Biblical Framework

Charles Clough

 

 

Lesson 121

 

We’re going to look at some of the details of what happened in response to the King’s presence.  Matt. 12:14 is just one example of the reaction to the King.  As I said, you can read the Gospels and you can watch this process operate, in that the first part of the Gospels is the King, basically presenting Himself, showing Himself to be the Messiah through words and through works.  For a while He attracts people, for a while He builds numerically His followers, and then at a certain critical point, almost literally half way through each of the four Gospels, the process reverses.  There becomes a reaction to the presence of the King and He becomes a very controversial person, and one who cultivates, as it were, fury on the part of those who can’t stand Him. 

 

In Matt. 12 is one of the turning points in His ministry.  That summarizes the action of the society’s leadership class to the person of Jesus Christ.  From this point on it’s just a matter of time before He’s crucified.  Note in verse 14, “But the Pharisees went out, and counseled together against Him,” so it wasn’t just one or two people, it was an entire coalescing of the leadership of the society, they “counseled together against Him as to how they might destroy Him.”  That is the response to the King.  Because we’re so used to preaching the Gospel and saying Jesus was crucified and we’re saved through His crucifixion, maybe sometimes we don’t give adequate attention to what led to the crucifixion.  Yes, the crucifixion is wonderful, but the crucifixion actually grew out of hatred, and it’s this hatred for God, a hatred for revelation, a hatred directed against the most clear form of revelation that has ever occurred in human history,  The purer and the clearer the revelation, the more violent the reaction will be against it.  So Jesus Christ becomes a case that is clearer to see than Isaiah, Moses, Daniel, David, or any of the other leaders of the Bible because He was perfect; the revelation was unhindered by any personal sin in His life, so the righteousness of God shown forth.  Therefore the sin in response to that righteousness showed up very violently.

 

Starting on page 51 I want to examine the long quote by professor Stroll because we want to understand in our thinking as Christians how the hatred against God and the animosity against any revelation, hint or suggestion about His character.  We want to study that and study man’s response to it.   I just picked this out, it’s twenty or thirty years old, but it would be typical of what you would hear in any university classroom today, same story.  It was typical of what you would read in Time Magazine, every Christmas and every Easter, U.S. News and World Report, all the news magazines, it would be typical of a television program discussion, wherever you go.  So even though this was a particular lecture at the University of British Columbia thirty years ago, it still has a structure that’s valid today.

 

We want to go through this little assault on our faith.  Part of this course is to become used to the assaults, the attacks against our position and understand them so we can stand against them.  I want to see how sharp we are by way of observation.  I found at least eight places in this professor’s dissertation where he betrays his presuppositional position, where he shows the bias against the Word of God.  We want to get cued to listening for this, because this isn’t just professor Stroll, this isn’t just the academic intellectuals; the men on the street are the same way.  It’s just that they express it differently.  We want to tune into this thing and understand where the attack is coming from.  So let’s go through this with sort of a fine toothed comb and watch. 

Remember when we started this we started in Genesis.  I said over and over again one of the places I personally have failed many times is when someone asks you a question about your faith, about the gospel, immediately you’re thinking of an answer, what can I answer to that question?  Wrong!  That’s not the first thing you think about.  The first thing you think about is the question itself. Review it; make sure that you really want to answer that question.  It gets back to how many times last week did you beat your wife.  You can’t answer it any other way than incriminating yourself. A question can be a trap for you, so don’t walk into the trap. Always review the question, filter the question before you try to give an answer to it. That’s a basic principle.

 

Watch what happens when this guy gets up and gives his lecture.  “In contemporary philosophical theology one of the most widely debated questions concerns the relation between the historical Jesus, a man supposedly living in Palestine sometime between 9BC and AD 32, and the Jesus described in the Gospel writings….”  Remember I told you before we got started with this, what do you have to keep your eyes on?  The historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ; we defined those terms and here it is.  He’s not using kerygmatic Christ, but the idea is there.  Let’s review.  The historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ, what do we mean by these two terms. The first one is referring to the real Jesus that walked around Palestine, the historical Jesus.  The second term is the kerygmatic, that’s the Greek word “the preached” Christ, meaning the New Testament picture of Jesus.  Later we’re going to discuss the diagram on page 53; we might as well skip over there for a minute because we’re seeing a good example of it. 

 

Figure 2 shows in picture form what the ideas are that are going on here.  When I first got into New Testament criticism it took me a while to understand what is going on here.  I finally boiled it down to this kind of way of looking at it. 

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                       Historical “Real” Jesus                                       Kerygmatic NT Christ

 

             Position A: Complete divorce between the historical Jesus and the New Testament picture.

 

                                                 Historical / Kerygmatic NT

                                                      Jesus   /   Christ

 

                 Position B: partial divorce between the historical Jesus and the New Testament picture.

 

                                           Historical Kerygmatic Real Jesus Christ

 

                         Position C: Identity between the historical Jesus and the New Testament picture.

 

Figure 2. Three views of the relationship between the “real” historical Jesus and the New Testament picture of Him (the so-called “kerygmatic Christ).  Positions A and B show paganized viewpoints whereas Position C shows the Biblical worldview.  The same three positions could be extended to the entire canon of Scripture. 

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Position A, Position B and Position C.  Positional C has the Historical Kerygmatic Real Jesus Christ, same person.  The picture of Jesus that we get in the New Testament is the picture of the true Jesus.  We could quibble here, we could quibble… you could say well, is it the New Testament picture of Jesus really what a 1st century Jew who happened to be in the street listening to Jesus would have thought?  Then I’d have to grant you that every Jew that walked the streets of Palestine in the 1st century wasn’t clued in to who Jesus was.  It’s very clear they weren’t.  But that’s not the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus that we’re talking about is who He really was, not what the average person on the street misinterpreted to be the historical Jesus.  They viewed Him as just a carpenter’s son.  But that wasn’t true; He was the Son of God.  So when we talk about the historic Jesus we mean the kerygmatic Christ, because the Holy Spirit who wrote the New Testament reported accurately what was going on with this enigmatic figure, the God-man, Jesus Christ.  The New Testament text preserves that.


