiles um he doesn't say that and so that's why I say um um it's much more likely that we can believe him he's talking about these guys who he's acknowledging are the acknowledged pillars of the church who are against him and so and so it does seem like that that's a a strong argument to that they're not Fabrications um Joseph Scott is there any evidence that suggests Jesus was married at all not to Mary Magdalene but to any other woman and there's there's followup questions at the end there's followup questions to that about wants to know that okay and other people are asking that too is there any historical evidence that Jesus may have been married if if not can we speculate based on the cultural norms of the time and other people have asked wouldn't Jesus have to be married in order to be taken seriously as a rabbi so this is a very a very frequent apologetic um or hypothesis that is that has been um has been speculated about and so so so for example the same way that I talked about that that that um gate about the needle that the camel has to get through in Jerusalem or something like that for that saying people have been saying for over a century that um that according to rinic Judaism um a a person for Jesus to be a rabbi if Jesus was a rabbi and for Jesus to um uh for Jesus uh for Jesus as a just a man in his society would have to have been married by the age of 30 when he's running around um and so that has been like people have been asserted that that must be the cultural norm and so even though there is absolutely no no mention of Jesus having a wife anywhere in any of our uh canonical sources or any early source so that doesn't exist we have zero attestation for that um um and by the way Mark talks about Peter being married so it's not that there's any problem with um and Paul again is talking about how Peter and the others go around with the other Apostles go around with their wives and their as their custom or to do so it's not that um Apostles and and early leaders of this church Church can't have wives um they are mentioned and so on or that women aren't important in the in this movement but there is no association of Jesus with any wife in any any of the sources but people say well from this Norm though if he's a rabbi couldn't doesn't he have to have been married wouldn't that be necessary for any uh Jewish male in uh in his 30s and the answer to that though is that we actually don't um we don't know that that's the norm so yes in rinic Judaism as the rabbis eventually kind of um discerned what their interpretation of law is and what people had to do to be a rabbi and so on um that becomes a norm uh and that becomes a norm when rudic Judaism really gets going in the third and fourth centuries second third and fourth centuries and so on uh and and a lot of um the rabbis that are in um uh rinic texts are contemporaries of Jesus but but again for those the the rabbi texts are are only written centuries later so we don't have anything like um as close of sources uh about um what rabbis are doing and uh you know that are contemporary to the historic Jesus that are written in that tradition those are way removed and so asserting that um that those were the rules or the Norms the Norms were ad very clearly according to our texts that we have of early Christianity they were very much in flux Jesus is often arguing with with the scribes the Sadducees and the Pharisees who have different interpretations he he and his followers are busily um uh healing people or or or getting Grain on the Sabbath or things like that who are which are which are portrayed as being in contradiction to the understanding of Jewish law at the time we simply in the Galilee where Jesus is from which is a multiethnic kind of place where there's both Greek cities and um you know Canaanite syrial Phoenician kind of peoples and um uh uh and Jews uh we don't know what would have been normative for a regular Jewish guy in the Galilee in the 30s of the Common Era we don't even know that Jesus would have a beard that isn't necessarily that's not necessarily the case um uh it's becomes a norm later that becomes a part of the law that is compelling and that everyone has to has to do but we don't know that for sure so so so what I would say on that one though so so even if there was a Norm the total absence of of a wife in the sources for Jesus in my opinion the implication you the most you can maybe say is that he would be a widower because he'd had a young marriage and and the wife has been long gone or something like that but that's not that's that's only to try to explain a norm that doesn't necessarily need explanation because we don't know that it existed um it could just be that he's a guy who never married it's certainly not anyway it's certainly not in the text and so there's no reason to specifically like I said before there's no reason to imagine that um just because a character like Mary Magdalene uh uh would have been his wife because she's most likely she herself is a widow an older an older Widow who is a one of the let's say people of property who is maybe supporting um uh the Jesus movement and so forth okay um there's several of those people are very interested in that question okay so next