The case for Christ, part Two

In a sense, it's all about eyewitness testimony.

You see, we have a nasty habit of reading the present into the past.  We have a nasty habit of reading the present into the past, and seeing things that happened thousands of years ago as though the people who were there were just like us.  You and I, we have a bunch of digital cameras around us all the time.  From where I'm sitting in my office, I have 3 in arm's reach (laptop, 3ds, cell phone).  If I want to take a picture of something, I'm seconds away from doing so.  If something essential happens, if there's a big to-do, I can capture it in still or in video, upload it instantly, and get it out there.  As a result, in this world, if I make an elaborate claim, people can bust my chops by essentially saying that old classic 'pics or it didn't happen!'

Yes yes.  There are no pictures in the Bible, no cameras, no magic, none of that, and so we approach the presence of Christ with a large dose of skepticism.  We look at the word of the Bible, and say to ourselves 'well, this was all written by largely illiterate fishermen and tentmakers, so how reliable can it possibly be?'  Without corroborating media, and given the distance between the events and their recording, how reliable can they possibly be?

This is where our understanding of oral traditions has to kick itself into high gear.  And this is helpful for us as Canadians, becasue we have a built-in knowledge of oral traditions, or at least we should.  In an age of quick video, and instant messaging, in an age in which we have access to media as soon as it has happened, this country and this society has had a real, legitimate issue with oral history and tradition before.

You see, our great nation has had a great many and various number of first nations groups who have laid claim to land, who have brought forward suit, and who have not had anything like what we would consider to be 'evidence' to back it up.  So, no evidence, no case, right?  Welllllllllll, not exactly.  As of late, the people who have only an oral history have actually had said evidence heard in court as admissible in court.  That is, the good people of our first nations, who told stories, danced dances, sang songs, and didn't have what we would call a written history, can have their oral histories and traditions heard as admissible in a court of law in this great nation.

What does this mean for us?  It means that perhaps oral tradition is more important than we thought it may have been to begin with. It means that we can get a lot done with our oral tradition that can stand up to rigorous scrutiny, provided that it is a matter of public record well known by the people who use it.  And this is the thing.  The case cited involves stories, songs, and dances that had been used for thousands of years.  The gap in the Biblical record, from when stuff happened to when it was written down, was about twenty years, at the smallest.

You and I , as I say, we have a deep desire to read the present into the past, to see  people, texts, events, as though it was us looking at it, and saying to ourselves, 'gosh, I sure wouldn't trust this at all.'  But we can't, and we ought not.  Or to put it another way, we know that Jesus is the most important guy who has ever lived ever, but of those living at the time, only the Christians worked out that he was.  Nobody else paid much attention to this itinerant street preacher, save those who were internalizing his message.  And with that being the case, Jesus remains shockingly well known amongst those who were in the world at the time.  If you compare him with others who were around at the time, comprable  people who had their names known through oral tradition and history, you'd find that very few of those still remain.  With Jesus, there are more copies, earlier manuscripts, and a greater depth of knowledge than the overwhelmingly vast majority of othe people who lived at the time.

It's really interesting, actually, once you start getting into it.  And when you do get into it, the entire history of the scriptures opens up and blossoms in front of you.  You see the copies and evidence of sources.  You see the way in which the scriptures were written down for you, and you see the fingerprints of the eyewitnesses all over their stories.  In other words, the deeper into this you get, the more interesting it becomes, and the less you can dismiss it by just saying 'oh, well, that's unreliable.'

The Case for Christ - Part One

Okay, here's a link to the video, since I can't seem to imbed it here.  How frustrating.  I will keep working on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMvaSAwL7_k

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.