Let’s think about something we’ve covered in the past.  We said back in the first part of the Bible that the entire human race at one point had the Noahic Bible available, Genesis 1-9.  The entire human race had those 9 chapters.  Today you go back into ancient history and you read all kinds of myths, Pandora’s Box, this lady that opens up the box and all the evil comes out.  There’s truth in that Pandora’s Box mythology, isn’t there.  What is it?  It’s a distorted faint memory of what event of real history?  Eve.  Achilles and his heel, what’s that a faint remembrance of?  What was the promise of the Messiah to Adam and Eve?  The seed, thou shalt bruise His heel but you shall bruise his head.  And it’s preserved in the myth of Achilles.  It’s twisted, turns, you could read they myth of Achilles and never having read the Bible you would never get it out of there.  Never!  But that myth preserves some of history and distorts the rest. 

 

So what we said was you could take the Noahic Bible, Genesis 1-9 and you could take any myth, Pandora’s Box, Achilles, the Enuma Elish mythology, and if you took those two things, the Bible and the myths, and you put them side by side, what have you got a testimony of?  What interesting, profoundly interesting data do you have here?  What you have is what the fallen flesh does with truth.  The mythologies are case studies of spiritual pathology that infects the human race.  The myths are pictures, by measuring the delta, the difference between the myth and the Scripture, that’s the measure of sin and its affect on the intellect.  Why this is never taught, even in Christian schools I will never know. But Christians should be taught this.  You’ve got a built-in experiment. Every experiment has a control.  The Genesis 1-9 text is the control.  The myths are what the sinful mind has generated down through history. Great poets, great stimulating writers, great oral teachers have generated this mythological material.  They were smart, skilled people, but what they did when put up against the control is a reflection of the hamartiology (or the doctrine of sin), it’s a reflection of the pathology of the fallen intellect.  What does it do to revelation?  It always distorts revelation. 

 

Why is there so much energy in the fleshly mind of man that works itself so hard to keep down and keep suppressing revelation?  Paul says that in Romans 1. It is to avoid what?  If I can suppress revelation what can I fool myself and self-deceive myself into thinking?  I’m no longer accountable to the God of creation.  You see there’s a powerful subliminal agenda at work here, behind the pathology, and the agenda is to get me safe as a sinner, get me safe from a hole, from a righteous God to whom I’m accountable. That’s the whole motif here.  That’s the thing that’s going on behind the scenes that generates all this delta between what the Scripture reports and what the mythologies create.

 

Let’s come to the New Testament and the diagram in figure 2. This diagram shows the same truth that I just got through saying, except now in place of the Noahic Bible we have the Kerygmatic Christ, and in place of the mythology we have the (quote) “Historical Jesus.”  People want to split them apart, the historical Jesus in position A, that’s what’s mythological.  They’re seeking for a Jesus of history that is not the Son of God, they’re seeking for historic harmless Jewish carpenter boy, because if He’s only a historical Jewish carpenter boy, and not the Son of God, whew! I can breathe a sigh of relief.  But if He really is the kerygmatic Christ of the New Testament, now I’ve got a problem, He’s my judge, besides being a Savior.  Moreover, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me,” I have no choice in the matter because He is the only way of salvation.

 

So faced with this you’d better believe that I’m going to try to create a historical Jesus that’s harmless.  Understand the agenda that’s going on here.  See this agenda at work so this doesn’t become just an abstract study in what some intellectual says.  The intellectuals are affected in exactly the same way as the non-intellectuals.  It doesn’t make any difference whether you’re intellectual or not, we’re all fallen.  And part of our fallen nature is to avoid and want to hide from God. What did Adam and Eve do two seconds after they fell?  Trying to hide, hide themselves, hide behind the bushes.  We’re still doing it, except now instead of using fig leaves we use ideas, and we use literature, and we use all kinds of sophisticated gimmickry, but we’re doing the same thing as Adam and Eve did with fig leaves. 

 

So Position B is like Avrum Stroll where they’re trying to spread apart the kerygmatic New Testament Christ that’s so offensive, so demanding, so compelling, and create the “real” Jesus, make this “real” Jesus harmless. 

 

Back to Stroll’s quote.  Watch how it unfolds.  As I say this is one address among many, and it happened thirty years ago, but the psychology behind it is the same thing.  Notice in the next paragraph.  “One may, I think, not unfairly summarize the scholarly opinion on this question as follows: The existence of Jesus is beyond question; but the information we have about him is a composite of fact and legend which cannot be reliably untangled….”  Stop there for a moment.  Two sentences—what do you observe about those two sentences.  Look at them carefully.  What do you notice in the sentence that begins “One may, I think?”  What does he do between “one may, I think” and the colon that follows the word “follows:” What has he set you up for?

 

Watch this, this is done time and time again, and it’s done so often that we don’t even think about it.  It is done repeatedly on television; it’s done repeatedly in news articles.  After you get to the colon and you absorb the content of that sentence, what kind of opinion would you be left with if you disagreed with him?  An unscholarly opinion.  So immediately in the first sentence he’s defined the scholarly opinion to be identical to the non-Christian position.  How often have you heard that one in evolution debates and all the rest of it, “well the scholarly opinion says”?  By the way, we can quote conservative scholars that don’t agree with this.  But when you cite them, if you believe this, what are those guys?  They’re not scholars.  So here’s an interesting thing that’s gone on in the discussion.  Right off the starting block, we’ve defined words. 