that's my opinion anyway about uh Jesus and being married there's nothing we don't have any sources for that and we don't need to imply that they we don't need to infer that that must have happened so darl Scott what parts of Christianity uh do you think actually originate from Jesus teachings um so that's very interesting yeah so um so for me um um I think that um that Jesus is very much trying to uh break with uh um oppressive kind of social conventions um that are are forcing people to live kind of unexamined lives and it's instead um telling people uh know he's like saying let the dead bury their own come follow me um he's pray telling people to pray give us this day our daily bread he is um he's telling people to uh to U sell all they have and give to the poor and follow me um and so creating a um let's say a mendicant spiritual Kingdom and group um you know anti- Kingdom it's not like the using the word Roman Empire it's the same word for as they Ed for Empire it's instead of a an oppressive Empire that is um you know sociely based and things like that this is entirely a spiritual one that is um that is based on on on being together prayer um rituals like the shared the shared meal so on so I think um things like that you know like communion is still um uh is still practiced uh to this day in Christianity and emerges back to the historical Jesus certainly the um the practice of baptism although initiated by the person before Jesus um you know makes its way through the movement and goes and Jesus is baptized and that's still there from this time and this idea that um uh that of wanting to make Society a just and Peaceable place where the last or first and the first or last and so forth um that continues to be I think at the heart of Christianity and goes back to Jesus um there's a bunch of other things in Christianity that don't I don't think go back to Jesus but anyway um that would be I would say for me some of the things um Bob Garrison can we say that John the Baptist is the true Christ since he baptized Jesus and so I would say no so so I appreciate that you know in other words um so so what do we mean the true Christ is um um and so certainly not for Christianity um so so again this is a historical question as opposed to True Christ is a is a theological question and is a a spiritual and a religious question um what we can say is probably is that there was a historical figure Jesus and um uh and there was a historical figure John the Baptist John the Baptist baptized Jesus and it may be that Jesus began his ministry as a disciple of the historical John the Baptist that doesn't though then follow the the John the Baptist is Christ although there is there were as we even saw in the um in the in the Christian texts uh there are followers and Disciples of John the Baptist in the Christian text so that's a separate movement that is still not not merged into fully merged into Jesus's movement and um and Josephus even talks about there being you know a big following behind John the Baptist and there's even um a religion that's continues to this day uh the mandans who look back to um John the Baptist as a leader and may they may go back to it we don't know there's no way to know because they don't have we don't have the records for that but anyway so for them then yeah John the Baptist maybe is um the Messiah in that sense for those guys but not um that's not for Christians no um Dale Ryder asks um John baptized Jesus at Jesus command repli oh he replied to that well so that's the way it was written into the story right so um John the Baptist baptized Jesus at his command that's how Matthew wrote it they explained that in the text so that's how it happens in the scripture story um okay Mark B can you speak to the idea that if Christianity is not true our faith is in vain well um so so I think that we have a um we've had in uh the modern era so just to say which is the let's say from the 1500 1700s onward um we have had an increasing awareness of history and historicity we developed the academic discipline of History to actually discover what happened and what didn't happen and we have had a very um what I think is a is a very false equivalence that things that are historical are true so we just innately say that um when something uh uh when we you know when when you say you know like George Washington uh you know chopped down the cherry tree when when we think that when we find out that that's not a well attested event and most historians don't think that it happened then we say that's not true as if history is is truth so um so when we're talking about if Christianity is not true um our faith is in vain true here we should not be having this modern idea that true means history it's not history uh Christianity is not about although we have had a in a modern times we have equated truth and history um history is uh is not true history is what happened uh and and actual history accessible history is our best um uh ability to reconstruct the most likely um sequence of what happened based on our readings of the available source and other evidence and so it is is in fact a a dim reconstruction it's not truth it is something that informs us about a lot of things it can give us