The Real Jesus: Myth #4 (6 of 10)

Myth #4: Jesus did not claim to be God

The idea that Jesus did not claim to be God is often put in a more subtle way.

Jennings: “The word Messiah did not mean the Son of God. It simply meant ‘the anointed one.’”

[INTERVIEWS WITH J.P. Holding: “Did Jesus claim to be God?” “Is the Old Testament Messiah divine?”]

The idea that the Jewish Messiah is God himself is not something that first century Christians made up. The divinity of the Messiah is something we find throughout the Old Testament.

The great Reformed scholar Benjamin Warfield wrote:

“It is quite clear, at the outset, that the writers of the New Testament and Christ Himself understood the Old Testament to recognize and to teach that the Messiah was to be of divine nature. For example, they without hesitation support their own assertions of the Deity of Christ by appeals to Old Testament passages in which they find the Deity of the Messiah afore-proclaimed.” (Dr. Benjamin B. Warfield, The Divine Messiah In The Old Testament)

As an example of this, let’s look at Psalm 110, which happens to be the most quoted Old Testament passage by New Testament writers.

“The Lord said to My Lord, sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool.” — Psalm 110:1

Jesus himself brought this prophecy into focus when He confronted the skeptics of his day.

While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying, "What do you think about the Christ? Whose Son is He?"

They said to Him, "The Son of David."

He said to them, "How then does David in the Spirit call Him "Lord,' saying:

"The LORD said to my Lord,
"Sit at My right hand,
Till I make Your enemies Your footstool"'?

If David then calls Him "Lord,' how is He his Son?" And no one was able to answer Him a word, nor from that day on did anyone dare question Him anymore. (Matthew 22:41-46)

Let’s look at Psalm 110 carefully: God addresses the Son as God. He tells us that the Lord Jesus sits upon God’s own throne. We have to ask: Who except God could sit upon God’s throne? Jesus sits on God’s throne because He always was and always will remain God in every sense of the word.

The Trinity and 1 John 5:7,8

There is a popular notion that 1 John 5:7 was interpolated into the Bible sometime in the last 500 to 600 years. The idea comes from the liberal critics' notion that the received text of the Bible must contain errors and that it is the job of modern critics to redact scripture to maintain integrity with the earliest known manuscripts.

Since 1 John 5:7 is not found in any of the ancient Greek manuscripts prior to 1300-1400 AD, then this text must be spurious. This is an accepted idea even among conservatives. Many modern Bible translations include the verse in brackets or as a footnote indicating its late inclusion.

Or so say the critics.

1 John 5:7,8 is the only scripture that contains the Trinitarian formula:

"For there are three that bear record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth,] the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."

The bracketed text is the Trinitarian doctrine that God is three in one. The doctrine of the Trinity does not fall apart on the basis of the rejection of this one verse. However, it is the only verse that succinctly denies the Oneness, or Jesus-only dotrine, otherwise known as the ancient heresy of modalistic monarchianism.

The problem I have with the modern criticism of 1 John 5:7,8 is that the Latin text is seen as having inferior credibility compared to some ancient Greek manuscripts. One such commentary explains:

This is the only passage in the whole Bible that gives any color to the trinity or "oneness" doctrines. However, the bracketed portion (see above) of this passage is almost universally recognized as an interpolation. It first crept into the Greek text in the fourteenth century. It is true that some late Latin, Vulgate MSS., copied not more than five centuries before, do contain it. This interpolation was first inserted into some Vulgate manuscript and was in the fourteenth century translated into the first Greek text having it. Had this text been in the Bible when the trinitarian controversies were going on, in the fourth to the eighth centuries, certainly the trinitarians who were hard pressed by their opponents to produce such a text, would have used it as a proof text. But none of them ever appealed to John as the author of this, for the good reason that it was then not in the Bible. It doubtless crept into the Latin text by a copyist taking it from the margin, where it was written by somebody as his comment on the text, and inserting it into the Latin text itself, from which, as just said, it was first translated into a Greek manuscript in the fourteenth century. The next Greek manuscript that contains it is from the fifteenth century.

http://godandson.reslight.net/1john-5-7.html

The problem for the liberal critics concerning the so-called "Johannine Comma" is that there exist writings of Greek and Latin church fathers who seem to quote the text exactly. Whether the text was in Latin or Greek doesn't detract from the validity of its reliability. From the third century on, the theology of the western church was written mainly in Latin. Since we have no complete manuscript of the New Testament in Greek from this time, there is no way of knowing whether the Greek text of 1 John 5 contained the phrase "the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."

The liberal idea is that God was obligated to transmit a Greek manuscript for every authentic verse of scripture. However, there is no reason to assume that the Latin received text is not reliable.

