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A
Foreign.
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B
Hello and welcome to the Thinking Fellows podcast. My name is Caleb Keith and this podcast is brought to you by the 15:17 podcast network of shows. You can go to 15:17.org podcast to see all of our shows there. Today I am joined by Scott Keith, Adam Francisco and Bruce Hillman. And we are discussing a question that we've been seeing online, I guess in various different places. I've been seeing, I saw it on YouTube. Bruce I'm guessing has seen it other places. Adam on Facebook because he likes his boomer social media.
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A
Oh my gosh.
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C
True enough, huh?
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B
But this has been trending, which is people asserting that Jesus never claimed to be God. This is happening from multiple different angles. I think. Adam, you've. You in a text message said this is like the classic Islamic sort of apologetic, like insta. Apologetic against Christians. I've been seeing it also from like the, like the quasi Aryan groups who, you know, like Jehovah Witnesses.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Like hold Jesus in some place but then say, look, he never said he was Yahweh specifically is the big one. Or that it's all insinuation or made up by Christians. And then of course there's always the agnostic and atheist sort of like higher criticism and all the biblical texts. This is a Christian interpretation of the text. But Jesus never says I am God kind of thing. So we're going to talk about this question and I think it's part of a bigger question for me that comes up even for Christians. Like, why would this be important for Christians besides sort of fortifying your ears from this particular type of attack on your faith or by giving, you know, like being prepared, you know, apologetically for when you're preaching the gospel for somebody to say, well, you know, did Jesus even say he was God? Kind of question. But is just the question, who is the Christian God? Like, who do Christians worship? Is our God just, you know, this, this guy, dad, who is frowning upon the world for all the naughty things they do, who is the, the God of Christianity? And so this question, did Jesus Christ claim to be God? Works its way into that as well. So I don't know. Adam, you, you said you have the Islamic bent to this, but are there any other, like, why do you think this question comes back up today? Why is it in rotation on the Internet right now?
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A
That's a good question. I think, you know, a lot of it's probably just motivated by a couple different things. And the things that would stand out at the top of my head would be just a, I don't know I don't want to just call it like a rationalism, but it just seems really weird to see, to think of if you're like a secularist or a pagan or whatever you want to call it, to think that a man was also God, you know, and so it just didn't fit the paradigm. It doesn't fit our. The worldview assumptions about who Jesus of Nazareth was. But best putting the best construction on it, which is a weird way of saying it, especially with regard to this topic, is if you do read the Gospels. Yeah. To be sure. The Gospel of John has a high Christology. You know, in the beginning was the Logos, the Logos was with God, the Logos was God. And you know, and he tabernacled or he dwelled among us. Right. In the synoptics. Matthew, Mark, Luke. It's not as. At least a superficial reading of it isn't as high. There's not. Now I think that's total rubbish. I think there's a very high Christology in all the Gospels. But if you're just reading it superficially and your assumption is that Jesus was not God, you're not going to find anywhere in Matthew, Mark or Luke, the earliest Gospels, presumably where Jesus says, I am Yahweh. But I'd add to that. Nor should you expect that because nobody would even say the word Yahweh in and around Jesus time. But what you do find, I don't want to put the cart before the horse. Is very clearly in what many regard as the earliest gospel to have been written, the Gospel of Mark. When Jesus is asked point blank, are you the Christ, the Son of the blessed? Which is a especially the scholars say. And I don't know about all this stuff, but Second Temple Judaism in particular is when Jews stopped using the. Stopped actually saying Yahweh and started using synonyms for it like the blessed. So when Jesus is asked, are you the Christ, the Son of the blessed? In Mark 14, at his trial, standing before the Jewish Council of the Sanhedrin, his response is, I am. So while Jesus never says the words I am Yahweh or I am Elohim or something like that, to expect him to say that is anachronistic. But he does in several places acknowledge his divinity. That's the whole reason why he gets arrested and put on trial and crucified, because he's guilty of blasphemy. And time and again throughout the Gospels, you have him making these remarkable claims about himself that maybe they require a more than superficial reading of the text. I suppose they do, but it's very clear he's saying he's associating himself with God. And then you have the. Whether it's the Pharisees or some other Jewish group ripping their garments because he's blaspheming. So anyway, I had to get that all out off my chest because this stuff drives me nuts. I. Scott, I suspect because you get driven nuts as much as I do, I think. Right.
