Transcription
You [Music] Thanks. Actually, I think they asked me to talk on the Jesus thank you is God. So, but I'm happy to talk on a resurrection if you guys want. But anyway, wonderful to be here. I love when they asked me to come to Corpus Christi for this. I was just really happy because I love Corpus Christi. This is my second or third time here and honestly it's my favorite place to go in Texas. It's just beautiful here.
I used to live in Virginia Beach. Yeah, I used to live in Virginia Beach and I miss it. I live in Atlanta now. I do teach at HBU, but I live in Atlanta. So, long commute on Mondays. Actually, I do teach several courses for them online. I'm full-time faculty there, but I do teach online. I teach for a lot of the athletes, for the nursing students, and then I teach for graduate students. A lot of graduate students learn; they do a master's degree in Christian apologetics online. You can do it from anywhere in the world. We've got people from all over the country in our Master of Arts in Christian apologetics who are taking it entirely online.
So, I teach classes for them that way, but I travel a lot. Since we moved to Atlanta 14 years ago or somewhere around that from Virginia Beach, my wife and I really miss the beach. Boy, coming down here, I just love Corpus Christi. It's so beautiful here. But I do get to travel quite a bit. I travel; I'm on the road 70, 80 or more days a year, usually going in the U.S., sometimes outside. A lot of times we get to go to cool places like this or meet good people.
Palm Sunday weekend, I was up in Virginia Beach, and I did a Saturday morning seminar at the church. Then I brought the worship services for Palm Sunday on, and so I had a great time. Well, that Sunday night, the pastor and his wife took my wife and I out to dinner. We went to this really nice Italian restaurant, and we were just having a great time with him sitting there.
At one point, the pastor leaned forward and he said, “Did you guys ever watch the television series Lost? How many have seen Lost here?”
Yeah, okay, most. Yeah, so I saw, of course, my wife and I loved that series. We were just glued to it, and we didn't even watch it while it was on live; we waited until it was on Netflix. Then we were just hooked on it; couldn't wait to see.
Well, he said, “Okay, well, do you remember the guy that played John Locke?” We said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, don't look behind you, but he is sitting in the booth right behind you.” Really?
Well, the interesting thing is I ended up getting my picture taken with him, and you can see it here. There it is. See? So [laughter] I do get to meet some cool people.
Anyway, next slide. So we're going to be talking about John, Paul, and the Fab Four on Jesus. But you think I'm talking about the Beatles, right? No, I'm talking about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We're going to have to see what they have to say about Jesus.
So the question we're going to be addressing in this session is: Did Jesus regard himself as divine? Now, I want to say that whatever we're not going to be talking about here, we're not necessarily asking the question, "Does the Bible say that Jesus was divine?" I mean God by that, okay? Did he say he was God?
When Jehovah's Witnesses come to your door, one of the main issues with which you can have a discussion with them is: Did Jesus think he was God? Does the New Testament claim that Jesus was God? All we have to do is show them certain verses where he did. And of course, you know they have certain verses and we can answer them, and then we can give them certain verses to show that Jesus claimed to be God.
If you're interested in knowing how to answer Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, I have a free book for download on my website. My website is risenjesus.com. Risenjesus.com. Click on the resources tab, then click on books and scroll to the bottom, and you can click on that and get a free download on how to answer Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses when they knock on your door. That is not what I'm going to be addressing in this session.
But that question would be: Does Jesus claim to be God in the New Testament? Alright, that's not what I'm going to be addressing. I'm going a little bit different here, and I'll tell you why. When the North American Mission Board hired me back in 2004, I worked for them for six years. They hired me as their director of apologetics evangelism. When I interviewed for the position, they showed me around; they showed me what they'd been doing, and they said, “So what do you think?”
I said, “You guys have been doing some fantastic work on Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses, the Watchtower, but you have got a hole in what you've been doing here that you could drive a train through.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Of all the non-believers that Christians come in contact with, what percentage of them would you say are Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons?”
"Twenty percent?" I said.
“Oh no, about 10%?”
“No, not at all, not even close.”
“5%?”
“No, no, 2% maybe.”