On one hand, we have some second century Greek fathers, such as Irenaeus, Athenagorus and Hippolytus, who were aware of the "three persons in one God" formula. This word, "prosopon," is the word the earliest writers employed to say, in Greek, 'One God in three persons.' The Latin term 'persona' is the correlative term to 'prosopon.'

John Calvin wrote:

Nor, indeed, was the use of the term Person confined to the Latin Church. For the Greek Church in like manner, perhaps, for the purpose of testifying their consent, have taught that there are three 'prosopa' in God. All these, however, whether Greeks or Latins, though differing as to the word, are perfectly agreed in substance.

(John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, Chapter XIII, 2.)

Calvin was most likely referring to Hippolytus who uses "prosopon" to describe the three persons of the Trinity throughout his refutation of the heresy of modalistic monarchianism.

Hippolytus c. 200 AD. "If, again, he allege His own word when He said, 'I and the Father are one,' [John 10:30], let him attend to the fact, and understand that He did not say, 'I and the Father am one, but are one.' For the word are is not said of one person, but it refers to two persons, and one power." (Hippolytus, 'Against the Heresy of One Noetus').

In addition, we have direct quotations of "these three are one" verse, referring to the Trinity in John 5:7,8, from the following Latin fathers.

Tertullian c. 200 AD. "These Three are one essence not one Person, as it is said, 'I and my Father are One' [John 10:30] in respect of unity of Being not singularity of number" (Against Praxeas, 25).

Cyprian c. 250 AD. "The Lord says, 'I and the Father are one;' and again it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, 'And these three are one.'" (Treatise 8, ch.3)

Priscillian c. 380 AD. "As John says 'and there are three which give testimony on earth, the water, the flesh the blood, and these three are in one, and there are three which give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one in Christ Jesus.'"(Liber Apologeticus)

Eugenius, spokesman for the African bishops at the Council of Carthage, 485 AD. "... and in order that we may teach until now, more clearly than light, that the Holy Spirit is now one divinity with the Father and the Son. It is proved by the evangelist John, for he says, 'there are three which bear testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one."

Several orthodox African writers quoted the verse when defending the doctrine of the Trinity, Vigilius Tapensis, Victor Vitensis, and Fulgence of Ruspe.

Fulgence of Ruspe 513 AD. "See, in short you have it that the Father is one, the Son another, and the Holy Spirit another; in person, each is other, but in nature they are not other. In this regard he [Christ] says, `The Father and I, we are one' [John 10:30]. He teaches us that `one' refers to their nature and `we are' to their persons. In like manner it is said, `There are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one' [1 John 5:7]. Let Sabellius hear 'we are,' let him hear 'three,' and let him believe that there are three Persons" (The Trinity 4:1).

The Latin Textus Receptus had, "the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one." The verse was known to the Greek and Latin fathers. If it was interpolated, it happened far earlier than 1500 AD -- the date claimed by liberal critics. In fact, quotations first begin to appear sometime after 200 AD. There is no reason to think of the Trinitarian formula in 1 John 5:7 as a mistake in transliteration or as an intentional forgery.

Countering the Jesus Mythists (2 of 2)

I was watching a YOUTUBE video with one of the proponents of the Jesus Myth theory, who not surprisingly did his work on this theory when he was in his late 20s. In the video, he asks viewers to "send research" so he can write a book claiming that Luke and Acts were not written until the mid-second century.

It doesn’t bother him that Clement the Bishop of Rome writing at about 95 AD quoted Luke and Acts in his letters. The 19th century liberal view that parts of the New Testament were written 100 years after Jesus death was refuted in the early part of the 20th century, but it continues today, strangely promoted by liberal academics, self-appointed Internet “scholars” and the popular media.

To understand the widespread misperception, a few facts need to be examined.

No original manuscript of any document from the first century or earlier exists today. There are a couple of reasons for this. The papyrus books and scrolls that make up the earliest manuscripts of the Bible were extremely fragile and subject to decay. At most, they could be expected to last only a few hundred years before they began to disintegrate into dust. The job of the scribe was to be in a mode of continual copying, since the entire body of literature in the entire world needed to be recopied in every generation. Scribes would often destroy the older copies to differentiate them from the newer ones. Or if the papyrus was usable but faded, he would copy another sometimes entirely different work over the older one. As a consequence, most of the works from ancient times have been lost forever.

A more durable material called vellum had been invented by the first century but didn’t come into frequent use until about 300 A.D. The life expectancy of vellum is about 1000 years or longer. Prior to this time, we find remarkable preserved fragments containing excerpts from many books in the New Testament. There is no single New Testament compilation from the first two centuries, but we find surprisingly numerous fragments that taken together form the content of much of the New Testament.

