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CREDO CAFE
Jesus the Patient - Liar, Lunatic or Lord?
We believe – Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Few today would argue with the first bit, it’s the second that causes problems. We tend to apply the rules of naturalism and rule out any supernatural explanations. So using the tools of psychology and history, what I want us to do tonight is to look at the historical Jesus and try to assess what kind of a man would say and do the kinds of things he did.
Some have argued that there is more evidence concerning the historical Jesus than the historical Julius Caesar – this is arguable, but even if true we must accept that there are gaping holes in our knowledge of the life of Jesus – biographical detail missing – ample scope for writers to ‘re-imagine’ a history of Jesus as a child, as a son, as a tempted man, as a husband? At work in the carpenters shop – all of this we don’t know.
FILM CLIP – Jesus the Carpenter from 'The Passion of the Christ '
For those who choose NOT to believe that Jesus is Divine, there is the problem of interpreting what we DO know of the historical Jesus and his impact. Without much doubt the most authoratative historical evidence we have about Christ come in the gospels (and some contemporary writings of Josephus) but obviously skeptics would regard these as ‘special pleading’ and so seek alternative historical interpretations of Jesus.
What ‘non-Christian’ interpretations of Jesus are you aware of? If we were to put Jesus on the psychiatrists couch, how could we explain his behaviour?
e.g.
Matthew 10 v 34 ‘"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’
Matthew 15 v 24 ‘He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel."’
Luke 22 v 14 ‘When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God."’
Other ‘Non-Gospel’ Jesus’s DISCUSS
The Da Vinci Code
• Essentially gives us a human Jesus, who never claimed to be divine, and who married Mary Magdalene, they had children founding a bloodline (‘Sang Real’ or Sancte Grail) which continues through ancient French Kings to modern day Sophie Neveu
Hidden Gospel accounts of a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene:
1) Hippolytus, Song of Songs: On the female Apostles
2) Gospel of Philip 63:33-36- An Undefined Special Relationship to Jesus- (2 versions of this text: The original, the suggested)
3) Gospel of Mary 17:10-18:21: Recipient of Revelation
• The true story of Jesus was hijacked by powerful church fathers who suppressed the truth at the Council of Nicea 325 AD, giving us ‘only’ four gospels, making Jesus Divine and promoting an anti-women agenda
Bethinking - Breaking the Da Vinci Code http://www.bethinking.org/resource.php?ID=211&TopicID=1&CategoryID=2
•It’s rubbish! (historically false about Nicea etc)
•Non-canonical texts have a MORE divine Jesus
•But Mary Magdalene Matters…
Mark Heard - I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVES MP3
Other TV shows pedaling a non-gospel Jesus often suggest an academic background to their claims. Most prominent among these is a group called The Jesus Seminar
The Jesus Seminar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar
The Jesus Seminar is a research team of about 135 New Testament scholars founded in 1985. One of the most active groups in biblical criticism, the seminar uses historical methods to determine what Jesus, as a historical figure, may or may not have said or done. In addition, the seminar popularizes research into the historical Jesus. They produced new translations of the New Testament plus the Gospel of Thomas to use as textual sources. They published their results in three reports The Five Gospels (1993), The Acts of Jesus (1998), and The Gospel of Jesus (1999). They also run a series of lectures and workshops in various U.S. cities.
The seminar's reconstruction of Jesus portrays him as a wandering wisdom sage who did not found a religion or rise from the dead, but preached in startling parables and aphorisms. He often turned common ideas upside down, confounding the expectations of his audience. He preached of "Heaven's imperial rule" (traditionally translated as "Kingdom of God"), which was already present but unseen. He depicts God as a loving father. He fraternizes with outsiders and criticizes insiders.
The seminar treats the gospels as historical artifacts, representing not only Jesus' actual words and deeds but also the inventions and elaborations of the early Christian community and of the gospel authors. The fellows placed the burden of proof on those who advocate any passage's historicity. Unconcerned with canonical boundaries, they asserted that the Gospel of Thomas has more authentic material than the Gospel of John.
Criticisms:
Arguably the single most telling criticism of the Jesus Seminar is that their "Criteria for In/Authenticity" create 'an eccentric Jesus who learned nothing from his own culture and made no impact on his followers'.[15] As others have observed why would such a Jesus be crucified?[16]
Other criticisms levelled against the Jesus Seminar include charges that:
- the voting system is seriously flawed,
- the criteria defining what constitutes red/pink/grey/black are inconsistent,
- it was wrong to exclude apocalyptic messages from Jesus' ministry,
- the attempt to popularize Jesus research degraded the scholarly value of the effort,
- the conclusions largely represent the premises of the fellows: 'Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.' Funk et al, The Five Gospels;
- only about a dozen of the fellows are leading figures in New Testament scholarship, and
- the fellows do not represent a fair cross-section of viewpoints.
William Lane Craig
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/rediscover1.html
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/rediscover2.html
MY JESUS - IS MY JESUS HUMAN ENOUGH, DIVINE ENOUGH? - DISCUSS
The Trilemma -
One of the best known modern uses of this formulation – sometimes referred to simply as "the trilemma" – is a form of apologetics meant to prove that Jesus is God. Often summarized either as "Lunatic, Liar, or Lord", or as "Mad, Bad, or God", it proceeds from the assumption that Jesus claimed to be God, and as a result one of three things must be true:
Lunatic: Jesus was not God, but he mistakenly believed that he was.
Liar: Jesus was not God, and he knew it, but he said so anyway.
Lord: Jesus is God.
The earliest use of this approach appears to have been by the Scots preacher "Rabbi" John Duncan, quoted in Colloquia Peripatetica (1870):
"Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable."[3]
Christian apologist C. S. Lewis developed the argument in a 1943 BBC radio broadcast which later formed the basis of his book Mere Christianity.
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Evidence that politely invites some form of response….
(why the resurrection is historical fact, why that fact is the centre of our apologetic) Steve Woolley
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