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C
Yeah, I think. I think there was a good question. Why is this coming up right now? I didn't even know it was coming up. I'm sort of. So. I'm not on Facebook or anything, so I don't. I didn't even really know it was coming up. But anytime someone says, hey, why is this strange challenge to the faith coming up? I'm not going to try to get too charismatic here, but we did a show not too long ago about this interesting resurgence in the belief of young men. And I'm never surprised when on the heels of that comes some challenge that is probably meant to appeal more to young men than anybody else. So, hey, there's a resurgence in belief among young men. Now let's bring in another sort of intellectual argument that might erode at the core of that resurgence a little more. And it's pretty easy to say, in a sense, that's the devil at work. But you can also kind of see his little minions in liberal academia who are pretty content with Christianity having no foothold, hearing the same reports we're hearing regarding there being a resurgence here and saying, hey, let's reintroduce something that can be a little bit of a challenge to this Adam. I think he said a lot of smart things there, but the smartest thing he said is that this is an anachronistic claim to expect somebody in Jesus time to walk around and make it two weeks without getting killed, maybe even two days without getting killed and going, I'm Yahweh, I'm Yahweh, I'm Yahweh, I'm Yahweh. I mean, it's just God's plan was for the ministry to last three years, right? It wasn't going to last three years. If he just like the one thing that he said all the time was in their time to just blaspheme, blaspheme, blaspheme. He blasphemed enough that there were many times throughout the gospels where it's recounted that they wanted to kill him for the egoing me statements and similar even he would even say Reference that he's the son of man, like sort of a euphemism there for the Messiah and for God and they try to kill him. It's just, it doesn't, it doesn't comport with, you know, what would have actually happened during the time. And then I'll let Bruce talk about sort of the part of this being that most of these direct statements are recorded in the Gospel of John and why that's not really. I don't think that's a winning argument. It's just something that somebody is saying to kind of provide a surface level. Hey, well, why is it just in the Gospel of John? Is there something different about John here? Has John got an agenda that Matthew, Mark and Luke don't have? But that's just not true. The other gospels record, especially as Adam mentioned, Mark and Matthew record the accounts of his death and in each account of his death he is killed because the Sanhedrin is pretty convinced he is walking around claiming to be God. So there is a requirement then to put him to death. They even convinced Pontius Pilate of this. Right. I mean, one of the arguments is that we're supposed to worship Caesar and this guy's walking around saying he's God, making us worship him. And this is how they get Pontius Pilate involved in something religious in the first place. It's just kind of, if you think about it for half a second, it's not a great argument. But I can see why sort of liberal academia, who really is tent with their power position, would bring something like this up probably at the behest of the evil one.
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A
Before we move to Bruce, who I can tell is ready to pounce. I think that's what, that's what that face is in the. Across the screen.
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C
Yeah, just pouncing face off.
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A
I thought I was thinking about this as you, you're talking, Scott, you know that genius Dan Brown.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Who wrote the Da Vinci code, what, probably 20 years ago now, a Hollywood movie, best selling blockbuster movie, or however they describe those types of movies in the book, the Da Vinci Code, he starts off, he says everybody loves a good conspiracy theory. And he's right. Right. And then. But as he, as he's developing the narrative in that novel, which just as an aside, I've been reading novels, as you know, Scott, I do know, just putting that out there thoroughly, enjoying a certain set of novels, but shall we
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C
say a certain genre
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A
in the narrative. If, if you all remember from either the book or the movie, there's this dialogue that takes Place after the. The detectives and I forget their name, but there's a guy that's like French royalty. I think it's Lord Tbring or something like that who's explaining the history of Christianity.
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C
Hold on a second. Hold on. Just. Did you read the Da Vinci Code?
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A
Yeah. I mean, yeah, because it was like the big thing.
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B
Wow.
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A
So I guess I did. Well, 20 years ago, I read a novel. 25 years.
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C
20, 25.
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A
I read lots of novels. Long time ago.
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C
Okay, go ahead. Sorry.
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A
But Lord T ring says something to the effect as he's explaining the history of Christianity, the early history of Christianity, he goes, you see, there would be no doctrine of the divinity of Christ had it not been for the Council of Nicaea or like Emperor Constantine's Council of Nicaea or something like that.
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C
Throw away. Yeah.