After the period when vellum came into use, we find an explosion of manuscripts. The majority of the extant manuscripts of the New Testament from 300 until 1000 AD are much earlier and more numerous than the manuscripts of any other ancient literary work of importance. Many of these compilations, called codices, contain the entire text of the New Testament.

When we look at manuscript evidence for works from ancient times, the New Testament is by far the most reliable document we have. There are more extant manuscripts of the New Testament than of any other work from antiquity.

In fact, there are over 24,000 copies of New Testament manuscripts, the earliest existing manuscript fragment, a portion of the text from the Gospel of John chapter 17, was copied within 35 years of the Apostle John’s death. Many other partial and complete manuscripts exist within the first three centuries after Christ.

This is quite amazing when we compare the New Testament with the closest contenders from this time period.

Homer’s The Iliad. About 600 copies of exist. The earliest was made 1,300 years after the originals were written.

The works of Plato. Only seven copies exist the earliest being 1,200 years removed from the original autographs.

The works of Julius Caesar. Only 10 copies still exist, and they were made 1,000 years after he died.

The works of Tacitus. Only 20 copies exist over 1000 years after the originals.

That any of these early papyrus fragments exist today is a providential circumstance if not a miracle. There are simply no complete manuscripts or any fragments left of Homer, Plato, Caesar, Tacitus or any other work from this time period.

In addition, most ancient manuscripts have widely variant copies and much of the text has suffered corruption. About five percent of the lines from the Iliad are corrupted due to variations in extant copies. Compare that with the most reliable New Testament manuscripts that have variations of less than one half of a percent.

The Internet has changed scholarship forever. Compared to the problem that first century scribes faced, we are living in a Golden Age of communication that the ancients would have thought to be miraculous. What I am typing at this moment could conceivably last forever without any corruption in transmission. What is published on the Internet is immediately viewable by millions of people in every country in the world in a matter of seconds.

We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but unfortunately we moderns are less capable of discerning the media material we view, hear and read. As R.J. Rushdoony has written, we are the “New Barbarians” – a generation of semi-literates barely able to think logically. It is sad and yet encouraging. Take the hubbub over the “Lost Tomb of Jesus” special on the History Channel on Sunday night. Even the liberal commentator Ted Koppel was openly disgusted at the lack of credibility of these filmmakers. At least they admitted Jesus was a real person. The Jesus Mythists are one step beyond left field.

This is actually the best time in history to be a Christian apologist. If you can think logically and read on a college level, you are already head and shoulders above the average 21st century American. Add to this the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who teaches us all things and you won’t find too many arguments against Christianity that are not a veritable house of cards.

Countering the Jesus Mythists (1 of 2)

One of the blessings and scourges to Christian apologetics in our time is the widespread availability of electronic text publishing and digital video production. It is a great blessing because never before has the Christian layman had access to the ability to study theology and communicate the Gospel to so many people. It is a terrible scourge because never before has the quality and reliability of materials related to the Gospel been so poor.

During the whole time when I was the editor of The Forerunner newspaper, our highest press run was just under 25,000 copies. Most copies were sold nearly at cost in bundles of 100 or more for evangelism purposes. We always had a couple thousand faithful subscribers and donors. This generated a budget of a few thousand dollars a month to pay the printing, shipping, and postage bills.

Now with the Internet, Forerunner.com has over 200,000 page accesses per month and over 100,000 visitors (according to one statistics analysis program). I recently put up some clips from the videos I’ve produced on my YouTube video blog and since November 2006 – about four months time – this has generated tens of thousands of viewers. We – meaning me and all the people who have helped me put this together over the years– are reaching many times the number of people than we did with print media and analog video.

A friend of mine, J.P. Holding, who lives just a few miles up the road in Ocoee, Florida, started Tektonics.org in the late 1990s. It’s a similar site to Forerunner.com in many ways. J.P. and I agree that one of the negative byproducts of the postmodernist flood of media technologies has been the emergence in droves of the “Jesus Mythists.” These are people who not only deny the existence of God, but also claim that the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth never even existed.

The proponents of the Jesus Myth theory are almost always without credentials. They do their “research” from a lot of out of date sources to prove an ill-conceived idea that almost no one in the academic community – not even the most liberal of the liberal Bible scholars – will entertain. Almost every scholar agrees that Jesus was a real person and that the Gospel accounts contain a historical outline of His acts and sayings.

The Mythists’ argument is that no one from the time of Jesus wrote anything about him. They discount all the writings of the Apostles and early Christians because they were “biased.” They discount the dozen or so accounts of Jewish and pagan writers who mention Jesus near the end of the second century because they were not eyewitnesses. What they are looking for is a “smoking gun” – an actual letter or manuscript recording the existence of written by someone prior to Jesus’ death.

