We'll be looking at this video on Thursday, but before we do that, here are some questions to ask, or to mull over as you watch the video.
The big question, and the one that hangs over any conversation about the Scriptures, and about Jesus, is really, how do we know anything? Although this seems like a simple question on the surface, it's actually much harder than it appears. The thing is, our entire lives are spent standing on the shoulders of giants. If you listen to the woman who says, early on in the video "I don't believe in God, first of all, because I grew up in an age of science," that sort of says it all. The thing about the scientific method is that it is a force to be reckoned with, surely. But it depends on repetition, on observation, and that's much more difficult to do with an event that happened once and once only. This is what happens with history, in that history and science don't occupy the same camp.
Another guy who speaks at the beginning (0:15) asks of Jesus to show up at his work with the Stigmata, then he'd believe it. Counter that with the man who says about ten seconds later that he doesn't believe that coming back from the dead is really possible. How are those two statements held in tension with the story of Lazarus and Dives from Luke's gospel?
When Lee Strobel says, at 2:00, if Jesus existed, which he's not sure about, he was a great teacher and a nice guy, but certainly wasn't the Messiah, and certainly wasn't the Son of God. The nature of this statement is worth considering as people who are working through the Scriptures, since we will encounter people quite frequently who will approach the story of Jesus with a lack of certainty about even his existence, but with 100% certainty about his lack of divinity. Contrast this with the attitude of the man from Mark 9:23-25. This is a man who was certain about the existence of Jesus, yet who realized that he needed help in his faith.
At about 3:20, when Lee takes the course from Hybels, he mentions that he was going into the church with a lot of misconceptions about the Christian faith, what it is, and what it does. Given that he wasn't familiar with the Bible at all, where was he getting these misconceptions from?
At 4:45, when the man talks about the distance between the events and their recording, compare that with the distance between when Hannibal was crossing the alps on elephants, and when historians wrote the details of his conquests down. Hannibal lived from 247-183 BC. The historians who wrote his life down lived between the following years:
Polybius (200-118BC)
Livy (59BC - AD17)
Appian (AD95-AD165).
Of the three, only one (Polybius) was even alive for the life of Hannibal, yet these details are considered to be essentially correct in their makeup. I know this is going to come up in the book / video series again, but it's worth knowing that the Gospels were not unusual in what they had to say and do. The distance between the life of Christ and the writing of the Gospels is not strange, nor should it be considered to be a mark against the Gospels that their writings came out not so much the next day, but within a human lifetime.
Okay, that's a good start. Enjoy your refresher on this stuff, and we'll talk more about it on Thursday.
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