 

The trick is, whoever sets up the definition of the word wins the argument, because going into the starting gate we’ve already eliminated the Christian position from scholarly consideration.  You can’t be a scholar and believe the Christian position, after you reach the colon in this sentence.  He’s put up a filter.  See what he’s done, he’s put up a filter that has filtered out you and me and any Bible-believing person.  I know plenty of New Testament scholars, I know a guy that’s got his PhD from Harvard in theoretical math and he’s got his PhD in New Testament studied from Cambridge University and he’s a fundamentalist that believes in the inerrancy of Scripture.  What about that, dual doctorate, one in theoretical math, one in New Testament, doesn’t that make him a scholar?  No!  It’s not the degrees you have, it’s the content of your opinion that defines whether you’re a scholar or not.  Do you see?  So watch this; this goes on and on and on.  He’s saying let me summarize the scholarly opinion, so obviously anything that follows isn’t scholarly.  Right away you’ve got a filter that he built in right off the starting block, right from the very start, #1

 

Let’s go further.  “… but the information we have about him is a composite of fact and legend which cannot be reliably untangled.”  At least he said it’s opinion, a scholarly opinion, but what I want to draw your attention to is what is the main verb in that clause?  The information we have about Him perhaps? Or, the information about Him might possibly be?  Do you see any qualifica­tion?  No. An indicative verb is used to convey certainty.  Language has moods in it.  In the Greek language these verbs form were actually morphologically different, so when you read the Greek you can tell whether you’re reading an indicative verb, an imperative mood or a subjunctive mood, etc.  What are those moods?  Degrees of certainty.  An indicative verb states a fact.  A subjunctive verb would be in English, “that could be.”  If you say that in conversation what kind of certainty is that? How does that differ from “that is what I say,” versus “I could have said that, I don’t remember.”  Certain politicians are good at using the subjunctive mood from time to time.  The subjunctive mood and the indicative mood are ways God has created in the language so that every one of us can communicate certainty or uncertainty or degrees of certainty to each other. That’s why the language has that structure.  All language has that structure in some form or another. 

 

So by using an indicative verb here he has connoted, just the way the sentence is structured, certainty, absolutely certain.  So after we’ve been hit with a filter about scholars, now we’re hit with the second thing, (#2) that it “is a composite of fact and legend which cannot be reliably untangled.”  See how it builds on itself?  First any Bible believer is filtered out of the discussion; the next thing that happens is now we’ve created in concrete the unbelieving statement. 

 

Let’s read further:  “These passages from Josephus (Antiquities, VIII. 3; XX.9) and the passage from Tacitus contain the only information we have about the existence of Christ from non-Christian sources in the first century.”  Hold the place and turn to page 25 in the notes. We went through this; when I was talking about the virgin birth claim, what did we do?  We went to some non-Christian sources and what were those non-Christian sources?  They were Jewish non-Christian sources.  Remember the Jewish sources that blamed Mary for being a fornicator and called Jesus a bastard.  Notice on page 25, I quote, right from the Mishnah what appears to be a reference to Jesus Christ.

 

“Joseph Klausner, a Jewish scholar, writes of this Mishnaic section: ‘That Jesus is here referred to seems to be beyond all doubt.’  Klausner notes that throughout the Jewish Talmud, including its Michnaic section, Jesus is known as ‘Yeshu ben Pandera’ (Jesus son of Pandera), a title which may refer to Mary’s allegedly paramour or to the virgin-birth claim itself (virgin in Greek is parthenos).  Another Talmudic scholar, Herbert Danby, summarizes the entire Talmudic reference to the virgin birth claim.”  What have we just said on page 25 about a source material, non-Christian source material about Jesus?  Jewish. 

 

Turn back to Stroll’s argument on page 51, look at his statement.  He quotes Josephus and Tacitus, and what does he says, it “contains the only information we have about the existence of Christ.”  So what’s my third observation (#3) about professor Stroll’s address?  He’s got a factual error, that is a false statement; that is not true that Josephus and Tacitus are the only information that we have about Jesus from non-Christian forces. 

 

Look what happened here in four sentences.  Do you see why college kids can get screwed up?  They come out of high school, and I’m not knocking the high schools, many of them are good, but there are so many other things competing to hard courses.  So we take basket weaving 101 and a few other things, then we always have to take the sociological courses, go through all the hoopla stuff and we come out of high school kind of half mature in thinking.  First thing, we get plugged into a freshman lecture hall somewhere where a professional sits, a guy with his doctorate who has years under his belt, who is Mr. Slick, and he just hoses down everybody in the lecture hall, lecture after lecture, hosing them down.   The kids have never been thought to think critically, never been cued to the signals that are going on, never taken apart and parsed a guy’s lecture like we’re doing, to learn how to take the truth and filter it.  Then they walk out, I don’t know whether I really believe the Bible any more, Dr. So and So said and he has a PhD.  Then here we go, ship­wrecks of the faith all over the place.  It’s especially disastrous when a kid goes to a Christian college and gets this liberal stuff for twice the cost he could get it for in a secular college. 

 

We have three things in this set of things to watch for. We see a filter being put on, the first step; we see an indicative sentence of certainty where there can’t be certainty.  Now we see a falsity.  Let’s read further.  “It is clear that neither writer could have been an eyewitness to the events he describes….”  I’m not so sure Josephus couldn’t have, maybe he was too young.  “The Gospels, of course, purport to contain descriptions of the life and activities of Christ, from the time of his nativity, through his baptism, crucifixion and resurrection.  Until the attention of historical scholarship was directed to these documents early in the nineteenth century, it was commonly assumed that they contained eyewitness supports of the events described….”

 

Number four (#4) by way of observation. What slick one has he just pulled right there?  There’s a lot folded into that statement, let me unpack it.  “Until,” (quote) watch it, underline that section, “attention of historical scholarship,” that’s an interesting statement.  Apparently there were no scholars before the 19th century. Thomas Aquinas wasn’t a scholar, Calvin wasn’t a scholar, he was only 21 when he wrote The Institution of the Christian Religion that formed the heart of Protestant religion for centuries afterwards, but he’s not a scholar though.  Excuse me!  “…until the attention of historical scholarship was directed to these documents,” let me explain what he’s really meaning.  By the term “historical scholarship” Dr. Stroll is talking about higher criticism.  This is a term we ought to know, “higher criticism.”  We also ought to note something else called “lower criticism.”  I want to define those two terms.