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A
So behind all this is this. It's not just popular, it is in academia, and it's been in academia for a good 200, probably more years. This notion that this high Christology that I referred to, this view of Jesus as fully God or fully man and fully God is something that develops over the course of a couple centuries. And then that assumption is oftentimes used as a lens through which people will read, say, the Gospels. Hence why it's one of the reasons why people give such a late date to the Gospel of John, because it does, at least a superficial reading, has a very high Christology. And the assumption is it would take a couple generations for that to develop. Especially it's got to be a couple generations away from these sort of monotheistic Jews. So they just sort of. Well, it must be very late then.
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C
So even though I'm going to let Bruce go to. But the number of things within sort of the critical framework of how people determine how old something is, how authentic it is, that just works off of. I have a presupposition. And now I'm going to squeeze all this data through this presupposition and on the other end is going to kind come out the thing I wanted to come out anyway, I wanted this to be old so I can say, hey, look, Matthew, Mark and Luke don't do the exact same thing that John does. John must be later, because it's obviously a compendium of Christian doctrine that was developed. And then he's actually writing a catechetical piece for the Christian theology that existed 150 years after Christ, not an account of what happened during the life and times of Christ. I mean, give me a break. That's not proof. That is conjecture. All Right, I'm done. Sorry. Go ahead, Bruce.
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B
All right, Bruce.
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A
He's getting ready. Yeah, no, I've all £120 of them.
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D
I have a few thoughts. First, I would say I agree with what AB And Scott are saying about the anachronistic aspect of it. In fact, I think that anachronism reaches further than you guys have even said. But I also would want to just be cautious about one thing too. And we're talking about that, which is, you know, there's this presupposition, as Scott mentioned, that like. So the general, I guess, most widely accepted one is like, Mark is written first and then probably Matthew and then probably Luke, Acts, and then probably John. There's some disagreement on whether Matthew has written first or Mark, but most scholars would say Mark is written first and they believe that because it's the shortest one.
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B
So this is.
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D
This presupposition is that you get Mark, who doesn't have a strong resurrection story and is a short gospel. And then the later gospels are filling in more details, so they're getting longer and longer. And that's part of the reason why John is later is because it's longer and it's got this high Christology. But that's of course, presupposing that,
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C
that
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D
each one of these gospels is sort of making things up instead of actually filling in the details. So, like, it's true what Adam said about the blessed and not using Yahweh and stuff like that. But I also think it's important to just remember if you believe that Scripture is divinely inspired, you do have statements where Jesus would have actually been saying things like he is God in John. And I think we're sometimes too quick to dismiss and buy into the argument that, oh, because John's such a later Gospel, we can't really count it as Jesus saying he was God. You know, it's not a legitimate source to claim that Jesus was God because Matthew, Mark and Luke are less overt about that. I find this a little bizarre when that argument is made for a bunch of reasons. I mean, the whole argument is that the church invented the divinity of Christ and that the original source material, particularly Matthew, Mark and Luke, goes the argument, you know, you don't see this. You don't see Jesus claiming to be God this way. So you, you automatically. The argument assumes that if you go to the earliest church source material outside of the Bible, right? If you go to Clement, if you go to things like the Didache, if you go to Ignatius, like the. The earliest Christian writings that exist outside the Bible where Jesus is clearly God. This argument against Jesus being God says, oh, you can't count that because the church is making that up at that time. So the earliest witnesses to the Bible, the first commentators ever on the Bible, are claiming that Jesus is God. And the arguments say, well, you can't, they're not right, because they're, they're dying. You know, Ignatius is on his way to be martyred and he's dying for a, for a God that isn't a God, you know, dying for just a man. It doesn't make sense. And the second thing that I think is frustrating is this idea that unless he overtly says it like he does in John, then there's no indication that he actually believed himself to be the Son of man, that he believed himself to be divine. And I find that bizarre too. The different Gospel writers are writing to different audiences and they're trying to convince those audiences of who Jesus is. And the way they're usually doing it 9 out of 10 times is by taking Old Testament imagery and statements and sayings and applying them to Jesus and his sayings and ministry to indicate that he is the long foretold Messiah who is in fact the Son of God. It's actually more credible to think that these writers who are trying to convince people of Jesus's divinity would spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with the pre source material which we call the Old Testament. So for example, like Son of man. Son of man's a different term than Messiah, right? So Messiah in the Old Testament is seen as just a human office. It's not assumed to be a divine office in any way. But Son of Man is a divine office. It's in many ways a more important and higher office than Messiah because the Son of Man in Daniel is seen as the king of the universe. Essentially he's the cosmic king. So when Jesus is claiming himself to be the Son of man, say in Mark, he's making reference to this figure that's much higher up than Messiah. And Jesus is in Mark in particular. If we take Mark to be the earliest one, for example, if we, if we just assume that in this, for the sake of argument, Mark is constantly making allusions to the Old Testament that his readers would have recognized Mark was putting in as fulfillment pieces. So for example, there's so many of these, but like one of them would be when Jesus is walking on the water and, and he's, and he calms the winds and the waves. And that's one of the statements In Mark, where he actually says, you know, I am, but only in the Old Testament, only God has the power over the wind and the waves, right? Tell them what to do.
