Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Resurrection of Christ in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
It is an enormous privilege for me to be here in Charlottesville. What I propose to do tonight is in substantial measure a kind of cleanup job. It’s attempting to clear the ground a wee bit, and then tomorrow night I want to make more of a positive statement. I shall begin tonight with a summary of major conceptions and misconceptions when we approach questions about Jesus of Nazareth, history, truth, an entire frame of thought.
First, historically people claim to know God on the basis of one of three structures: mysticism, reason, or revelation. In reality there’s usually some combination of the three, but the mystic claims to have knowledge of God out of some personal encounter. The person who rests on reason thinks he or she is able by the force of the ontological argument or some other structure to demonstrate beyond reasonable cavil the existence of God and perhaps even some of his attributes. This has been done again and again in various structures across history.
The famous RenÈ Descartes, for example, with his cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” which every first-year philosophy student comes to know, was, in fact, a devout Roman Catholic who thought by this base he was going to be able to win just about everybody to his own faith. He thought he could reason people to Christianity. At the same time, the majority of Christians across time have depended in the first instance on revelation; that is, on the belief God has disclosed himself in events, in words, in a variety of ways. That immediately raises the issue.… How do we know it’s revelation? Is it worthwhile?
The second thing I want to say is the Christian view of the Bible is it is a mediated book. This is really very important. If you ask a devout Mormon or a devout Muslim how his or her book came down, it is by a kind of direct disclosure without much mediation. Whether the golden plates that reached Joseph Smith or ostensibly in the Qur’an, then such an infallible book, there can really be no textual variance.
Whereas, the Bible for its part comes to us in a surprisingly mediated form. There are parts of the Bible which claim to be by dictation. The most amusing part is doubtless the prophecy of Jeremiah. Jeremiah receives this message from God according to the Bible, and he dictates it to his secretary, a chap called Baruch. Baruch writes it all down, and the enemies don’t like it. They take the scroll, and they slice it all up and throw each piece into the fire.
If you’re a Christian or a Jew reading that, you’re supposed to laugh. Does God forget what he said? He dictates it all again through Jeremiah. So there are some parts of the Bible that are ostensibly the result of dictation, but there are huge swaths of the Bible that make no pretense of coming to us by dictation.
For example, when King David writes the well-known psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” it’s not as if he came in from a heavy day of administration and then God said to him, “Pick up your quill pen, David. You’re not quite done yet. Take down the following:
‘The Lord …’
‘The Lord …’
‘… is my shepherd …’
‘… is my shepherd …’
‘… I shall not want.’
‘… I shall not want.’ ”
It just didn’t happen that way. In other words, there is so much of the Bible that emerges out of the experience, the pain, the agony, the suffering, the hope, the belief, the witness of the people who lived in these various places and periods of time.
For some people that is proof positive against the work of the Spirit, but what the biblical claim is is that God has actually worked through these forms of human mediation so what comes out is nothing less than what God wants disclosed even while it is an astonishingly human document. The result is the gospel of John does not sound like the gospel of Luke. The vocabulary of Paul is not the vocabulary of the letter to the Hebrews, and so on. There are different genres. Compare it. You should compare it with the Qur’an, with its shuras, its chapters of decreasing length.
Instead, take a look at the biblical books that include narrative, discourse, lament, malediction, proverb, genealogy, letters, indignation, praise, apocalyptic literature, and much more, different genres that have emerged within the framework of human existence. In other words, the biblical claim is God has actually disclosed himself through people writing in the framework of their own deep experiences, preserved, no doubt, by God to bring out the truth but still immensely human documents.
The third thing to be said, still by way of prolegomenon, is Christianity is a peculiarly historical religion. Supposing you could prove, I don’t know how, Gautama the Buddha never lived. Again, I don’t know how. I don’t think it’s possible. How do you prove something of that order? Supposing you could prove, would you destroy Buddhism? No, of course not, because the credibility of Buddhism depends finally on the coherence of the entire philosophical-religious structure, on its attractiveness as a system. It does not depend in any particular on any historical datum from the life of Gautama.
Go to India. Supposing you could prove (I don’t know how; I can’t conceive of how) Krishna never lived, would you destroy Hinduism? Of course not. Hinduism has millions of gods. Nobody knows them all. The Greeks had thousands. The Hindus have millions. They all nestle within a framework in which truth underlies all existence … good, bad, and indifferent.
The framework of advance is within a karma system in which you can rise in increasing cycles or fall back in decreasing cycles, but if you lose a Krishna, you can go down the street to a Shiva temple or others. The system does not fall apart because somehow you could prove one god didn’t exist.
Now go to Islam. Ask a friendly Muslim, a neighborhood imam. Ask. Do. “Sir, can you conceive Allah, had he chosen to do so, could have given his final revelation to somebody else other than Muhammad?” Ask respectfully. Perhaps, he may misunderstand your question in the first instance and say, “You don’t understand. We believe God spoke through the prophet Abraham and he spoke through the prophet Elijah and he spoke through the prophet Jesus, but his last and final revelation is through Muhammad.”
You reply, “Well, I understand that is what you believe. I’m neither affirming it nor am I denying it. It’s not quite what I’m asking. I’m asking a slightly different question. Do you think Allah, had he chosen to do so, could have given his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad?”
Almost certainly, he will say, “It’s inconceivable in the light of what happened, but the revelation is not Muhammad. God could have given his revelation to anyone he chose. We believe he gave it to Muhammad. We believe it is the final revelation, but there is nothing intrinsic to Muhammad. Though we believe he is the final prophet, there is nothing intrinsic to him that makes him himself the revelation. Allah alone is god.”
