Brant Pitre on the history of Jesus Christ | The Augustine Institute Show with Dr. Tim Gray

[Music] welcome to the augustine institute show this evening we're going to talk about the historical case for jesus i know some of you are thinking well i'm a strong believer why do we what do you mean a historical case for jesus history is really important to christianity and to judaism in fact without history we would simply be an idea christianity would be an idea it would be kind of like gnosticism i guess or a myth but what makes history so important for christianity is that christianity is about what god has done in time god enters into the world and into human history and he has done amazing things and so the idea of the gospel the good news it's about the good news about what god has done in our world to save our world it's not simply good advice it's good news about an event and that's what we're going to explore tonight [Music] well welcome everyone i'm so excited to have my dear friend dr brandt petrie as our guest tonight we're going to talk and explore the historical case for jesus and dr petry has written a wonderful book called the case for jesus and it's a wonderful book that goes into the historical questions that modern scholarship for the last 200 years really since the enlightenment has had regarding jesus christ and christianity and so we're going to look at some of these tough questions and issues and we're going to see that the more we study history the stronger your faith can be i really firmly believe that i know dr petrie does as well so brent it's a joy to have you on the show thanks tim it's great to be here yeah well you know i think a lot of people think well if we're going to get into history and scholarship and this is going to be something that's going to get us away from the heart of jesus or the meaning of jesus but in in your own life you've dedicated your life to studying uh you did your doctoral studies on jesus as you got deeper into history it led to deeper faith didn't it absolutely absolutely yeah i i think that that uh that kind of reservation about the study of history uh flows from a few things first of all it's hard it's hard work um there's lots of information lots of books to read lots of ancient writers to study um but also too i think sometimes it flows from a misconception of faith right like a friend of mine once was teaching a catechism class and he asked the students you know what is faith and one of the kids said well faith is when you believe something even when you know it isn't true like no yes no that's not what faith is no faith is our act of trust and our ascent to what god has done and what god has revealed in time in space and in human history so it is an act of the intellect and the will that doesn't go against reason but actually flows from and is a continent with his formed by our our rational faculties right it it fits and works with god making us not just uh to have hearts but also to have minds and so um in my own journey over the years i grew up i'm cradle catholic um and came from a practicing devout family but when i went off to college what happened was i started to study classes on the new testament old testament and hear questions about the origins of the bible or the origins of the gospel or the divinity of jesus that no one had ever raised when i was growing up as a believing catholic and i think so many people experience that when they go off to college they'll hear that here they are at a university really smart people various professors with doctorates and they're raising serious questions you know can we really trust the gospels you know right was it the church inventing these ideas did jesus actually claim to be god right or is that just a myth is that just an idea which is a that's a serious question that deserves a serious answer and as you mentioned earlier i knew from growing up a christian growing up a catholic that the christian faith makes a historical claim it isn't just an idea it isn't just a set of like rules and regulations a kind of code immorality christianity is fundamentally a historical religion because it claims that the god of the universe became a man in a certain time in a certain place in a little village in nazareth and so uh that historical matrix of what we believe uh when we ask serious questions about that they deserve serious answers you know when we talk about history like this bran it reminds me of the whole idea of jesus did god really become man and the incarnation is that god became man in time that's what we celebrate at christmas every christmas and so god enters into history when he becomes incarnate absolutely and so in my own experience when that idea was challenged so for example the story i tell in the book is in my first class on the new testament i was an undergraduate the professor came in i think it was the first day he said i know what you believed all your life about the gospels you know the gospel according to matthew mark luke and john i know that's what it says in your bibles and that's what you that's what you hear at church but i'm here to tell you that scholars today know that the gospels were originally anonymous and that none of them are written by written by eyewitnesses and that we can't really know if what they say about jesus what he did and what he said is actually historically true or if it's just more mythological more like folklore and for me as a cradle catholic that really rocked me it rocked my faith