historical context allows us to read uh historical texts if we have a if we don't have the historical context of a text then we will read it as if using presentism and and we'll get all sorts of distorted understandings of that text so history is very valuable but history isn't true and so what I would say is again so if Christianity is not true our faith is in vain well so Christianity is not about is not history Christianity is um an idea of of how Christians have um organized into sacred community in order to relate to one another and to God and so that experience um can be true and that's not about um that's not about history and then in that being true and then it's not in vain so that's how I reflect on that okay Theophilus writes is it possible to separate the Jesus from the mess Messianic hope uh during the hundred-year occupation uh of the Roman occupation 36 from 63 BC and can you speak about the violence in the Jesus movement for example arming the disciples uh with broad swords when an ear went missing so yeah um so so again this so we're talking about the different kinds of pictures of um of the historical Jesus and so like I say the most um common uh scholarly most Scholars I think are going to gravitate to the one like I said that I just showed Bart erman's version of it which is um Jesus as an apocalyptic Prophet so in other words um um somebody who was having a very um who's believing in a very literalistic end of the world this world of of all of the suffering that we have is going to end and a new world is going to arise and that new world death and Injustice will be defeated and so on but there may be accompanying that just a total horrific destruction um of this world as we wait for the new world to emerge um and so so you wouldn't be so when I'm talking about um um the picture of Jesus as social social revolutionary or Jesus as as Sage those other images those are not separating Jesus from the apocalyptic context everything is in that apocalyptic context but but there is an idea that is happening um simultaneously to literalism and a literal apocalypticism it is believing in a in a spiritual Rebirth of the world in other words that um the Millennium is already upon us that we are already have now already entered into a new spiritual realm where um instead of having a cataclysm where everything is destroyed literally rather everything maybe is going to start getting better and better in this new age of the spirit and so um and so that is simultaneously there is a kind of a spiritual as opposed to literal interpretation of that apocalyptic context and so I suggest that it's not we not we can't know for sure you can make different cases for it um which of those Jesus is leaning to so Jesus might have been just a regular literal apocalyptic and he might have been already kind of teaching kind of a spiritual um uh Messianic idea and so those are both the two things in terms of the uh disciples are armed with broad spores after so after Jesus is um uh is is betrayed um ear gets cut off um you know by by one of the disciples cuts off one of the ears of the guards and one of the telling is of the story um so so uh I to think of that's stories first in Mark and then repeated in Matthew and Luke so the I don't know I'd have to look it look it up specifically but I would just say like in a lot of cases I would suggest the details of the um um in my view anyway the details of the um the gospel narratives are very rarely um there's not they're not very likely to have too much historical basis in other words they're the um uh those are in a lot of cases the inventions the creat inventions of the evangelists most of most of the details from my perspective anyway we're most likely to be able to approach the actual historical Jesus Through the teachings which had a lot more capacity to transmit and that's that's something that was also true for the Buddha right where the some of the teachings are going to have been able to been transmitted through that um that oral process whereas the details of his life you know weren't as remembered and so wouldn't have been as known so um yeah so I would say that the um it's it's not the case necessarily that um um that early Christians are instantly pacifist or something like that um so there's examples that we can have here that um that that although there is a peace tradition that is advocated for by Jesus pretty strongly in a lot of our sources um there is also um uh there is not a I mean uh there isn't there isn't you can't read the sources and say there's not also a counternarrative of that there's some uh there's violence there is that too so in the story okay so that's as many questions as I have what did you guys did you guys take a look at my question oh there GNA be more okay once oh there's answers to my questions oh here we go so darl Scott um Daryl Scott thinks I think if people knew that Supernatural events had occurred that had change society quite a bit well so what I would argue is that actually um it would definitely prove that I mean would prove that Supernatural physical things happen but how would we interpret that so even let's say like the ability to walk on water or even something as as really big as raising the