 

Lower criticism we don’t have to bother with right now.  Lower criticism is dealing with the source material in the manuscripts.  Some uncial manuscripts read this way in John 8:58 and other manuscripts read another way in John 8:58.  The greatest and biggest example of lower criticism is the last chapter of the Gospel of Mark is a controversy, that’s not in some manuscripts, sometimes it is.  So there’s an example of lower criticism.  Lower criticism deals with the textual materials that are used in Bible translation.  Lower criticism has presuppositions to it, that’s why today we have this big argument going on about the King James text versus the non-King James text, that’s a lower criticism question. 

Higher criticism seeks to understand how the Bible was created in history.  In other words, higher criticism opens the question of—when Luke sat down to write the Gospel of Luke where did he get his material?  Was it a direct vision, was it interviews?  We happen to think actually that Dr. Luke, who was a physician, interviewed a lot of people.  In fact, he’s the only guy in all the Gospel writers who reports how Mary felt about her pregnancy in great depth.  So it’s quite clear that he went back to Mary and talked to her.  As a doctor he was interested in those kinds of details.  Matthew wasn’t, he was a tax collector.  So in Luke’s Gospel you get more of a flavor of what was going on during the pregnancy.  Matthew is more concerned with the bureaucratic and legalistic implications in the virgin birth, but not how Mary felt.  I believe that’s why God took four different men to write four different Gospels; He gives a perspective on the person of Jesus Christ.  That’s a harmless kind of higher criticism.  But that kind of higher criticism always existed, there were debates during the canonicity period when the Church was trying to decide what books should be in the canon.  They engaged in an early form of higher criticism when they were trying to decide that question.  Did an apostle write this particular book or didn’t he?  

 

What this guy means by historical scholarship in the early 19th century is higher criticism that sought to explain the Scriptures in terms of humanism, as a humanistic creation of man.  Higher criticism sought a human explanation for all documents, Plato, Aristotle, everybody else, and they placed the Scripture along with everything else.  So the uniqueness of the Scripture, in spite of its own self-claim that it is the Word of God, that it’s an inspired text, that’s tossed aside, and the Scripture is arbitrarily at step one in the discussion classed as a piece of humanly generated literature and given that fact, now how did it happen? That’s where we get stuff like Moses couldn’t have written the Pentateuch, John couldn’t have written the Gospel, all kinds of reasons. We don’t know very much, but we know out of the millions of people at least John the apostle could not have written the Gospel of John.  We can’t be certain about history, but that we can be certain of.   That’s the agenda that started floating around in the 19th century. 

 

Now do you see what he’s done here?  With that sentence “until the attention of historical scholarship” it’s like nobody ever raised the questions before.  Bologna!  What he’s talking about is when humanism and secularism took over all control of Biblical studies, then the opinion changed about the eyewitness business.  Put yourself in the position of a naïve college student, first time out, he reads “until the attention of historical scholarship,” and gee, there wasn’t any historical scholarship and you know, gee, when all these historical scholars got together in the 19th century, everybody else is naïve.  I guess we have to go along with scholars because everybody until them assumed there were eyewitnesses, and they came along and told us there wasn’t, so I guess there isn’t.  Totally oblivious to the fact the agenda is at work… the agenda is at work, it’s manifesting itself intellectually, maybe not like the myths of the 8th, 10th, 15th centuries BC but there it is again.  The contention is that there is not a Creator that’s revealing Himself in human language to man, and if that’s so, then the documents which are in human language can’t be of God, right? Logic follows.  But the logic only follows if you agree to the starting point, and the starting point is that there’s not a God who speaks.  Given that premise, then yes, go ahead, treat the Bible like it came out of just man’s mouth. 

 

Be alert to the presuppositional baggage that’s being imported.  When these words come in, think of a Trojan horse coming inside the walls of Troy, and at night the soldiers come out.  Think of your mind as like the city of Troy, and when you get statements like this, the Trojan horse has come into your city, and what does Paul say in 2 Cor. 10:5, “Casting down every vain imagination and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”  The young student faced with this kind of stuff for the first time usually is not prepared to take it, so all the Trojan horses come through. Every time a sentence is made like this there’s no critical filter operating in the mind, everything is sort of taken in, in wonderment, trust in the faculty that they know what they’re saying, and then boom, all this explodes inside their hearts and tears up their faith, because it hasn’t been properly filtered.

 

Let’s continue with professor Stroll, “It is extremely unlikely that the writers of the documents we now possess would have been eye witnesses to the activities of Jesus….”  How does he qualify the certainty in that sentence?  He puts a strong adverb in there, “extremely unlikely,” not just unlikely, but it’s “extremely unlikely.”  We would like to ask Dr. Stroll why do you say it’s extremely unlikely?  What’s your statistic, what’s your probability distribution?  Where’d you get that statistic from, “extremely unlikely?”  That’s number five, (#5) we’re counting the number of Trojan horses in this statement. The only thing that he can use to justify “extremely unlikely” is his philosophic presuppositions, but to state the philosophic presuppositions over and over is just to state it over and over.  It’s not a proof of anything, it’s just a working out of his worldview, and if he’s going to do that, we can do the same thing.  Worldviews sin collision!

 

Let’s look at the next sentence: “Even if there were reason to believe some of the material to express eye witness accounts of Jesus’ life, the accretion of legend, the description of miracles performed by Jesus, which exist in these writings [sic] make it difficult, if not impossible, to extract from them any reliable historical testimony about the events described….” Let’s look first at the sentence that begins “Even if there were reason to believe,” does anyone smell a rat in that one?  “Even if there were reason to believe,” just think about that one.  That’s the same kind of thinking that I warned you about when I said one of the things that offended the Pharisees about Jesus was His self-authenticating authority.  Jesus didn’t look for anybody to prove anything.  What He said was by definition true. 