because if jesus didn't claim to be god and if the gospels aren't reliable truthful accounts of what he said and he did then why would i be a catholic right exactly and we're going to get to the answer to that question in a minute but i just want to invite everybody to join our conversation we you know we have these live shows that you can ask ask questions that we can uh field and have a dialogue with you so please you know text in your questions use our text line which is 720-650-0-100 so you can text in a question just let us know you know if you're linda from phoenix or you're mark from ontario canada just put your name where you're from or what country we we have a lot of people from all over the world so we love having you as part of the conversation so please do that or you can also leave a comment in our comment section you can put questions there on the forum platform so if you're watching unformed you could type into the to the comment section and leave your questions and so if you have any questions about history and jesus that you know maybe all the way back to your freshman year of college maybe your college days or you're watching you know the history channel and somebody you know maybe there was barterman or somebody being interviewed in one of these modern scholars who was skeptical and uh have those questions well one of those skeptical questions people have as you mentioned brent is you know these gospels were just anonymous and passed on and i love how you tackle that as one of the first topics of this book so why don't you give people the brief answer to that yeah so the the short short version of the issue is this is that um in the mid 20th and late 20th century the theory arose and became very widespread that originally the four gospels in our new testament matthew mark luke and john um were anonymous and that they did not have any titles and they weren't ascribed to apostles like matthew or john right so just to give people a sense of that so it says you know the gospel according to mark or the gospel according to matthew and the hypothesis was that was added on later on that's exactly right give it authority but it wasn't there originally and they just kind of were passed around anonymously in other words there was no name to validate the book that's exactly right so the theory says originally they were written and published by we don't know who okay and then they circulated for almost 100 years without any titles and then in the late second century the church began adding names to the gospels in order to give them authority so that people would believe that they were written by eyewitnesses like matthew or john who were both members of the 12. and that's really the rub isn't it because if it wasn't done by people who had a name you you lose the eyewitness testimony and then you lose the sense of credibility that's exactly right and proximity to the event right because an eyewitness is going to be closer to the event than some anonymous person writing who knows where and who knows when so when i went off to college and first encountered that idea that all of the gospels were originally anonymous and the titles were only added later i was just an undergraduate i didn't know anything so i'm just taking notes like the gospel was originally anonymous check check and i remember thinking oh that's a little odd i hadn't heard that before but over time it would it it was kind of like a crack you ever get a crack in your windshield it starts to grow and yeah so it starts off small just a little little doubt or a little uncertainty and then it starts it spreads throughout the whole windshield and pretty soon you can't see right you can't see where you're going and that's really what happened to me personally accepting that theory of the gospels not being eyewitness testimony then raises the question well what in them is true and what isn't and how do we really know what jesus did and what jesus said and so it ushers you into a kind of skeptical attitude which eventually led me to even wonder with a lot of scholars today well did jesus actually ever even claim to be god and that that was really the question that hit me that's a big one that i want to come back but i love your response to this because it's very very simple yeah uh i mean and it's very historical the historical answer to the idea that these gospels weren't anonymous that they is what is what for people it's to go and look at the manuscript the actual manuscript okay so right even to this day if you want to tell how how do you know someone wrote a book there's two ways to tell what scholars call external evidence and and internal evidence so internal evidence is just look in the book and see who wrote it like my book says brant petrie wrote the book right so that's i'm on the first page that's internal evidence external evidence for finding out who wrote a book is to ask people who knew the author who lived at the same time as the author hey did this person write that book like so you could ask pope benedict's brother you know did he write a book on jesus nazareth yes he did right so it corroborates the internal evidence so what i started doing was looking at the internal evidence of ancient greek manuscripts and external evidence from ancient christian writers who were alive either at the time of the apostles or shortly thereafter and what i discovered was this blew me away there are no anonymous manuscripts because i was expecting well surely if they were all