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C
Maybe today, too.
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D
And it says, yeah, and it says that he passed them by. That's the phrase that's used in Mark. That phrase is a direct phrase from the Old Testament that's used multiple times after God appears to someone and. And then leaves. It uses that exact phrase, and he passed them by. And Mark uses this phrase multiple times when Jesus performs a miracle. So if your whole argument is just, no, I need to hear Jesus say the words, I am God in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, or I don't think he's divine. Well, I'm sorry, you're asking for a level of proof that's kind of silly, because what the actual gospel authors are trying to do is to try to show you that Jesus is the fulfillment of these characters, like the Messiah, like the Son of Man. And it's supposed to become obvious by actually being careful to interact with the source material instead of just some wacko going around saying he's God. You have to demonstrate that he is who he says he is, not just have him say it.
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C
Can I give an example of that, Bruce, please? Because I think that those are all great points. You were pointing out some things in Mark, Matthew 9. I'm just going to. I promise to our listeners who aren't used to someone reading. I'm not going to read that long, but just hold tight with me.
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A
It's the Bible though, right? So it's good.
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C
It is the Bible. I know we are allowed to read the Bible or the Lutheran Confessions. Those are the two things we are allowed to read on this show.
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B
That's right.
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C
Okay. Matthew, chapter nine. And getting into a boat, he crossed over and came to his own city. And behold, some people brought to him a paralytic lying on a bed. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven. And behold, some of the scribes said to themselves, this man is blaspheming. But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, why do you think evil in your hearts for which is easier to say your sins are forgiven, or to say, rise and walk, but that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. He then said to the paralytic, rise, pick up your bed and go home. And he rose and went home. When the crowd saw it, they were afraid and they glorified God, who had given such authority to to men. Okay, everything you brought up in your argument, Bruce is in here, right? The fact that he's demonstrating he's God by forgiving sins, that when he forgives sins, the teachers of the law automatically recognize that that means that he's claiming to be God. So much so that they start grumbling that they're blaspheming. He proves he's God by reading their minds. Okay. And then making a point to them. To say, hey, anyone can say your sins are forgiven doesn't mean they're forgiven. But to show you that when I say it, they are forgiven, I'm going to prove that I can do a miraculous thing that only God can do, too. Whatever bones, whatever sinew, whatever nerves and synapses, muscles or whatever were destroyed to make this man a paralytic, they're now healed. Take up your bed, your mat, and walk and go home. And he does it. Like, if that's not claiming to be. Oh, and by the way, uses also the Son of Man reference that you were talking about from Daniel in that little section of Matthew, not John. Matthew. You have at least three or four things going on there where Jesus is absolutely claiming to be God and demonstrating it. We won't get into the interesting thing. Jesus saw their faith, the faith of his friends.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And then said, your sins are forgiven. That's pretty cool. I like it. But.