Such a plea for comtemporary written evidence is extremely unreasonable. We do not doubt the existence of other ancient figures who were not written about until after their death. Until the 20th century, we had no contemporary evidence that Caiaphas the High Priest or Pontius Pilate, who were mentioned several times in the New Testament, were real people either. They are mentioned by later historians, but except for the Gospels and Acts, there was not a single letter, writing or inscription by them or by a person living in theri time who recorded their sayings or doings.

That is, until very recently.

In 1990, diggers in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City uncovered an ossuary (repository for bones) with the inscription JOSEPH SON OF CAIAPHAS. This marked the first archaeological evidence that the high priest Caiaphas, who according to the Gospels presided at the Sanhedrin's trial of Jesus, was a real person. So, indisputably, was Pilate. In 1961, diggers in Caesarea found the fragment of a plaque indicating that a building had been dedicated by PONTIUS PILATUS, PREFECT OF JUDEA.

There is also a lot of physical evidence that validates the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus and the Apostles. Archaeologists have uncovered a first century house in Capernaum that according to tradition was the home of St. Peter. The building contains a meeting room that might have been used for worship. Some experts speculate that this was the synagogue where Jesus preached, as recounted in John 6:59.

The Gospels contain no fewer than 45 references to boats and fishing as they relate to Jesus. These fishing communities have been proven to exist! In 1986, two members of a Galilean kibbutz came across the remains of a 26-ft.-long wooden dory, buried in the mud near Kinneret on the Sea of Galilee, that has been carbon-dated to the first century. Almost certainly, this was the kind of vessel used by Peter, James, John and the other fishermen whom Jesus recruited as his first disciples.

Although movie director John Cameron claims to have discovered the ossuary of the family of Jesus (even claiming Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene on sketchy and far-fetched evidence) it’s unlikely that we should expect find such physical or written evidence of Jesus from a contemporary source other than His disciples.

The reason is that according to the Gospels, Jesus was viewed by almost everyone during His lifetime -- including most of his disciples and family members -- as either an ordinary rabbi, perhaps a prophet, or maybe the promised Messiah -- although even Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist had doubts. This view changed dramatically after the Resurrection when His followers universally began to preach Jesus as the risen Christ and Lord of the universe.

Until His death on the cross, he was controversial yet ordinary. After the resurrection, He was sensational and extraordinary.

To the left is the Pilate inscription discovered in 1961. It reads: "PONTIUS PILATUS, PREFECT OF JUDEA."

Is abortion legal through all nine months of pregancy in all 50 states for any reason?

I wrote in one of my video blogs:

"Abortion is legal through all nine months of pregancy in all 50 states for any reason."

I was then corrected by VOMUTE who wrote the following:

False-
In the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade it simply stated that abortion is legal by the U.S. constitution but abortion laws may be restricted by the states to varying degrees. So yes, abortion is legal, by the U.S. constitution. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t state laws which restrict late term abortions. It’s a “STATE’S” decision to what extent those laws are carried out. I assume the state you live in (as nearly every state does) has certain restrictions and laws that deal with abortion such as parental notification for minors, mandating the disclosure of abortion risk information to patients prior to treatment and yes to which trimester the abortion may take place in. I hope you noticed my emphasis on state. If you want those questions answered I recommend looking at your states laws. If you dislike what you find I recommended writing your congressmen and address the situation. You seem so scientifically and medically knowledgeable about the subject I’m surprised you didn’t know the legalities as well.

I’m also surprised while acquiring your wealth of knowledge you didn’t learn how to correctly spell PREGNANCY.

Pro-abortion? Say what? I’ve never heard of a pro-abortion organization group. Is it a cult? Is there really a group who’s promoting abortions? Are they professional abortionists? I feel a little dumb now. I'm making the assumption that you're referring to people who consider themselves "pro-choice" which is entirely different from being "pro-abortionist". Choice means Choosing- having the ability to choose not promoting something. Just as Anti-abortion doesn’t mean anti-choice. Before you decided to regurgitate what the media, church, parents tell you to I would recommend getting educated on the subject.

My response:

I love it when people tell me how ignorant I am and that I didn't research my "facts," I need to get educated, etc.

As Johnny Carson would say, "Here's where you are WRONG, pro-abortion breath!"

With Doe v. Bolton, the access to abortion on demand was extended to all 50 states at any time during the pregnancy for any reason whatsoever,

With any "state restriction," the exception clause "danger to the life and health of the mother" is always required.

So all an eight-and-a half-month pregnant mother has to do is tell her doctor she is thinking about suicide or that she is having mental health problems due to her pregancy and it automatically becomes legal. In fact, many abortionists tell their patients to say this.

I call these doctors "pro-abortion" because they want child murder legalized through all nine months for any reason.

That's the reality. You may think I am an extremist, but I am just telling the truth.

Thank you for teaching me the correct spelling of pregnancy.

"I DID NOT know that!"