“Well then why have you spent nearly 100% of your time preparing Southern Baptists to answer 2% or less of the non-believers with whom they come in contact? What do you think?”
I said, “Well, who are the majority of non-believers out there? They're atheists and agnostics. Why aren't we preparing Southern Baptists to answer them and to have intelligent discussions with them?”
“You're hired.”
So, that began my work at the North American Mission Board. When you're talking to Jehovah's Witnesses, you can answer the question: Did Jesus claim to be God as it's in the New Testament? All you have to do is show them verses.
But when you're talking to a skeptic, an agnostic, an atheist, a Muslim who does not accept the Bible as God's word, they might say, “Well, the Bible says Jesus is God. I don't believe the Bible.” So what do you do then?
So that's what I'm going to do is apply historical method and show and give you a historical argument for why we should believe that not only does the Bible claim that Jesus is God, but why we should believe that the Bible is really correct here, that Jesus did indeed claim to be God, that he thought he was God. You understand the difference here?
I'm going to try to prepare you to address the skeptics. If you want to know how to address the Jehovah's Witnesses, go on my website, get that free download. Now we're going to talk about how to address skeptics.
We're not assuming that the Bible is divinely inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative, or even historically reliable. It's: What can we prove with reasonable historical certainty? I'm going to give you some historical reasons for believing that Jesus thought he was divine and he thought he was God.
I'm going to give you two key truths regarding it’s more probable than not that Jesus claimed to be divine. When we say more probable than not, what do I mean by that? More probable than not. When we talk about historical investigation, some things are more certain than others.
We have more historical evidence to suggest that Jesus died by crucifixion than we have that for the virgin birth. It doesn't mean we shouldn't believe the virgin birth; I'm just saying if we approach this purely as a historical question apart from faith, we have far more evidence that Jesus died by crucifixion than that he was born of a virgin.
When it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, we have fantastic evidence to suggest that Jesus rose from the dead. In fact, I assess the evidence or the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead as very certain. The evidence we have that Jesus claimed to be God is not as good as the evidence we have for the resurrection, but I'd say it's more probable than not.
So it's still good enough to believe historically speaking that Jesus claimed to be God; it's just not as good as we have for the resurrection. Alright, so that's how I've nuanced this again.
Again, I'm not coming at this to say, “Well, the Bible says that; I believe it, that settles it for me.” It might settle it for me, but it's not going to settle it for the skeptic with whom you're discussing, right? They're going to say, “I don't care what you believe; I only care what you can prove.” So I'm going to give you evidence for it.
So, two key truths that render it more probable than not that Jesus claimed to be divine:
Key truth number one: The earliest Christians— that is, Jesus' apostles—regarded Jesus as divine.
What's the evidence for this? Let's go to the earliest Christian writings. Philippians 2:6-11. One of the, you know, the New Testament is comprised of 26 books and letters written by no less than nine authors over several decades of period. Philippians is one of the earliest letters, probably written around the year 60, within 30 years of Jesus' death. There's a hymn in it; it's called the Kenosis hymn, chapter 2:6-11, which many scholars think Paul is embedding this in there; that Paul didn't come up with this; it's just an early Christian hymn.
But it tells us about some Christian doctrine, and here's what the hymn says:
“While existing in the form of God, Jesus did not regard being equal to God something to be held on to, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and was born in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason God exalted him greatly and gave to him the name that is above every name, in order that at Jesus' name every knee may bow, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue may profess that the Lord is Jesus Christ to the glory of God the Father.”
Now, let's look at this a little bit at a time, and I want to show you why they had such a high view of Jesus.
"While existing in the form of God..." The question is, what does that mean, "existing in the form of God?" The Greek word here is "morphe." It contrasts with the form of a servant. It's not in the form of God with the form of a human; it's the form of God with the form of a servant. And the difference between human and servant— you've got the essence if we're talking human, but when we talk about servant, we're talking about a role, right? A status or a role.
So since the early Christians here, Paul, are contrasting the form of God with the form of a servant, he's really saying is Jesus existed in the role of God, and he emptied himself. He didn't regard being equal with God something that he wasn't going to hold on to. So, he emptied himself and took on the role of a slave, a servant.