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B
All right, so the. There's a. There's a kind of a interesting theme here with the Prove it that I like that you brought up Bruce that my. My dad was just on, too, because this ties back into, you know, something brought up, I don't know, four or five episodes ago when I gave, like, this facetious thing you'll hear, which is you can claim to be the best thing in the world, but you have to, you know, and I use, like, you can blame it to be the best skateboarder in the world, but until you actually prove it, or whatever it is, whatever thing it is. And what you said, Bruce, is if you just walk around claiming to be God, of course you could do that, right? Like a. A crazy person could just walk around proving or claiming to be God. It's that the ministry, the entire ministry of Christ is set up to demonstrate that specifically, the thing, as we've said, that gets him killed is this constant claiming of the authority that only God would have. So one of the most common ones through his ministry is the healing as a sign of the forgiveness of sins, which he then claims that he has forgiven their sins. And then the Healing is a sign of this. And then the question of his authority keeps coming up over and over, over again. And it makes me, when Christians or modern people do this, it's sort of like you can see why the scribes and the Pharisees had a motivation for questioning his authority as God over and over again. It would destroy their entire sort of comprehension of the Old Testament, their entire religious system. Today, when you see people do this, I'm most confused by confused. But you can see there's something else going because whoever is saying is trying to direct somebody's, a Christian's attention to hey, look at your Bible and see that Jesus never claimed to be God, is trying to validate something about the Bible. They've moved past the effort of just saying like, oh, it contradicts itself. It doesn't make any sense. The book has no historic value. They've moved past that argument. They're trying to say, hey, the Bible is recording true information. It's a good historical document. They've given all of that up and now they're going to you and saying, but look it, Jesus never claimed to be God. So the religion built up around this book is the problem. It's not the book, it's not the information therein. It's that Christians have made up a claim that the teacher in this book didn't.
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C
And that's exactly what the devil did to Jesus when he tried to tempt him. Just saying.
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D
And, and you know, the Matthew and Luke have, you know, resurrection stories, which are pretty important and should say something about Jesus's divinity. And I, again, I just think it's really important that people recognize that what those gospels are trying to do, all four of them, is to show that Jesus isn't just God, a God. He is the specific God of the Old Testament that has been prophesied about for a very long time. And it's not enough for him to simply go around and say, I'm God. He has to demonstrate very specific things. He has to fulfill very specific prophecies. He has to meet a very high standard that's set out. And I get particularly frustrated, like I said, when these, the, the earliest accounts of Christianity that you have are, are that Jesus is God. And yet this argument completely dismisses those. I mean, we're talking like the Didache, like that may be the earliest work outside the Bible that we have very early on. I mean, that book opens up with there are two ways, a way of life and a way of death, which is a deuterocanonical Like a, like a Deuteronomy based Jewish way of, of opening the text. So a lot of scholars have said this text is so early, it actually still writes and speaks like, like it's Jewish, even though it's a Christian text. And in that little work, which was a church manual to train, we think it was to, we know it's a church manual. We think it was to train young pastors or deacons. We're not entirely sure of that. Could have just been a manual used in church like a missile would be used in Catholicism today. We're not sure. But this very early work clearly has the Last Supper in it and Jesus being seen as God. So it's frustrating to say, well, our earliest sources that are interpreting the four gospels are saying Jesus is God. And then people saying, well, you can't use those sources because the church is already inventing Jesus as God by that time. Well, when did that take place? When did they start inventing Jesus as God to the point where they're willing to die for him and be martyred in horrible, terrible ways? Which is what most of the early Christian literature is. It's martyrdom stories.