anonymous to begin with and if i'm acting like a historian and looking for evidence then there should be plenty of anonymous copies right but when i started doing what scholars called text criticism which is studying the actual original greek manuscripts and looking at the text in its original language um i kept looking for those copies and guess what tim didn't find them there's not just there's are there a few no there's zero right and not just for one of the gospels but for all four so i mean this is a big deal like there are no anonymous copies of matthew no anonymous copies of luke no anonymous there's no there's not a single copy of the gospel of matthew that doesn't say according to matthew right yeah certainly that's complete i mean obviously there's fragments that's what i was going to say there's sometimes fragments but at the start of the first page we don't have a first page of a gospel it doesn't say according to matthew mark luke or john that's right so it's amazing that this kind of theory gets spun up without evidence right and it becomes factual for the academic world yeah well and it's not everyone in the academic world but i would say it's the majority position at least it was when i was in school in the late 90s right it is it is there are some changing voices and challenges have been raised to it but it was one of those things where first i looked at that data then i started reading the church fathers and this was the end so once i started reading these ancient christian writers i expected them these are people like justin martyr saint irenaeus of leon these are people who were disciples of men who were disciples of the apostles they're one two generations removed from the life of the apostles and what i discovered was i expected them to be as agnostic or skeptical about who wrote the gospels as some of my professors or the books i was reading were and what i discovered was not only are the manuscripts unanimous in attributing these books to matthew martin luke and john but so is the external evidence from the father so the internal evidence and the external evidence all aligned all along it was completely unanimous on and so let's just go back to that moment as you begin to realize this more and more yeah you go back to when you were in college student you're you're you've got that crack growing in the windshield sure that crack of doubt right yeah when does that crack just go away because all of a sudden you realize no actually all the manuscript evidence which is not just hundreds but ultimately thousands of millions of thousands of mainstream that all consistently point to this and all the outside evidence of the church fathers are all corroborating this and so all of a sudden the church's position on this is actually confirmed by history that's exactly right did you walk away with a deeper sense of faith absolutely because it helped me arrive at a faith that wasn't believing something even when i knew it wasn't true but a faith that was supernatural to be sure a gift but also grounded in reason and and um coherent with reason it was a reasonable faith you know when you say that it reminds me of pope benedict emeritus who always talked about faith and reason yes as two wings and i think this is one of the geniuses of catholicism is we believe that faith and reason belong together they're not there's not attention like the more you try to do study and reason it doesn't mean you're undermining faith that's important for people to understand absolutely history is not a threat to the christian faith it actually bolsters the case that's what i try to show in the book and it's just superficial history a little bit of knowledge well that's the thing i like to be dangerous a little bit of knowledge mixed with a little bit of error too or bad logic bad philosophy bad arguments right uh can can be very destructive and very dangerous and very misleading and so for me the moment was really when i started reading the fathers the church fathers that was a pivotal moment because i thought wait a second if all the most ancient christian writers and by the way these are ancient christians writing in gaul which is france africa north africa carthage they're writing in egypt alexandria they're writing in palestine so they're spread out throughout the world so there's a geographical spread as well how are they all agreeing about the authorship of these gospels if the titles weren't added to 100 years later it's an implausible scenario to imagine which is what scholars will say sometimes that after 100 years scribes all around the roman empire just miraculously attributed the exact same titles to the same books no if they were originally anonymous we would expect discrepancies and divergences in who the books are being attributed to but that's exactly what we don't find we get a question from uh tim in scottsdale arizona who asks you know what's the historical facts that jesus actually lived that he existed what would be some of the bigger facts that we could prove historically like historical evidence proving his existence okay um the first one would be the existence of the gospels themselves yeah because what we have in the four gospels is four ancient biographies written either by students of jesus or by the disciples of his students so mark is a student a disciple of peter and luke is a disciple of paul although paul's once removed but they're all written within the living memory of the historical figure in question jesus of nazareth