 

What event in the Old Testament did we link to the doctrine of revelation, inspiration?  Mount Sinai.  Here’s where this framework will help you start circulating.  Imagine yourself in your mind’s eye at the foot of Mount Sinai.  Moses is up on the mountain, smoke and fire all over the place, and all of a sudden you hear these Hebrew words come rolling down this vast valley with a million other people sitting there.  And you hear the very words of God in the Hebrew language.  “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt,” like there was a fantastic PA system that you couldn’t believe.  Put yourself in that position and look how ridiculous it looks to say hey God, can You give me some reasons to believe what You’re saying?  How stupid and arrogant that looks, and nobody who heard God’s Word in that thing would have said that.  Even the non-Christians would have fallen over when God spoke, because implicitly in our hearts the way God created us we know our Maker’s voice.  There’s no discussion, there’s no need for a reason. 

 

That’s just another gimmick, that here man is, and we’re going create a proof system, and we’ve got all our human logic here, our logic machine at work, and God’s got to fit into our logic machine.  God’s got to fit our criteria, we set the criteria of truth and we make God fit it. That’s arrogance, that’s Eve back in the garden.  What did she do?  She took the Word of God, “thou shalt die the day you eat thereof,” and over here we have Mr. Satan who says the day that you eat thereof you are not going to die.  So Eve puts them both on the same platform, treating Satan, the creature, just like she treats God, the Creator, erases the Creator/creature distinction and then thinks she’s going to have a test to determine the truth, she’s got to have a reason to believe.  So you see we’re right back to the same thing.

 

So this statement, number six, (#6) “even if there were reason to believe,” is just another popping up out of his self-consciousness (or unconsciousness) here, of his philosophy of life, that there has to be an autonomously based and constructed set of proofs to which God has to adhere, when in matter of fact God is the one who’s existence is the presupposition of proving anything, because were He not existing we wouldn’t have any enduring truth to prove.

 

Let’s continue. I’m sure that in the next part of that statement you spotted one of the most obvious portions of his statement, “the description of miracles performed by Jesus … make it difficult, if not impossible, to extract from them any reliable historical testimony about the events described.”  What does that flagrantly show?  His anti-supernaturalism.  The guy doesn’t accept miracles. The whole Bible from beginning to end is talking about the interfering God. What have we said about the framework here, what kind of a kingdom?  A disruptive kingdom.  God constantly disrupts, especially fallen creation.  In His grace He disrupts us, calling us to Himself so we don’t wind up in hell.  It’s all a miracle.  But a miracle? I mean, good night, we can’t believe in miracles.  Why can’t we believe in miracles?  The answer usually is this:  You can’t believe in miracles because they’re disruptions; if you allow any disruption in natural law, you destroy the certainty of knowledge, because you make it chance driven, chaotic. That’s the argument you always get into. 

 

The reason for the hatred of miracles is that miracles violate the certainty of human knowledge, because our minds want to have it all packed and packaged, and a miracle is an interruption to the package. So what’s our answer?  Who stands behind the miracle that’s doing the disrupting?  Is God a chaotic God or is God an immutable God?  Is God a faithful God, a God who assures us in the New Testament that He cannot lie, that He cannot, even though He’s omnipotent He cannot violate His character. That Creator God’s character is the source for the miracle.  So a miracle [can’t understand word] the certainty of knowledge because the certainty of knowledge is His omniscience.  The certainty wasn’t located down here, it’s located up here.  So miracles are only a threat to knowledge if you’ve made the human the source of the certainty.  Yes, miracles do threaten that kind of knowledge.  Yes it is awe inspiring to think that the God of the Scriptures told a man to slit his son’s throat, but the point still remains that God, who stands behind those commands, has a character made up of His attributes, a character that is the source of our stability and our basis.  Our stability from day to day doesn’t hinge on how we feel, it doesn’t hinge on how we think.  [blank spot] 

 

… because God sustains us. He never gets tired, He never runs out of energy, His plan is never thwarted and every molecule obeys His sovereign will.  That’s the kind of certainty we have.  So a miracle here and there doesn’t phase us in the least.  It’s just another part of the plan of God.  But a miracle indeed is scary to one who comes at this whole thing from an unbelieving perspective. So Stroll is bothered by this.

 

Finally, “It seems to me likely that during this [NT] period a prophet arose….; but an accretion of the legends grew up about this figure, was incorporated into the Gospels by various devotees of the movement, was rapidly spread throughout the Mediterranean world by the ministry of St. Paul,” it’s nice that he recognizes he was a saint, “and that because this is so, it is impossible to separate these legendary elements in the purported descriptions of Jesus from those which in fact were true of Him.” 

 

What do you notice about that right from the start, item number eight in our critique?  The first subject and verb, “It seems to me likely,” well that’s fine, but that’s auto biographical, I may or may not be interested in what seems to be likely to you Dr. Stroll.  All he’s doing in that last sentence is simply reiterating what he said seven times before, I am an unbeliever, I have located certainty in the human intellect, miracles are a threat to my worldview, and that’s why I can’t stand miracles, and that’s why I cannot allow the Scriptures to speak for themselves, but they must be under the control and suppression of the human intellect through scholarship that began in the 19th century under higher criticism.  So all we have heard in this lecture from start to finish is an articulation of the non-Christian world view. 

 

When we started this series I said watch for a tactic, and we have to learn to use it ourselves, what I call the tactic of strategic envelopment.  By that I mean you take an event, like the coming of the King of Kings, the Lord Jesus Christ in history, and you pack all those facts about Jesus Christ, the claim of His virgin birth, the claim of His life, His sermon material, reaction of people to Him, that whole package that we call the New Testament, and you envelope that package in your worldview.  That’s what Dr. Stroll has done.  He’s taken the New Testament and enveloped it in a worldview so he explains it from his perspective. 