He was born in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death on a cross. For this reason, God exalted him greatly and gave to him the name that is above every name.
Now, if I were to ask you, what was the name that he received? Many of you would say, “What? Jesus.” And I said that too! I mean, after all, what was that hymn? Jesus' name above all names, beautiful Savior, right, from the 1970s. But it dawned on me several years ago that can't be what it is. After all, what name did he have before his death? Jesus!
Now, really! So he dies his death on the cross and God gives him the name, the same name he had. Well, thanks a lot for that reward; I had that before I went through all that.
What's interesting to note is that the Greek word for name is "onoma," and it also can mean title. Now think about this: instead of thinking name, think title. Because Jesus subjected himself to death on the cross, God exalted him and gave him the title that is above every other title.
So that at Jesus' title, every knee will bow and every tongue will profess that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” That comes from Isaiah. Isaiah 45, God says, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth. I am God and there is not another. I have sworn by myself. My words have gone forth from my mouth in righteousness and will not turn back. That to me every knee will bow; every tongue will profess to God.”
In this chapter of Isaiah, we have God who says no less than eight times in that chapter, “I am God. I'm the only God. There is no other God but me.” And then after saying all those times, it says, “And to me every knee will bow and every tongue will profess to God.” And this is what the early Christians attributed to Jesus.
To Jesus, every knee will bow and every tongue will profess to God. This is amazing! They’re taking a verse that applied to Yahweh in the Old Testament, and they're applying it to Jesus in the earliest times of the Christian Church, and they're going to say that the Lord is Jesus Christ.
Now, some English translations say that Jesus Christ is Lord. That makes it just a little bit vague. In the Greek, the word "kurios" (Lord) appears first in that clause. They're going to profess that the Lord is Jesus Christ. It's there to bring emphasis; that's why they put it first in the clause. They're saying that Jesus is no less than Yahweh.
This is amazing! He existed in the role of God; he gave that up, took on the role of a servant; he died the humble death on the cross. God exalted him and gave him the title above every other.
What's the highest title? Is it President? Is it Prime Minister? It's Lord! God is going to give him the title above every other title so that at Jesus' title, and then they apply a verse that applies to Yahweh in the Old Testament and attribute it to Jesus. They're going to profess that the Lord Yahweh is Jesus Christ.
Well, the earliest Christians, that is, the apostles, this comes from Paul, believed that and were proclaiming that Jesus is no less than Yahweh.
Romans 10:9, written at the same time as Philippians, and Paul says this: “If you profess with your mouth the Lord is Jesus,” same thing, Lord because first in that clause, “and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
One question is, what does he mean when he says, “If you profess with your mouth the Lord is Jesus?” If you do that, you'll be saved. Four verses later, verse 13: “For whoever, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
So if you profess with your mouth the Lord is Jesus, you'll be saved, for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Well, where does Paul get that from? He gets it from Joel 2:32: “And it will come about that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Who's Joel referring to? Yahweh! And Paul is taking this and he's applying it to Jesus, saying Jesus is Yahweh. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. You can profess with your mouth the Lord Jesus.
This is pretty strong stuff. Here's another one: 1 Thessalonians 3:13. 1 Thessalonians is probably the oldest piece of Christian literature in our New Testament, or period. It's probably the first that had been written in the late 40s, with less than 20 years after— somewhere between 15 and probably 15 and 18 years after Jesus died.
And here Paul writes about the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones. Well, now, look at what he's referring to from the Old Testament: “The Lord my God will come and all the holy ones with him” in Zechariah 14:5.
Who do you think Paul is saying Jesus is here? It's not really ambiguous here; he's saying Jesus is God.
So, the earliest Christians, Jesus' apostles, were saying Jesus is God. So now how do we know that this wasn't just Paul the Apostle saying it? How do we know the other apostles were saying it as well?
Well, we know from Galatians chapter 1 and Galatians chapter 2 that Paul knew the other apostles. He met with Peter in Galatians 1. He went up to Jerusalem three years after his conversion; he met with Peter for 15 days. He saw James, the brother of Jesus, as well.