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B
Well, it's kind of the same thing with the apostles, right, where you have this, you know, you have this recurring thing where it's like, well, the apostles maybe can alluded together to make it up or something like that. And so they could get super rich. Yeah, so they could get super rich and have influence and power even. Is it Alex o', Connell, he pointed this out recently. He goes this, yeah, o'. Connor. He even kind of big famous atheist voice right now or agnostic voice right now, but that it's ridiculous to think that there's no historical precedent for that these guys gained anything, that it would be insane to have died unilaterally for something they all knew together was a lie and that one person selling them out could have prevented such a horrible death or something like that for these early Christian apostles and martyrs. I also think that this works today. So this my guess, you know, this is part where you do a little speculation. My guess why this is recurring, why I've seen it so many times in various feeds, is because it relies on the fact that it's a quick hit of information. Hey guys, Jesus never claimed to be God. Look at all these verses where it really seems like he actually claims the opposite. Like where he says the Father is greater than I, or there's a list of these, or why would God pray to himself in the garden? That doesn't make Any sense, if you're God, you don't need to pray. All this kind of information lines up very quickly on social media and relies on the low amount of effort and reading comprehension that people have. So then all of a sudden you have people who go, you know, in Sunday school, you're right, I did never. I never came across the words, I'm God in any lesson I've ever read in the Bible. That's crazy. And so then you get this. You know, you're preying on people who probably have a ton of exposure to the Bible in their childhood and through high school or, you know, through Bible stories and Sunday school and church. And then you get them thinking and they go, yeah, I never heard those words. Wow, nobody's ever thought of this before. Jesus didn't claim to be God kind of situation, which is kind of what you're saying is you have to preemptively kind of teach this, what you guys have been saying, which is you're not looking for the words per se. I am God, though. There are, like we said, there are examples of like the before Abraham was I am. And we also, we focus on the I am part of that statement. But I do think it's really substantial. You can't skip the before Abraham, because this is, you know, these Jews are claiming to be the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, right? This is like the before your promise. I'm not a, you know, I'm not a Jew like you. I'm before Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I'm God. You know, there's a lot going on here with that. And so you have to kind of train people, I think, to look for. This is, as Bruce was saying, this is the authority that God has given in the Old Testament. This is the life of Jesus. A whole ministry which is meant to demonstrate I fulfill these character traits, these qualities, this divine name, I fulfill it. And so his ministry is then one of fulfilling the who God is the God of Christianity, the creator of the universe, the Savior, the one with the authority to forgive sins. The one with the authority to set up the church and worship of him. The one who. With the authority to die or to judge. You know, this is throughout here, even other title like Bruce brought up or one of you guys brought up, Son of Man. This is the title of the King of God's kingdom given throughout the Old Testament. John the Baptist then declares that Christ is the kingdom of God in their midst. So you have this thing where how could the kingdom of God be present? And the King of God's kingdom be present if God himself is not amongst you. This is. There's a lot in the New Testament. It's not an isolated claim. And it's also why the earliest church fights over this. The creeds are established in large part because of this, which is even later. But then the epistles. So even if you said Paul was making it up, these epistles are quite early. And this is what works out to be Christianity is this collection from the New Testament which is centered on this claim that Jesus Christ was God, that the authority to forgive sins, create you as a new creature to baptize you in his name, all of these things. And so it's. I don't know, it's kind of ridiculous to see the Bible as valuable, authoritative or historical, even book at all. These New Testament books have any value at all. And then claim like, well, the earliest Christians completely made up a fiction based on them.
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D
Can I just add, Caleb, just people to be a equal opportunity conspiracy theorist if you're going to go down that road. And what I mean by that is like if you, if you come across something on social media, like what you mentioned Caleb, like some of the stuff, well, you know, why would God pray to himself? And why would. And you. And your brain starts to light up and go, oh my gosh, I never thought about this before. That's a good point. Oh wow, that's. That's right.
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B
It's conspiracy.
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D
And they broach. He starts be an equal opportunity conspiracy theorist. And at least like just stop for a moment and be like, you know, this religion has been around for 2,000 years. It's been the height of Western civilization. It's had some of the brightest minds in the entire history of the world contribute to its truth claims. You think you might want to just pause for a second, take a deep breath and think this has probably been discussed before and maybe there's some good reasons for why what seems at first to be an aha, gotcha kind of thing probably actually isn't and has a
- [35:07]
C
brilliant and well, there's always the idea that I thought of the one thing that's going to break it, right? Nobody's 2,000 years somebody's been trying to break this thing and hasn't really done it yet. But you know what I got?
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B
Well, there's a word for this.
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D
I do this to myself.
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B
I think you're in the mic. The most intelligent period in human history. Right. Like where like all of the. The brilliant minds before must have been
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C
dumber than like, yeah, chronological snobbery like on display?
- [35:35]
D
Exactly. Like sometimes I'll hear stuff that for me, even though I've studied Islam, not at the level like Adam has, but now on Instagram, you know, there'll be a lot of pro Muslim, like apologists that you have access to, which I had never seen before. So I'll sometimes watch some of their stuff or sometimes I'll watch someone who is against Islam, who's a Christian apologist, but they'll say something like, I'm like, is that really in the like Quran? Is that really, Is that really true? Like, does that really. Do they really think that? Because I'm like, that's crazy if that's true, you know, and then, but what I always do is I then try to go to an Islamic source or authority and be like, what's their explanation on this? Because I don't ever want to engage a Muslim and be like, gotcha. And then look like a fool. Because I didn't really understand what they say about that potential, you know, discrepancy or weird thing. And I just would hope they would do the same with Christianity. I mean, that's not to say there couldn't be weird, crazy things on either side, but like, you can't just immediately hear it for your first time and be like, oh my gosh, yeah. And then add it to your bank of gotcha ammunition. It's just, it's not a smart way and it's not fair to someone else's belief system.