 

But this is a two-edged sword. We can envelop it in the worldview of the Scriptures themselves. We allow the Scriptures to explain the Scriptures.  And we take our position in the worldview that there’s a Creator and a creature distinction; that has all kinds of intellectual implications.  We understand there was a historic fall with all kinds of intellectual implications to that.  And we understand that the God of creation spoke publicly in history from a mountain at Sinai at one point in history, in the Hebrew language such that if you had a tape recorder you would have recorded His voice.  Therefore God does not have a problem revealing Himself in human language. So when Jesus Christ walks the face of the earth and makes the God-claim that He is God and man in the hypostatic union, He can speak and I understand that to be the very words of God that come out of His human mouth; I don’t have a problem with that.  And if He wants to turn stones into bread, He can do that; I don’t have a problem with that.  That doesn’t mean that all rocks are going to fall apart because Jesus took one and turned it into bread.  Rocks are going to stay rocks.  That one didn’t because that wasn’t God’s plan for that one.  So where’s my trust? My trust is in the character of God. 

 

Let’s go on, we want to finish up this section so we can get on to the doctrine next week.  On the bottom of page 52 are some sentences I want to draw your attention to.  “The New Testament picture of Jesus is often called the ‘kerygmatic Christ’ as mentioned above.  It contrasts with the ‘real’ historic Jesus.  Figure 2 shows how this pagan sort of thinking contrasts with Biblical thinking on the issue.  Some of the most extreme critics hold to position ‘A’ in which the kerygmatic Christ has no connection whatsoever with the historic Jesus.”  The next sentence, if you would underline it, there’s an important point I’m making here. “In their world view,” i.e. in the pagan unbelieving world view, “man experiences religious emotions and responds in his imagination by generating religious images.”  That’s the dynamic for the origin of the New Testament.  People had religious experiences so they wrote about it. Shirley MacLain had religious experiences and she wrote about it, any number of people had religious experiences and they wrote about it.  So there’s no difference in the Gospel of John and what Shirley MacLain wrote, because it’s all coming out of the human intellect? 

 

You can sit here and endlessly try to defend this little point of the Bible and that little point of the Bible, and you’ll be sitting there a thousand proofs later still defending yourself if you don’t come to grips with the fact that the basic agenda denies the Creator/creature distinction and the self-revealing God.  That’s the target, not some obscure little detail somewhere. 

 

Continuing, “No communication exists between a Creator and a creature because at bottom all is one impersonal cosmos, a grand Continuity of Being.  New Testament writers, in this view,” now watch this, “merely created the kerygmatic Christ out of their religious imaginations.  Christ, in this view,” I got this from an apologist and I love this statement. “Christ, in this view, is like a chameleon that takes on the qualities of the observer’s theology.”   A chameleon blends into the environment, so there can be 1008 different Jesuses, all of whom reflect the imagination of their authors.  That’s why you have to have a creed and you can’t go around this world saying well I believe in Jesus.  What Jesus?  Tell me about this Jesus, is this Jesus the Jesus of the New Testament Scripture, or is this the Jesus of someone’s imagination.  Maybe it’s William Miller’s imagination. Maybe it’s John Smith’s imagination.  Maybe it’s Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy’s imagination.  Or is this the New Testament Jesus that we’re talking about.  Always hone in, which Jesus?

 

On page 53 I’m trying to summarize this and I have a quote there I’d like to look at.  Before we do that turn to John 12.  We’re trying to get at the bottom of all this criticism against Jesus, and I’ve said several times tonight that the problem is this agenda of trying to make the world safe for sinners.  We do that by cutting off revelation from a holy righteous God.  In John 12:37 we have a portrayal of the unmasking of what was going on.  Here is John the apostle’s description, guided by the Holy Spirit, of what we’ve been talking about with Dr. Stroll tonight, same thing.  So watch, from verse 37-41.  “But though He had performed so many signs before them, yet they were not believing in Him.”  Look at that; was Jesus inefficient in His revelation?  Did He not have the right church growth program?  Did He not buy the right religious franchise so He could set something in motion?  Something is failing.  Here’s the God-man, the hypostatic union, performing many signs and they didn’t believe in Him.  If He lived today people would say gee, you’ve got to change your approach here.  The Bible says no-no, Jesus doesn’t have to change His approach, His approach did exactly what it was supposed to do. Watch the next verse.

 

Verse 38, “that the word,” purpose clause, see, they weren’t believing in Him, purpose clause, “that the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled which he spoke, ‘Lord, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”  “The arm of the Lord” is an Old Testament Messianic term. [39]“For this cause they could not believe, for Isaiah said again, [40] He has blinded their eyes, and He hardened their heart; lest they see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and be converted, and I heal them. [41] These things Isaiah said, because he saw His glory, and he spoke of Him.”

 

Remember Isaiah, the time of the fall of the kingdom. What was a prophet in the Old Testament?  He was a prosecutor.  Isaiah brought prosecution against the nation of Israel for their disbelief in the Old Testament Word of God.  And part of the judgment that Isaiah announced was that the more of the Word of God that you hear, if you reject, the more of the Word of God you hear the more you’re going to reject.  So ironically preaching the gospel doesn’t just soften hearts; preaching the gospel itself can be the process of hardening hearts.  So lack of belief is not a sign of impotence in the gospel message.  Lack of belief in the gospel message may be a sign of the hardening ministry of the Word of God, a damning ministry of the Word of God, and it’s an awesome thing to think about. Far from saying Jesus was inefficient, far from saying the gospel just doesn’t get through so we’ve got to modify it, we’ve got to adapt to the audience kind of thing, far from that lack of belief can be a sign of damnation. The Word of God accomplishes both things, it hardens and it softens. 