um that is better evidence we have for almost any other historical figure from that time period and i usually illustrate this to my students by an example if you compare alexander the great for example right now we have several we have four or five biographies of alexander the great whether it's in plutarch's lives or suetonius's lives of the caesars right but those biographies are written 200 300 150 years after alexander the great list lived and no one's doubting with great skepticism classical historians do every day they write books on alexander the great without doubting the substance of those biographical accounts of alexander the great no one's going around saying the myth of alexander he didn't really exist but the biographical and historical evidence for alexander the great is nowhere near as chronologically close to the figure as the four biographies of jesus that we have in the new testament uh so that's the first thing i would just point to the gospels the second thing would be josephus who the first century jewish historian who also mentions jesus of nazareth and his antiquity of the jews so we have an extra biblical ex non-christian witness so any other figure of history that kind of historical data though that kind of historical evidence would be in iraq considered irrefutable proof of their existence ben asks a question how do we know um that the gospel is our eyewitness testimony oh that's a great um that's a great question well two of them aren't in the sense that they aren't direct eyewitness testimony for example luke at the very beginning of his gospel uh makes very clear that he's basing his gospel in the testimony of eyewitnesses but he himself is not an eyewitness and then mark we have no evidence that he was a follower of jesus but that he was a follower of peter right um so what i would say is only two of the gospels claim to be direct eyewitness testimony that's the gospel matthew and the gospel of john so for example in john chapter 19 verse 35 and then john 21 24 the author of the gospel the beloved disciple actually makes clear he says you know he who saw this bears witness that he tells the truth talking about his testimony is true and his testimony is true that's right he uses the jewish language of testimonia like witness bearing true witness that's a very serious uh claim and then at the end of the book uh in john 21 24 it says he who uh he who i forget let me get the exact verse if that's okay i know just to point this out at the very end in john 21 24 after there's this exchange between peter and john the beloved disciple it says this is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things and who has written these things right so the book ends by telling you it's being written by the beloved disciple who was with jesus at the last supper and throughout his ministry as an eyewitness and student and this idea of eyewitness related to history was really important for the ancient greeks and romans very important very important if you look at other biographies for example josephus the jewish historian wrote a biography of himself an autobiography demonex who was the the student of a lot the life of demon acts he was a philosopher and then one of his students wrote a biography of him if you could show that you knew the person you were writing the biography about it would establish the veracity and the plausibility the credibility and so the gospel writers when they are eyewitnesses like john will sometimes point that out but then when they aren't luke tells you at the very beginning of his book in chapter one verses one through four that he's basing his gospel on the testimony of ao toptai in greek should we get the word autopsy with the word autopsy because an autopsy is a doctor who has seen for himself he's examined himself you know the causes of death so that greek word autoptie luke tells us i'm not an eyewitness but this gospel is based on eyewitness testimony so luke 1 and john 20 uh 21 are two key places to show that the gospels claim to be eyewitness testimony themselves so important well anna asks a really good question she says you know we have the four gospels uh but sometimes the words of jesus are different in different gospels yeah so is that you know how do we know what he really said perfect perfect i like that question wonderful question yeah because we have to read the gospels according to the standards of ancient biography so on the one hand they are biographies uh there was an ancient greek category known as a bios a life of some famous figure usually be about a philosopher or a king which of course jesus is both right he's the great wise man he's the new solomon and he's a new david right um but um when it comes to uh the i'm trying to put this out i'm trying to think of how exactly to answer this well you know let me put it this way you know it's not like history has to be like a tape recorder right yeah that's okay so you don't have to have a tape recorder say this is exactly said now he was an itinerant preacher and so sometimes he's going to say maybe the beatitude's one way then he goes to another village and he's going to give a shorter list because the weather is bad yeah the crowd's hungry sorry my ball got lost that's right so this is important though yes so there are two ways to explain the differences between the gospels the first is genre just remember that when ancient writers wrote biographies they were not attempting as a rule to give what we would consider like