dead um while having all kinds of incredible practical value is still separating ourselves just massively cosmically from like the one God who is the creator of a universe that is so much bigger than just Earth you know that is uh you know or just our solar system just the Galaxy the local group of galaxies you know there is this incredible um scope of this thing that um one we we wouldn't have any I don't think that I think it would be um a bit of a leap of logic to connect that thing that happened all the way necessarily to to God um and all and also um um even if let's say we we did identify that that is uh someone who has let's say greater than our mortal human capacities in other words there's some kind of uh elevated Supernatural presence that may be though not as big as what we're talking about with God we also wouldn't have necessarily the ability to judge you know at that level and so so what I'm suggesting here is that it doesn't actually constitute proof and that we have to actually in order to connect to God as the source of everything we have to not be relying on like again um history or even uh physical Miracles or something like that and instead that we have to do a lot more deep um kinds of philosophical and Theological introspection to understand uh truth and meaning at the at that Cosmic level than in terms of these kind of incidents that's my feeling but I totally see what you're saying um fastbook flake says even if an entity could walk on water that doesn't make him the progeny or creator of everything exactly that's what I just said so it essentially proves that there is an entity that can walk on water and little more exactly that's kind of what I was trying to get at um and Karen Lee said it would prove nothing so oh the second question that was the second question yeah or maybe that's the first question yeah okay um and Jesus Booker says I don't need Jesus to have done anything to relate enduring truths about human nature to our relationship or the concept concept of Eternity so yeah exactly both temporally and eternal concept of Life both temporally and eternal uh Michelangelo Sanchez says on the third question and my questions AR numbered here so is the third question we'll have to read the answer first and then I'll find out with the question um uh we even use in our narrative our personal life since we trust what our family says about our early childhood so that was the question um what are other ways we use narratives to form our identity as opposed to being defined by our history so exactly I would say that we we actually tell stories about ourselves um and we don't actually we know those either like you say from being told about them by by our family members or actually even in L cases by memory um but the be because of the way memory Works um every single time we tell those stories the the the story to tell our you know our actual history and so on okay well thank you so much for thinking about all my questions and also for all of these questions so there's an idea here for a future lecture um does John have any thoughts on the value of the Bible for atheist and uh yeah we maybe we could maybe do about a lecture on that I certainly think that there's um one enormous value that just is um there for everybody is that the Bible is um uh you know a cultural context for um like in the West in Christendom what we now call the West uh it for all of um uh thought for you know like two you know 1500 1800 years or something like that the last 2,000 years kind of uh where almost all of our um like art you know art and music and uh and poetry and um uh literature and plays and so on will make all kinds of references to the Bible um and and just even having a basic biblical literacy helps us to appreciate all of uh historic art and so on um and it connects us uh in a lot of ways to um you know all of our traditions and ancestry if you're if you're from the West you know and so the same way that um you know if you're uh from you know South Asia then having a basic uh literacy in in both Buddhism and Hinduism and and jism and some of the other religions are going to be helpful even if you're an atheist in understanding the cultural context of all of the historic Heritage of of Art and everything else and the society and so forth so I do think that's very useful um I also want to thank darl Scott and Dylan Walker for your donations to support our Channel how wonderful of you I really appreciate that um like I said um we have we had a lot of donors um uh give at the end of the year last uh at December and we really appreciated all of those and that um made us think we got to do these more often so we're we're trying to work out um you know how we can really ramp up our schedule and have lectures on a much more frequent U basis so uh once again I want to thank everybody great discussion great questions oh there's more I thought there was Ed questions oh there's another question I'm sorry that's the last one okay I'm sorry I didn't miss that okay Dylan Walker also asked um wondering if John could speak a bit on the development of the Resurrection narrative whether there an empty tomb so um so yeah I would like to whenever I was going to do these kind of things I'd