 

So Jesus, the revelation through the person of Jesus Christ did not fail, it did accomplish the purpose.  The purpose clause in verse 38 is “that the word of Isaiah might be fulfilled.”  It was doing work, just not the work that people would like to have seen done. 

 

Back to page 54 in the notes.  “Modern critics have followed a similar path.  Having turned from the pieces of Biblical truth mixed into Western civilization, they deny the possibility of any verbal revelation.”  Look at this quote coming up, this is a ripper.  I sought for years to get a quote this clear.  This is by Paul Tillich, who was probably one of America’s most famous theologians in the 20th century.  I heard him when I was at MIT, he used to come down from Harvard and give lectures.  “One of the most famous theologians of the twentieth century, Dr. Paul Tillich, wrote,” neo-orthodox person, not orthodox; I said neo-orthodox meaning modernist.  Watch this quote because he lets it all out of the bag here.  If you’ve doubted what I’ve said tonight, listen to the quote because he just verifies everything I’ve told you in the last sixty minutes. 

 

“‘There are no revealed doctrines, but there are revelatory events and situations which can be described in doctrinal terms…. The ‘Word of God’ contains neither revealed commandments nor revealed doctrines.’”  Look at that sentence twice.  “The ‘Word of God’ contains neither revealed commandments nor revealed doctrines.’” Does that explain to you why you can go to your First Liberal Church that your great-grandfather went to, that used to preach the gospel 50 years ago, and you don’t hear the gospel any more.  Do you know why?  Because the people in the pulpit have been trained under guys like Tillich.  So they don’t even believe that there’s any communication from the Word of God.  All the Bible is is a compilation of human authors who had religious experiences.  Like Shirley MacLain did, she could have written revelation 22 for all they care, no difference. 

 

Conclusion, diagram on page 55, here’s the process. We had a similar diagram back when we studied the hypostatic union and the virgin birth and we said the doctrine of God, man and nature was fouled up and if it was fouled up there was a revulsion against the claim of the virgin birth.  Now we see a similar situation, except now the issue isn’t the doctrine of God, man and nature, it’s much more of a narrow area, the idea of revelation.  The pagan world view hits the King’s historic appearance, looks at it, sees it, denies it can be any revelation from God and rejects it and goes off in a wild search for the historical Jesus.  “Will the real Jesus please stand up” sort of thing.  Whereas the Biblical worldview, somebody who’s submitted himself to Scripture, who has a regenerate heart, who’s taught by the Spirit, looks at the Kings’ historic appearance and accepts it, because he recognizes the voice of his maker.  He’s not in rebellion against that voice, so he has no problem accepting the New Testament text at prima fascia, that it is what it claims to be. 

 

Next week we’re going to begin three doctrines, the doctrine of kenosis, the doctrine of impeccability, and the doctrine of infallibility.  Those are the doctrines associated with the life of the King, just like the doctrine of the hypostatic union was associated with the virgin birth, now we’re going to look at this doctrine of kenosis.  If you wonder what kenosis means, it means empty, and it comes from that very, very familiar passage we all know, Phil. 2:5.  We’re going to talk about that and I think we’ll see some pretty amazing things that should be encouraging to us in our life.

 

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Question asked: Clough replies:  This is a good question that’s been brought up, and that is that looking at TV programs like the learning channel, etc. we hear a lot of the work being done about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the cult of the Essenes, and the people that lived in the cliffs there where the Dead Sea Scrolls are found.  Is this whole effort to uncover these people really an attempt to undermine the gospel?  I don’t think it’s consciously intended to do that.  I think the scholars that work in those areas are just curious.  The thing that they don’t do is what we found the biologists, the geologists and the astrophysicists don’t do, they go out into the universe and they see data, they’ve uncovered data, and they want to interpret the data in some sort of frame of reference, but their presupposition is that there’s no plan out there prior to man interpreting the data. 

 

So if there’s a history, for example, we want to see the history of man.  We’re curious, you know, we want to see what happened in history.  What they think about in trying to get at this history is that man has to start with uninterpreted raw data and build up a history from that raw data.  Whereas we, Biblical-believing people need to think in terms of the fact that yes, we have to go out and dig too, archeology helps us too, but we don’t say that history doesn’t exist until man thinks it up.  We say that history existed for all eternity in the mind of God and that there was a sovereign plan all the time to administer the plan.  So God has authored history, history is going exactly the way He wants it to go, and that all these pieces fit together, and the Bible is a key, if you just let it, is a key to interpreting this stuff. 

 

In particular the Dead Sea Scrolls have two ramifications.  What at first they found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and you don’t hear much about it any more, is they found pieces of Isaiah and Daniel that were written, particularly Daniel, that was written and dated, their method of dating is a style of the letters, and paleography, so they found shreds of the book of Daniel on these Dead Sea Scrolls that predated when the critics thought Daniel was written.  What is it about the book of Daniel that forces every unbeliever to late date it?  It’s filled with prophecy.  You can’t have Daniel written early because the moment you allow Daniel to be written early you’re face to face with prophecy.  So since Daniel prophesied of Medo-Persia, of Greece, they’ve got to get the date of Daniel shoved forward in history so that it becomes a retrospective fake prophecy.  The problem came that the Dead Sea Scrolls were dating prior to the last date of Daniel. So this created consternation, and it’s interesting that in all the discussion you hear about the Dead Sea Scrolls, that discussion has been relegated to some journals that aren’t talked about too much. Nobody wants to talk about that hot potato.  So again we have the filter operating. The issues that you hear about are issues that are either kind of neutral-ish, although there is no real neutralism, but kind of neutral-ish, or potentially hostile to the gospel, oh, we’ve got to look at that one!  But when it comes to archeological details that confirm the Scripture, then we don’t want to deal with that.