a verbatim transcript it's not like a court stenographer sitting there and typing down every word exactly you can see this uh the best example i would point her to is the accounts of the last supper because then they'll counsel the last supper and mark that's good because betty had a question about that in matthew 26 14 luke 22 you've got accounts of one event where jesus speaks one time and the words are not in the same order they're not verbatim they're not a verbatim transcript but they give us the substance this is so important of what jesus said right and that's how ancient biographies were they would attempt to give the substance of what a person said now um on some occasions like the last supper you're gonna have slight differences but the meaning is the same on other occasions you can explain the differences in the way you just said when you've got an itinerant preacher going all around jesus isn't making up new material every time he goes to a new town comedians will know this but also professors know this right you don't always start from scratch and with different audiences you'll use different words you'll use different uh forms sometimes longer sometimes shorter but then and then you recycle and you recycle and sometimes you recycle and say it differently so what he says in one gospel a saying you might have actually said that in cafernon and then in jerusalem you might have changed the wording a little bit that's exactly right depending on who his audience is every good teacher will adapt this teaching to the audience so those are just two ways pope benedict actually mentions this in his book he he actually says we have to remember that although the gospels aren't transcripts they give us the substance of what jesus said and they tell us the truth right because you or i we could recount this what happened in this interview we could recount it tomorrow to two different people are we gonna use the exact same words right no but that doesn't mean we're not telling the truth right we often summarize re-characterize use different words in human discourse in oral discourse that's just a natural thing would it be true would this be correct uh brant to say that you know because people like to say well our idea of history is much different than the ancient idea of history and so would it be quick to say well yes maybe in terms of chronology we're we're kind of with the order of which what was said and what was done yeah but they cared that it actually was said and it was actually done that's very important so that's like a that's another one of those dangerous half truths right so on the one hand modern history and ancient history are very different for example we tend to aim for exactitude down to the precise day and minute so if you read a biography of abraham lincoln it'll be a thousand pages tell you exactly what minute he was born because we have access to lots of data and details ancients tended to be more general and shorter in their biographies um but that doesn't mean they weren't aiming for the truth in fact in the case for jesus i have a quote from lucian a famous ancient uh historian who actually wrote a book called how to write history right it's from the same time as the gospels and what does lucian say that the aim of the ancient historian of his day is to say is to tell the truth of what happened and that's what history is about it's about events so ancient historians cared about they cared about history was historical that's exactly in fact josephus the jewish historian he goes after other historians of the jewish war because they were giving false accounts and he said i'm going to tell you the truth yeah of what happened because i'm writing historia in greek like history that so that that part of the concept of history and we even find the term mythology used in the epistles and to differentiate what the christians are doing it's mythology with something it's meaningful but it's not historical that's exactly right and for christianity it's meaningful and it's historical i i i always point to this i have lots of friends who love jrr tolkien right and cs lewis and c.s lewis and token both came up with a modern literary category of true myth or they would use the word myth in a kind of elastic sense to talk about stories that have deep truth to them and that's beautiful and good in the modern period and i love lewis and token but that's not what the word muthos meant right when the new testament writers meant it used it so in first peter or ii peter you know when that word occurs and also some of the pauline letters it means something that is false and not historically true so that's where we get that meaning of the term missile so they're very different concepts they knew what history was and the gospel writers especially luke is are making very clear that you know that that that's what they're writing in their in their books great we've had some great questions submitted but this one i i want to tackle here and this is a bigger one down there so a viewer says they're sitting with a friend right now who and their friend believes that jesus was a real historical figure a real man but not that he was god incarnate so what would you say to him he's watching right now okay no pressure no no it's a great question so first i would say well let's look at the gospels and ask well who did he claim to be so you might not think he was god but the historical evidence supports the fact that he did claim to be god and one of the