Fourteen years later, he goes back up. He runs the Gospel message past them that he had been preaching in Galatians 2, now to make sure he's preaching the same thing they’re preaching, and they said, “Yep, awesome! Good job! Keep up the good work, brother.” And so they're saying he's preaching the same thing they're preaching.
Peter had a disciple of his own later on named Clement of Rome, and Clement referred to Paul and Peter on the same level and called him the blessed Paul the Apostle. John had a disciple called Polycarp. Some of you young’uns in here, you remember, you're going to get pregnant someday; you have a son, and some of these names, you know, just remember Polycarp.
Alright, so Polycarp was a disciple of John, and Polycarp said that Paul accurately and reliably taught the message of truth. And Polycarp ends up quoting from Paul's letters a couple of times and referring to them as part of the sacred scriptures.
This is amazing! It's unthinkable that if Paul's preaching this Gospel message, the message of truth, that something as basic as Jesus' identity wasn't included in that. Of course, it would have been! And so you have Paul saying the Jerusalem Apostles, Peter, James, and John certified that he's preaching the same thing they're preaching.
And you've got the disciples of two of those guys, Peter and John, pretty much saying Paul’s teaching is what they were teaching. I could give you more evidence as well, but that should suffice to show that when we’re hearing Paul on the Gospel message, the basics of the Christian faith, we are likewise hearing what the Jerusalem apostles were reporting.
So if Paul’s teaching that Jesus was God, we can be certain, historically speaking, that it is— so were Jesus' apostles, the other apostles who had walked with him.
Okay, so key truth number one: The earliest Christians, Jesus' apostles, regarded him as divine. And notice this is not at all to assume that the Bible is reliable, is it? It's just to take it and say, “What can we get out of it?” Looking at it as historians, what is it that we can know with certainty?
Without saying that this is divinely inspired, just looking at this historically, what can we conclude? We can certainly conclude that the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as God.
That's key truth number one. That leads us to key truth number two: The best explanation for key truth number one is Jesus claimed to be divine, as evidence in the New Testament suggests.
We think about it: If the earliest Christians, who were pious monotheistic Jews, were claiming within just a few years of Jesus’ death that he was God, where do you think they got that idea? If Jesus never claimed to be God, why are all the leaders— those who walked with him, those who were out proclaiming the message— saying he's God?
It wouldn't make sense for pious Jews to do that. The only reasonable explanation is that Jesus made such claims. And I think we could just stop right there and say there’s our case that Jesus claimed to be God: The earliest Christians were saying he was God and the most plausible explanation is that Jesus himself made such claims.
Are there any evidence in the New Testament that he actually claimed to be God? Yeah, there is! Let me give you some of that evidence, and I'm going to break this into two things: biography and Son of Man.
Let's look first at biography. Now, most scholars today think that the Gospels are ancient biographies. Now, there are different kinds of genres— there's history, there's biography. You go to the Old Testament; there are the historical books of the Old Testament, like Samuel, Kings, Chronicles.
There's what's called wisdom literature. This was standard literature back in those days, that's like Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon; that's called wisdom literature. You’ve got your prophetic books. You come to the New Testament, Acts is a history of the first three decades of the Christian Church.
You've got your epistles, your letters; you have Hebrews, which is a homily, a sermon. You've got Revelation, which is called apocalyptic literature, much on the same lines as like 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and some other Jewish literature like this.
Sorry! So it seems like when the Bible is written, God used the authors to write according to a genre that was contemporary with their time. So if they wanted to write about Jesus, wouldn't you use biography? Of course you would! You would use biography.
And we've got good reasons to think that the Gospels are ancient biographies. Let me just give you a few. Number one: In an ancient biography, the focus is on a main character in the history. The focus is on an era, a government, or an event. Like Thucydides in the fourth century wrote on the history of the Peloponnesian War. That's all it's about; you've got some big characters in there, but the whole thing is about a war, that's the big topic.
Or Tacitus's Annals of Rome that talks about some history of the Roman Empire. When you're talking about a biography, though, it's about the life of an individual. Of course you have others that are involved, but it's that focus is on that main character. Of course, that's what we have with the Gospels, right? The focus is on Jesus.