- [36:48]
A
A gotcha on Christianity is really easy.
- [36:51]
C
Yeah.
- [36:53]
A
If you didn't rise from the dead.
- [36:55]
C
That's right.
- [36:56]
A
You know, we've all wasted our time. Western civilization has wasted 2,000 years. And it'd be easier to disprove Christianity going after that than sort of like coming up with some novel, like special insightful reading of the New Testament that nobody else has thought of for 200 years.
- [37:19]
C
It's also the only religious belief that I'm aware of that that gives you the formula of how to defeat it. Paul says exactly that in 1 Corinthians 15:17. Right? 15:17. Did I get that right? I hope I did.
- [37:33]
A
Yeah.
- [37:34]
C
And at the end of the day, where do you see that? Is there a part in the Quran where it says, well, if you want to prove that this is all a load of crap, this is what you need to do, or even sort of less dogmatic things like some Eastern religion, I don't think you get in them the way to completely disprove all of the things I've said here or that have been said here is to do this. But you get that in Christianity, it's because it is falsifiable epistemologically, it's dialed in like that. And it's almost like the real God, who sort of is the one that fashioned the way we think rationally, was able to say, hey, not only is this all true, but I'm going to give this to you in a way like maybe part of his plan was all along that I'm going to give you this Messiah, this salvation in a way where you can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it, touch it, which is how your brain works. And you're going to hear him make the claims. You're going to see him do the things that prove the claims. And then even the final claim, the one that touches us all, his death and resurrection. I'm going to make it so that enough people see that. And then I'm going to bring a really smart guy into the mix that says, hey, you know how you beat this thing? You beat this thing. If you can show that Christ didn't raise from the dead. By the way, I'm going to also, in this same part of Scripture, I'm going to give you the names of the people that saw him raised from the dead so that you can go talk to him. Come on.
- [39:10]
D
I think your point. Sorry, go ahead.
- [39:12]
A
Engraved on Rod Rosenblatt's headstone is 1 Corinthians 15:20. But in fact, he rose from the dead.
- [39:20]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:21]
A
Christianity is vindicated. It can be falsified. It is contingent upon facts, the way no other religion is. And in particular, a very narrow point and also a point that you could. I don't know that It'd be easy 2000 years on, but certainly would have been easy in May of AD 33 to show that he didn't rise from the dead.
- [39:50]
C
It's funny, the one that's like the
- [39:52]
A
one that says motive and opportunity to do so.
- [39:56]
C
This is the truth. And I'm wearing. Is also the one that is the most verifiable and or falsifiable if one. It's. It just. I think, Come on.
- [40:07]
B
This, this kind of critique has more to do. Usually the one we've been talking about with, you know, Jesus never claimed to be God, has more to do with like eroding the authority of the church. And funny enough, like, even though it's more substantial to the resurrection of Christ than it is to his immoral authority of the. As a teacher, but the moral authority of the church to Establish particular things. Which is why I think this argument is borrowed from religious groups, really. Right. Like this is borrowed from Aryans or other Christian heresies. It's borrowed from Islam. It's not, as you said, it's not the most poignant, just Christianity is false kind of thing. It falls more in the secret knowledge camp of things, which is if you could read the Bible with this piece of information, then you would get something true out of it. If you could read the Bible understanding that Jesus never claimed to be God, then you could be part of this movement that knows that the organizational church has been corrupt for thousands of years. First it was Rome, but the Protestants fell into the same thing. It's the whole, the problem is Christians and their authority and their ability to control things, and it's because they read their Bible wrong. And if you could just get the glasses on to see that Jesus didn't claim to be God, then you'd be free from the oppression of that system and you'd know the truth. Yeah.