things i show in the book that's one of the main burdens of the book is to show that jesus claims to be divine in all four biographies that we have of him from the first century matthew mark luke and john but he does it in a very jewish way right so you can see very really explicit examples of this like in john chapter eight when jesus says um before abraham was i am and i am a go in me and greek is the greek name it's the greek phrase from the book of exodus where god reveals his name to moses right god says my name is i am he who is right tell them i am have sent you to them sent you to them so when jesus says before abraham existed i am when he's only 30 years old yeah in a jewish context he's making a divine claim same thing in the gospel mark when jesus is standing before caiaphas and caiaphas says tell us are you the son of the blessed one and jesus says i am and you'll see the son of man seated at the right hand of god and coming with the clouds of heaven how does caiaphas respond he tie tears his garments and says this man has blasphemed now a lot of christians don't realize it wasn't blasphemy to claim to be the messiah all the messiah was was the anointed king of israel but it was blasphemy to claim to sit at the right hand of god because to sit on the right hand of god means you're equal with god and to come on the clouds was something any jew would have known in the old testament who comes on the clouds it's a revelation of god it's a revelation of god so the question i would pose to this person is if jesus of nazareth claimed to be god then you only have three options to respond to him either number one he was a liar in other words he knew he wasn't god but he claimed to be god and if you read through the gospels jesus does not come across as a liar okay second is that he's a lunatic in other words he's somebody who thinks he's god but he actually isn't god okay and that's so inconsistent with the genius that we find in jesus's teaching and deeds throughout jesus is not a madman which by the way that's the highest possible madness you can have to think that you're a deity when in fact you're just a man and then the third option this is all you have left if he's not a liar if you don't think she's a liar and you don't think he's a crazy man if you don't think he's a lunatic then the only option left is that he is the lord yeah he is who he claimed to be he didn't leave you any other options you know i i i just want to say too because i know we're running short on time here is my favorite chapter of your book brand is the the case for jesus divinity that you have in here i thought it was a it's a fabulous thing because it's it's and i know you even say this is kind of the heart of the book when you get to that part and so many people haven't heard that the historical jesus actually claimed to be god and uh that's that's a lot of confusion out there i think also in episode six i think it was in the search we interviewed you yeah that's right yeah and talk about jesus and talk about the case for jesus a bit and his divinity and so i recommend we have the search unformed watch episode six of the search it's really compelling case for that and uh and i i want to just recommend for everybody out there and for this viewer who is who's debating the case for jesus i'm glad you're watching and and discerning this the case for jesus pick up brent's book and what we want to do i i think i feel like this is such an important book anybody who wants to uh donate to the augustans today whether join our mission circle our mother giving society or a one-time donation but if you join the mission circle we'll send you a free copy of brant's book the case for jesus i want to get this in the hands and if you just simply want to buy it we have it on catholic.market you can find it there catholic.market the case for jesus we also have alexiou bible study on form so if you're like this time has gone by too fast you can watch the videos that we have we have a whole set of videos of dr petry going through this and i think eight or ten episodes yes eight episodes eight episodes in detail and we have a workbook for small groups to do a bible study on the case for jesus so i hope you can join us for that and take advantage of that uh because it's the more you understand history the more your faith is going to grow stronger with deeper conviction deeper confidence and then you're going to have the competency to share the reasons for the faith and so that's what's so important so brian thank you for joining us it's my pleasure are we done already we are done i can't believe the time has gone by but we're going to get you back on again soon that would be great and uh and we want to thank everybody for joining us and anybody who wants to join our mission circle help us have these programs we're deeply grateful for your support on the mission circle for just ten dollars or more a month you can become a mission circle partner with us and we do a lot of special things like have our professors like dr brian peter who's one of our professors here that gets to speak directly to the mission circle members so we'll have to set that up soon as well so thank you so much for joining us and may the lord bless and keep you [Music] you

Channel: Augustine Institute

Views: 16,900

Rating: 4.9711814 out of 5

Keywords: case for jesus, Tim gray, brant pitre, Augustine institute

Id: zUldM5WsUCI

Length: 31min 52sec (1912 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021