When you come to Acts, the focus isn't necessarily on a single person, you've got Peter, you've got Stephen, and you've got Paul— these big characters that Luke focuses on throughout. But it's mainly a history of the first three decades of the church and here's how these three main characters impacted it, and the Holy Spirit, of course.
But the Gospels are on one main person: Jesus. That's what a biography does. In an ancient biography, you had a little bit typically that discussed the ancestry of that person, and then it launched into that person's inauguration of their public life.
I think I mentioned this in the panel discussion last night, so it shouldn't all surprise you that there's very little about Jesus' childhood. It goes along the same kind of path that most ancient biographies did— a little about the person's lineage, where they came from, and then BOOM! right into their adulthood.
Most biographies don't have much at all on a person's childhood. That's another thing that lends us to believe the Gospels are ancient biographies. Ancient biographies were typically around ten to twenty thousand words; sometimes they could be a little less or a little bit more, but this was the general length.
The reason being is they didn't have Netflix, they didn't have DVDs; there was no television then. And the way that they learned and were entertained would be through the performance of reading literature usually after dinner or an oral tradition that was repeated, that would typically be memorized.
So you would read this biography in a single sitting; it would take a few hours to do, but that's what you did at night. You listened to someone read it or recited it as an oral performance. So the Gospels are that length as a typical biography would be. You can see how the Gospels fit right in with this category with this word length.
Mark on the lower end, a little over 11,000, and Luke at the highest end, right at a little over 19,000.
Number four: The main subject's character is illuminated through their words and deeds. This is really interesting! When I was a child, I remember one Christmas my mom got me this book, or Santa got this book for me, and it wasn't a coloring book, but when you opened the book up it had all these lines and you just couldn't make out what it was; it looked like just a bunch of scribble.
And it came with two sets of cardboard-like sunglasses, and one had these paper lenses that were like see-through cellophane, and the other lenses of the other pair were blue. It was like you put the blue pair on and you look at that page of all the scribble and it's like you know, you still— it was weird! You take that off and you put the red ones on it, whoa! And that it would like cancel out the things, and you really see what the picture was there.
It was pretty cool! How many of you had something like that?
Yeah, a lot of you! Okay, so that’s pretty neat! You just had to wear the right lenses. And there's a lot of questions that I found that I had with the Gospels, but once I viewed them through the lenses of ancient biography, some things just came to light that astonished me.
Let me give you an example because it relates directly to what we're talking about here. Many skeptics out there will say that there's an evolution of the view of Jesus in the Gospels. That Mark's Gospel is the earliest and he presents Jesus as a human, as the Messiah. And then as you go up, you come to Luke and he’s the Son of God at that time, and you come to John, and boy he’s full-blown God and deity in John, but not in Mark.
Well, watch this! When we read Mark as ancient biography, I'm going to show you in a minute, but I want to tell you a little of why we look at this. And this comes from Plutarch. Oh, not that Plutarch from The Hunger Games; the real Plutarch, who lived between around the year 40 and just after 120. Much of what we know from the ancient world comes from Plutarch.
And so he wrote a lot of things. Well, in the most frequently cited passage in Plutarch's biography of Alexander the Great, here's what he wrote, chapter 1: "It is not histories that I am writing." He’s not going to write a history, but lives. Lives was their way of saying biography; they didn't use the word biography; they said lives!
He's not writing a history; he's writing lives here, or biography, when he's talking about Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and others, okay? He says, "I'm writing lives, and in the most illustrious deeds, there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice. Nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall or the greatest armaments or sieges of cities.
Accordingly, just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes— where in the character shows itself— but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.”
What Plutarch is saying here is, “Look, I’m not writing the histories here; I'm writing biographies! And the objective of a biography is just like a painter is painting a portrait of a person, and they want to communicate through their eyes and so forth the kind of personality this person had. Who was this person? They want to do this in a picture.”
I'm going to pull up Plutarch, who says, “I'm going to try to do this in my biography of the person. So don’t get on me if I leave out important battles that this guy fought as a general. I’m trying to tell you who this person was! What were they like? What was the nature and essence of this person? That’s what I’m focusing on.”