- [41:43]
D
And can I add to that, I think like Adam said, this is, this kind of idea of Jesus not claiming to be God is probably 200, 250 years old in academic literature, but I think the modern appeal of it, why people are kind of like it. And you know, Erdman has done a lot of work, Bart Erdman has done a lot of work on this and others. I think if, and to Scott's earlier point like that, it's kind of demonic, the best way to sort of get people to accept a Jesus without the true Jesus is to give you a morally righteous Jesus that you can follow. And I think that's what's happening here is, you know, if you can, if you can make the claim Jesus never claimed to be God that was later invented by the church to suppress you and oppress you and to stop you from doing. But, but we don't want to get rid of Jesus. He was a great moral teacher, he was a great light in history and he taught us how to love and he taught us how to. So what happens is you get to co op Jesus for your kind of moral political ends and you can say, no, I'm not anti Jesus, I'm not anti Christian. I, I mean he, he did a lot of great things, but he wasn't God. And so you, you kind of put things back into work's righteousness. Right. So it's like, well, what's the importance of Jesus for the world? Well, the importance of Jesus the world is he taught us the way he taught us how to live. He taught us how to love. He taught us how to be good people. He taught us how to make a great society. He taught us how to speak truth to power. He taught us how to do, you know, a peaceful protest. And on and on and on and on and on. And that's the Jesus that everybody then hugs and says, yeah, Jesus is a great guy. And that's the Dionic nature of it is you strip him of his divinity and you exalt him as a moral authority and then you co opt him to be used for your own agenda. And I think that's what I see is that's usually how I see it actually gets played out.
- [43:35]
B
I think you're completely right, Bruce. I just saw one of these the other day that was like, you know, some, some sort of activist for, you know, you know, left wing homosexual behavior.
- [43:48]
C
Well then that guy that just won the, the Democrat senate election in Texas.
- [43:54]
D
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:55]
C
He's making arguments that the Annunciation is an argument for abortion.
- [43:59]
D
And he was quoting the Gospel of Thomas the other day about gender. And you know, there's, you know, God doesn't.
- [44:06]
B
Yeah.
- [44:07]
A
That a woman must become a man in order to be saved. Yeah, that stuff.
- [44:11]
B
Yep.
- [44:11]
A
That's interesting.
- [44:12]
B
And you get this weird. You just get this weird like, well, the most important part of the Bible is that Jesus said you need to love. And you're like, well, that's, you know, not the most important part of the Bible. The most important part of the Bible might be that Jesus is God and he died for your sins. That might be the most important part of the Bible because if he wasn't, I'm not sure his command to love everybody matters at all. To be.
- [44:39]
D
Well, this is where, this is where Augustine's great, right. Because everyone who's going to hell is going to hell because they love really well. They just love what they love. Well, is wrong. Love is what's sending them to hell.
- [44:50]
B
Bruce. I'm okay. That's the thumbnail. You're going to hell because of love. That's the. Or love is sending you. There you go.
- [44:57]
D
St. Augustine. It's the wrong kind of love, Right. It's loving the wrong thing or loving something that's the right thing in the wrong way. That's sin from Augustine. I think it's a very profound view of sin. It's not just like you did, you were naughty. It's that your heart, your, your entire desire was set against God. And so what sin is, for Augustine is a love of something wrongly so when people are like, wow, God just wants you to love, Augustine would be like, what kind of love? You know, what is the object of it? What is the point of it? Because love is. Love is what you could say. You know, I love. I love myself. So therefore I'm going to commit some crime against another neighbor because I have a. I'm entitled to it because I just love myself so much.
- [45:47]
A
I mean, right?
- [45:48]
D
I love my country. So that gives me a blank check to do whatever I want. Whatever. Fill in the blank. I love my kids, so I'm going to cheat on the SAT scores because it's better for them to get into a good. It always comes down to love, sin.
- [46:03]
B
Well, guys, I think this was a good episode. This is a fun one. I would say, take heart. Not only did Jesus claim to be God, he actually fulfilled it. He actually fulfilled that claim and that requirement. So it's better. It is better than he claimed to be God, in fact. So that's the takeaway for me for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed this. If you did, make sure to subscribe to the show, but also to share it with family and friends. We were encouraged to talk about that more. That was and is one of the fastest ways that podcasts can grow. In fact, I was sitting somewhere just the other day and heard like, three people talking about their favorite podcasts to one another. Wouldn't it be great if we did that for these shows here at 1517, our favorite podcast on the 1517 Podcast Network? So if you enjoy the thinking fellows, make sure to share it with people in your life. We thank you for listening. We will catch you next time. Bye.
- [46:59]
C
Bye.