prefer not to always do it extemporaneously because I would like to look at what all the different sources all say um but here's how I gen generally tend to frame it so we do have um um I know multiple attestation on the idea that Mary Magdalene and other women are at the tomb um that's found in um in you know John which is unrelated to the synoptic gospels and the synoptic gospels um and some other sources too um and we also have Paul's um testimony so it's very important because in my view anyway because it's earliest so um so Paul in describing how Christianity gets going um uh he talks about how um uh Christ began appearing to the different Apostles he doesn't actually list the women first but he says uh it appeared to um I'm trying to think of who's first maybe Peter then the 12 then to James the brother of of Jesus then to a whole bunch of Christians Al together and so he lists off all of the all of the uh appearances of Christ and then he says finally last of all um Christ appeared to me you know the least of all the apostles Bor because I was used to be a persecutor of the church and so forth um and so I I I understand Paul which is the is actually the eyewitness here the person who is actually testifying to the experience um we read about his justification for it in the Galatians letter to where he's talking about how he had this experience with uh the Risen Christ that informed his calling and so my understanding of that and my reading of that is that Paul has a Visionary experience with the Risen Christ and so I would understand that he is recounting that as a thing that um early Christians are experiencing so maybe beginning with Mary Magdalene and other women who had been disciples and followers of Jesus maybe then with all the other the twel and all the other Apostles uh and his brother and so forth and that ultimately Paul also had a vision like this in other words a vision of the Risen Christ then later when um uh so when uh you know when the when Mark's gospel is written um Mark has a different idea entirely so there's no ending where where where anybody's seeing Jesus um the Angels were saying he's not here for he's risen but that wasn't the appealing to Mark and I'm sorry Matthew and Luke who tell um experiences that people have um with the uh with the Risen Christ where the Christ is actually essentially seeming like a physical entity that's having a visitation now uh in these literary texts as imagined by these evangelists and that gets most full-blown in in the last of these Gospels John where there's even an apostle who's like thrusting his uh you know doubting Thomas who's thrusting his um hand in and so on uh in order to prove that there's some kind of physical thing happening here um and so what I would say is that what probably happened is um to my my perspective on on this what this happened is there's a historical Jesus he's executed by the Romans all of his disciples flee nobody's there to see um um he is a poor person and a common um they don't there's nothing special there's no special trial before Pilate the Romans crucify lots of people and when they're done crucifying all of these people not just three but just a whole all the people they want to crucify they they throw them in a common pit and their body is not found again because there's were never they're never seen from the dep types at all flat and so forth um there's later uh so so later um like you're talking about stories of a tomb and so on that those then uh those tomb stories are told to elaborate uh elaborate the story but in the what happened in the history is then some of the the Disciples of Jesus who are wondering what was this all about why was this was never going to happen we were founding this Millennial Kingdom whether it's literal or spiritual whatever it was we didn't expect this to happen we didn't expect Jesus to be uh crucified um then some of the disciples maybe the women disciples U begin having visions of a risen Christ and they start to then have that in form their understanding of of what Jesus's Ministry was about that he's now conquered death in a very new and spiritual and different way and then the stories of these Visions including the one recounted by Paul caus the gospel writers to um write much more physical literary narratives um those physical literary narratives then inform and scripture inform Christian theologians and so that uh informs Christian theology so that's how we that's how I'd explain that well I turned my phone off so I don't know if there's more questions are we are we done Leandro uh no that's that's the okay I'm not sure I'm pronouncing the name properly Mai bus thank you oh thank you so much and thanks to everybody I really enjoyed this um what a what a wonderful discussion and I appreciated all the interaction

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 355,046

Keywords: community of christ, exmo, exmormon, ex-mormon, christmas lecture, birth of jesus, jesus myth, prophecy, prophecies, bible studies, christianity lecture, judaism lecture, christian education, meaning of christmas, is jesus the messiah, biblicar scholar

Id: GYB91lRYyOE

Length: 131min 15sec (7875 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 12 2022