Now keep that in mind as we do a really quick view through the Gospel of Mark. Watch this! Mark chapter 1: it opens by saying, “As Isaiah the prophet said, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God.”
And notice he’s not talking about Jesus coming to do that for God. He goes on in chapter 1 to talk about John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus. Mark chapter 1 pretty much opens up and says, “Hey! John the Baptist is coming to prepare the way for God, Jesus!” That’s chapter 1.
Chapter 2: Jesus forgives the sins of a paralytic and then heals him, and the Jewish leaders say, “You can't forgive sins! Only God can do that! That's blasphemy for you to say that! Only God can forgive sins.” And Jesus said, “Yep.”
Chapter 3: The Jewish leaders accused Jesus when he's exercising demons. “Oh, you're casting out your Satan, casting out Satan.” And Jesus gives this little parable and says, “Hey, if you want to go in, there's a strong man and you want to go in and rob his house; you can't do it unless you bind the strong man, and then you can go into his house and plunder his goods.”
And Jesus, by that, is saying guess what? The strong man is Satan! And when you see me expelling demons and doing exorcisms, that shows I'm only able to do that because I have bound Satan and now I'm plundering his kingdom— the people who are enslaved by Satan. I'm setting them free and I can only do that because I bound Satan!
What human can bind Satan?
Chapter 4: Jesus is on the boats and he’s asleep, and the boat’s getting ready to go under. The disciples wake him up, and he goes up and he speaks, and the winds and the waves calm. According to Psalm 89, Psalm 107, and Ecclesiastes 8, calming the wind is something God does.
Chapter 5: Jesus raises someone from the dead, which according to Ecclesiastes 8, only God can raise someone from the dead. They say, “Wait a minute! Peter raised someone from the dead; Paul raised someone from the dead; what about Elijah and Elijah, you know, they raised someone from the dead.”
All these raised people from the dead, but they did so by praying, and they did it in the name of Christ, appealing to God. Jesus did it on his own power, in his own word!
Mark 6: Jesus walks on water, according to Job 9:8. Only God walks on water.
Mark chapter 9: Jesus casts out a demon after he comes down from the Mount of Transfiguration. He comes down from the mountain, and his disciples are unable to cast out a demon. He does it, and later on his disciples say, “Why couldn't we do that?” He says, “Well, fellas, this kind of demon comes out only by praying to God.”
I could see Peter talking to Philip and saying, “He didn't pray!”
Mark chapters 12, 13, and 14: Jesus makes statements that he's not only David's son but he's also David’s Lord.
Mark chapter 14: Jesus— the apocalyptic Son of Man— who'll be worshiped and served in a manner that should only be given to God.
So the whole Gospel of Mark, from its very beginning and all throughout, is fairly clearly telling us about Jesus’ character, who he is. Remember, the painter is trying to communicate that to us through this smile and through the eyes. Whereas Plutarch says the biographer is trying to communicate through what the person says and what the person does or did.
What did Jesus say in doing the Gospel of Mark? By his very words and deeds, he's claiming to be God. Remember, in the Gospel of John, they said, “Hey, if you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” And Jesus said, “I have told you; the works that I do, they testify who I am.”
Let's go to the second evidence: Son of Man. So we talked about biography, and we see in Mark, the earliest Gospel, it’s very clear when you read it through the lenses of ancient biography; Mark is saying that Jesus is God. Jesus is in there saying it.
Now, who is the Son of Man? We just mentioned this apocalyptic Son of Man. We find the Son of Man in Daniel chapter 7 in the Old Testament. We find it in a piece of Jewish literature named 1 Enoch, which by the way, 1 Enoch is quoted in the letter of Jude in our toward the end of our New Testament.
1 Enoch was written— most of it was written sometime in the late first century BC and early first century AD. We’re not sure exactly, but somewhere in that period. And then later on they put in the section they added to it sometime in the late first century.
It's not Christian literature; it's Jewish legend. And 4 Ezra is probably second century. It all reads kind of similar. In fact, if you read 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra 3, they're a lot like Revelation. But it talks about the Son of Man, that apocalyptic Son of Man.