 

So the big issue with the Dead Sea Scrolls is what was this community that formulated these things? These people, there was a whole religious community that existed out in that area and the fascinating thing from a conservative point of view is the connection between John the Baptist and this Essene group, because they spoke in terms of light and darkness, they spoke in terms of the sons of light and darkness, they had a screwed up view of the Messiah, I think they had multiple Messiahs, but it was clear from what we’ve seen so far is that they were thinking that the time of Messiah is close, the time of the end is near, and interestingly they were only ten miles away from John the Baptist’s ministry.  So the question is, was there interaction between them, did John go out there and work with them.  Did they influence John in a human sense of his vocabulary, for example? Did John not borrow, I won’t use the word borrow, but did he, from a human point of view did God use the Essenes to give him some vocabulary in terms of expression, which he then had corrected through the Holy Spirit because John’s theology is not Essene theology

 

So there are a lot of questions about what this group was.  It’s just that these treasures that they have from our conservative perspective, is the wonderful preservation of Scripture and the textual material that comes out of the Dead Sea Scrolls is just tremendously exciting.  It’s exciting for another reason, the text from Isaiah, in face I quote the Dead Sea Scrolls when we did the post-exilic period and in the notes I had a text from the Masoretic text, I had a text from the Palestinian text type, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I showed you there.  That’s what I was using, that was taken from a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and when you compare the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Masoretic text, which is 1000 AD, and people would say oh well, you Christians only got a Hebrew text from 1000 AD, anything could have happened before 1000 AD.  You can’t trust that text.  Well, isn’t it interesting that when you dig up the Dead Sea Scrolls, 200 BC, we see essentially the same text.  So what does that tell you about our confidence in the text? 

 

So our interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls is primarily in terms of lower criticism, manuscript detail.  We’re incidentally in what the Essenes did, how they worshiped, what they thought, but only as background to the New Testament.

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  It’s healthy to look at those kinds of programs and ask yourself what is the agenda going on.  I think all of us as Christians can’t just sit here and passively take in anything that comes out of the tube.  We can’t do that, we’ve got to filter it, and that’s a good approach.

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  I don’t know whether our library has any of the books, but there are a number of very good conservative, what you call New Testament introductions, probably CBD has them, look for the title New Testament introductions.  That’s higher criticism from a conservative perspective; hopefully, they sell conservative books in there.  There’s one by Guthrie, offhand I can’t think of some of the names of the authors.  I’m sure since I studied them there are some New Testament introductions.  There are also some conservative treatments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but frankly, I recommend if you’re interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, get a translation of them, because most translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls will have footnotes the cross reference Scripture texts.  My point here is, in all this discussion the closer you can personally get to the primary material, so it’s not filtered through what professor So and So says, just read it for yourself. We’re not stupid.  

 

[same person says something] I would venture that Barnes & Noble would have a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  [something else said] Yes, I’ve heard that, I haven’t seen it, but he’s right, there’s a CD rom that’s going to come out with a text on it.  And that’s what you want, you don’t want 500 volumes of commentary on it, you just want to read it for yourself.  Don’t feel intimidated.  You can go ahead and pick up the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a lot of it is junk, this stuff about the light and the darkness, some of it’s all about their religious community, this and that, it’s like reading something out of the hippies of the 60’s, the flower children in Colorado somewhere, but apart from that, you’ve got text from Maccabees, you’ve got texts of Daniel, you’ve got texts of Isaiah, you’ve got passages from Isaiah being commented on, and the value of that is it tells you how first century people were reading the Old Testament.  It’s very interesting.

 

One of the things that come out of this, just from our perspective, is that those people were clearly reading the Old Testament prophesies of the kingdom as a literal, physical kingdom on earth.  They weren’t talking about some spiritual heaven somewhere like the amillennialists.  They weren’t talking that way, so that means that when John the Baptist came walking into that era of Judaism, and Jesus too for that matter, when Jesus and John were around saying the Kingdom of God is coming, the Kingdom of God is coming, our point in our debates over eschatology is how would the guy in the street have understood Jesus when Jesus said “the Kingdom of God is coming”?  If you read the Dead Sea Scrolls, that is what the Jews were thinking.  So it helps understanding what the guy in the street was thinking about so that when you read the New Testament text there’s no problem interpreting it.  If Jesus didn’t mean what they meant, then He should have qualified it.  But Jesus doesn’t qualify it, so that means that Jesus went along with the popular impression of what the Kingdom was.

 

Those are the tools; those are the benefits of learning about these people. But frankly I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on that if you haven’t first spent a lot of time just in the Bible itself.  Don’t let this become a deflection from your study.

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  All it would take would be a ten year error, and we don’t have that refinement, they can’t tell plus or minus ten.  So that’s right, that’s a good observation, that a lot of these things are date contingent and that’s my point about so many things about Egypt and Egyptian history, we really don’t control ancient history well enough to integrate with Scripture.  I wish we did, because I’m sure that the Word of God and history had ramifications and had all kinds of implications.  I think we would see links, I think we would be able to identify clearly who that Queen of Sheba was, I think we could clarify the plagues on Egypt, when they happened. All that was public, it wasn’t symbolism, that wasn’t done in a corner; that was all there.  So there’s got to be historical stuff out there, it’s just that Satan is the god of this world, and he just blinded people, and he literally has screwed up history, the accounts of history. 

 

If we’re sitting here in 1999 and we have scholars in this country that already denying that the genocide against Jews in 1943 didn’t happen, we’re only fifty years removed from that and we’re already denying it.  So come pal, if we’re thousands of years removed from Jesus, you’d better believe we’ve got history screwed up.   

 

Next week we’re going to get into what doctrines fall out of this, and these doctrines are going to be hinged on the hypostatic union, that’s why we had the hypostatic union first, and they sound all hairy and complicated, and they are because God’s incomprehensible, but there’s some powerful truths here that apply to Christ’s priesthood, to the filling of the Holy Spirit today, etc. So there are a lot of practical implications in this.

 

See you next week.