And in 4 Ezra, he's referred to as the Elect One, but in 1 Enoch and Daniel 7, he's called the Son of Man.
Now, I'm not going to read from these texts because it would take a lot of time. Let me just give you eight characteristics of the Son of Man, this apocalyptic Son of Man that you find in these texts:
1. He will appear as a light to the Gentiles.
2. He will appear before God.
3. He will appear before all mankind on the clouds of heaven.
4. God will make him preside over judgment.
5. He will wipe away all evil.
6. He will rule over all.
7. He will sit on a glorious throne.
8. He will be worshiped and served as only God is.
The God who shares his glory with no one! These are eight characteristics of this apocalyptic Son of Man that we find in Daniel 7, 1 Enoch, and 4 Ezra.
Now question: Did Jesus claim to be the Son of Man? What you know, and what is the Son of Man? You know, some would say, “Well, it's not a man in the Gospel of Mark; it just means he was human.”
No, we're talking about this kind of Son of Man. And here's what it is: Jesus says this in Matthew and Luke. For those of you who have studied this a little more, you've heard of the Q source.
Let me just fill you in if you've never heard of the Q source. It's not a mystery or anything like this. Scholars— I mean talking about conservative scholars— most New Testament scholars today acknowledge that the Gospel of Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their sources.
You say, “Well, why would Matthew, if he was a disciple of Jesus, why would he use Mark?” Well, because church tradition tells us that Mark had Peter, the lead apostle, as his primary source.
So, why not use Peter? Something based on Peter— because he was the lead apostle and authority. Moreover, Peter was with Jesus at certain events like the prayer in the garden, the raising of Jairus' daughter, the Transfiguration, where Matthew wasn't there. So there's going to be stories from that Peter knew that were going to be recorded in Mark that Matthew wasn't privy to because he wasn't there.
And Luke said he got his information from eyewitnesses, and of course, Peter would have been one of those. And so Mark would have pretty much been Peter's memoirs, to an extent.
So why not use that as an eyewitness? So here's the thing: If the story is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and scholars say, “Well, it probably comes from Mark as the source.”
If it’s in Matthew and Mark but not in Luke, they say that Matthew got the story from Mark. If it’s in Luke and Mark but not Matthew, Luke got the story from Mark. But there are over 200 verses in Matthew and Luke that are very similar, that are in Matthew and Luke sometimes almost word-for-word, but they're not in Mark.
So that leaves one of three options: either Luke used Matthew as a source, or Matthew used Luke as a source, or Matthew and Luke had a common source— be that oral tradition or a written source, and so most scholars think that it was this common source that they used.
And so they call that Q. And the reason being is the German word for source is "Quelle," and they just abbreviate that with the letter Q. That’s all Q is.
Now, do they know that there is a Q source? No! They think that there was a Q source. Was it oral tradition or was it written? We don’t know. Most scholars think it was written.
Was it a Gospel of its own? Probably not, because it only involves the sayings of Jesus. So I tend to think it could very well have been some notes one of the Apostles took down when Jesus taught and took that along with him.
It’s very conceivable that that could be the Q source. Wouldn’t it be cool?
When Jesus says, “Everything has been entrusted to me by my father,” that’s found in the Q material. It’s in Matthew and Luke almost word-for-word. We also find it in John: “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands.”
Because of this, most scholars admit that John is an independent source of the other Gospels. So you have multiple independent sources here. Pretty cool!
Alright, let's look at something else. John 5:22-29: “For not even the Father judges anyone, and he has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father; and he gave him authority to execute judgment because he is the Son of Man.”
Remember the eight characteristics of the Son of Man? He will judge the world.
1 Thessalonians 4:15-16. Now, Paul doesn’t call Jesus a Son of Man here, but he attributes to Jesus the same role. He’s doing the same thing, so he says, “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord.”
Now, it’s interesting— this is the only time that this phrase "word of the Lord" in this particular Greek construction is used. It’s the only time it appears in the New Testament, and it probably means that this we say to you by the teachings of Jesus; that Jesus, what I'm giving to you, he said comes from the teachings of Jesus himself.
So it’s not like a prophetic utterance from someone with the gift of prophecy; “Oh he has a word from the Lord.” Not that; this is a teaching of Jesus.
This we say to you by the word of the Lord: “That we who are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep.”
“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, with the trumpet of God.” He’s coming back in judgment! That the second coming, the Son of Man, the apocalyptic Son of Man he’s talking about here!
You see, this is the teaching of Jesus. He’s going to come back.
So you've got Paul, you've got John, you've got the Q material. Let me give you one more. This comes from Mark. This is at Jesus’ trial before the high priest Caiaphas. Finally, after talking to him for a while, Caiaphas says, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?”
And Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”
And the high priest tore his clothes and said, "Why do we still need witnesses? You've heard the blasphemy; what do you think?" And they all condemned him of being deserving of death.
Now, why was he guilty of blasphemy here? It’s not blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah, the Christ. There have been many people who had claimed to be the Messiah's, and yet they were never charged with blasphemy.
It’s not blasphemy to claim to be the Son of God; after all, prophets, priests, kings, angels— Israel herself had been called son of God. Jesus could have gotten out of that one easily, right?
What got Jesus the charge of blasphemy is that he claimed to be the Son of Man, who would come in judgment, who would be given honors and glory that only belonged to God himself.
Imagine, in light of this, here’s the scene: Jesus is on trial, and the high priest says, “Alright, look, got these false witnesses confusing. Look, just come out, tell us clearly: 'Are you the Messiah? Are you the Son of God?' ”
And Jesus knew his hour had come, and he said, “Yes, and yes! I’m going to go a little further. You know that Son of Man in Daniel 7, who’s going to ride the clouds, that divine figure, who everybody's going to worship and serve as they would serve God? Well, guess what, guys? That's me!
And you're going to, you think you're judging me now? Huh! I’ve got news for you! I’m going to judge you because I'm going to come; I'm going to be sitting as a co-occupant on God's throne, riding the clouds, and I'm going to come, and I'm going to make you a footstool for my feet.
You think you're judging me? No! I'm going to judge you because I am that Son of Man, because my father and I were made of the same stuff. Blasphemy!
That's pretty clear! It’s in Q, it’s in John, it’s in Mark, it’s in Paul. We have multiple independent sources here all attesting that Jesus was claiming to be this divine, apocalyptic Son of Man.
We have reason, historically speaking, to think that Jesus actually claimed to be God in this way. This is huge!
You know, we hold our Bibles in our hands. We said this is one book without realizing this is sixty-six books and letters written by numerous authors. It was only later that these things were collected and compiled into a single volume.
So when we’re talking about John, we’re talking about Mark and Paul and all these, these are independent sources. We’re not talking about just one source, the Bible. We’re talking about multiple independent sources, early sources. Paul saying this goes back to Jesus himself and his teaching.
We have every reason to believe that Jesus claimed to be God in this sense.
And so in conclusion, we have multiple independent sources here. I mentioned different literary forms, so yeah, biography, letters, sayings, literature. This is the strongest kind of multiple attestation a historian can look for.
So summarizing, there are two key truths that render it more probable than not that Jesus claimed to be God: Number one: the earliest Christians, Jesus' apostles, regarded Jesus as divine. And second, the best explanation for key truth number one is Jesus claimed to be divine, as evidence in the New Testament suggests.
And we talked about biography and Son of Man.
One last thing: if you want to know more information, you can go to my website: risenjesus.com. I'm also on Facebook; I'm on Twitter as well. Our website just got a huge major facelift just a few days ago. Go visit our new website!
I have all kinds of debate videos, lectures on there that you can see. If you want to know more about ancient biography, I have a new book; they might have a couple of copies left in there.
I know a number of you involved in, but that's got stuff on biography and it talks about why there are differences in the Gospels.
I mentioned how reading the Gospels illuminate, if we view them and read them in light of ancient biography, we can see that we can understand Jesus as divine in Mark.
Well, a lot of the differences, discrepancies, contradictions in the Gospels melt away when we read them in light of their ancient biographical genre, and that's what the book is about.
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