Now come to Christianity. I don’t know how, as with the others, but suppose you could prove somehow quite Jesus never, ever lived. Would you destroy Christianity? The answer is yes, utterly, because the Christian claim is God has disclosed himself not only in words or events, but ultimately in Jesus of Nazareth, himself simultaneously God and man.
The claim is so sweeping. Ultimately, if it is destroyed there is no useful Christianity left. In fact, we can speak not only of Christ as one person, but certain events in his life.… If you could prove Christ never rose from the dead, you’ve destroyed Christianity. Do you know the first person to make that argument was a man called Paul, writing with just over 20 years from the events themselves, saying, “Let us suppose for a moment Christ did not rise from the dead. What would follow from this?”
He began to tease out the entailments of his own reasoning. We’ll come back to that a little later this evening. In fact, I want to come back to the same point tomorrow night in a slightly different connection. In other words, Christianity is an astonishingly historical religion. It depends on historical claims.
The way we have access to history in the first instance is by documents and witnesses, people who claimed to have seen and touched and handled, people who were there, and report what they see and what they heard. That’s precisely why debates about Christianity do turn at least in measure on historical matters.
I want to say in the strongest possible way I make no pretension of being able to convince you or anybody else of Christianity’s rightness by simply historical arguments. Somebody might believe Jesus really did rise from the dead and simply say, “But I don’t want any part of it.” In other words, there may be moral dimensions or cultural dimensions to the reasons why we believe or disbelieve.
We’ll come to some of those in due course as well. I do not want you to think simply by historical argumentation I can talk you into the kingdom. I don’t think that. The Bible doesn’t allow me to think that. Yet, there is an ineluctable historical element in Christian claims that sooner or later has to be faced.
A year and a half ago at Easter, the then Anglican bishop of Perth in western Australia was asked on the public media in that country, “What would happen if suddenly the tomb of Jesus was found and beyond reasonable cavil, it really was the tomb of Jesus and the body was still there? What would happen to your faith? Would it be destroyed?” “Of course not,” the dear bishop replied. “Jesus has risen in my heart.”
That’s the kind of mystical approach to religion. It’s outside the public arena. It’s outside of history now. It’s private experience of something, and that is a long way removed from what the New Testament has to say. Paul, writing 25 years after Christ, is a lot more blunt. There he says, “If you really conclude Christ has not risen, then Christian faith is futile and empty,” which raises some very interesting things about the nature of faith, but we’ll come back to that too.
Fourth, the issue is not over some vague thing called literal interpretation. This is often thrown out. Fundamentalists believe in literal interpretation. We believe in symbology or whatever. Sometimes the antithesis is put as sharply as that. Strictly speaking, no one is a literalist in the strong sense of the term. For example, in one remarkable passage, Jesus says he’s the door, but no one thinks of him as being flat on both sides, turning on hinges and squeaking, no matter how literalistic.
If by literal you simply mean you try to understand the text in a straightforward and sensible way as possible, granted the understanding of that particular literary genre and understanding there are claims here to historical witness and the like, you’re trying to be faithful to sensible evenhanded interpretation, in that sense I suppose I’m a literalist, but that allows lots of room for symbolism and metaphor and different literary genres, proverbs, parables, and much more beside.
Finally, still by way of introduction, still under this summary of major conceptions and misconceptions, I think we do well to remind ourselves we too are culturally located. In other words, none of us approaches this subject, not I as a Christian, not a dear friend in a biblical studies department at another university, who is a deeply committed atheist or an agnostic, not any of us, not you.
No one approaches any of these subjects tabula rasa, a clean slate, an empty hard drive on which you simply write new files and then the whole computer works nicely. We all bring our cultural baggage with us. That does not mean the cultural structures which we have inherited cannot be changed or modified or contraindicated or reshaped. I don’t mean that. I’m not a determinist, culturally speaking, and yet we inevitably bring bits of baggage with us.
Let me give one simple example. Thirty years ago, the notion of tolerance that dominated in North America was very different from the current notion of tolerance that dominates in North America. Because we live today, most of us have imbibed the current notion without even asking tough questions.
Thirty years ago, most still operated with a notion of tolerance that was best articulated by the great French philosopher and thinker, Voltaire, who said, “I may detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This became almost the definition of tolerance. In other words, there was the possibility of strong disagreement, even insisting what you are saying is despicable or stupid or ignorant or corrupt, but still, “I defend your right to say it.” In a free society, that is what tolerance means. “I disagree, and yet I insist you may speak.”
In today’s notion of tolerance, there is something else that’s operating. Nowadays, tolerance has so been redefined, for reasons I do not have time to go into here, it looks a bit more like this. What you do not have the right to do is, in an assortment of domains, to say someone else is wrong. That’s the only wrong thing. If you say they’re wrong, you’re intolerant. That’s not what Voltaire said. Voltaire said, “I may detest what you’re saying but insist you have the right to speak.”
In this new form of tolerance, in a wide variety of domains, you are intolerant if you say someone else is wrong. Not least does this operate in the domain of religion. I’d claim this new view of tolerance is intellectually incoherent and morally perverse. It’s intellectually incoherent because it is very difficult to imagine what tolerance means when you’re not prepared to say somebody is wrong in the first instance.
How does a Marxist turn to a capitalist and say, “There is nothing wrong in what you say. I tolerate you”? How does a capitalist turn to a Marxist and say, “There’s nothing wrong in what you say. I tolerate you”? Let alone a democrat and a republican. How do you do that? Don’t you have to say, “I think you’re nuts, but I defend your right to speak”?
In other words, don’t you have to disagree before you can speak of toleration? To speak of tolerating someone by insisting you can’t say they’re wrong is not toleration at all. Moreover, it eventually comes morally perverse. In that, the one thing this new vision of tolerance says is wrong is disagreement with its new vision of tolerance. This has worked its way into UN documents and into one of the Canadian charters.
“We defend tolerance everywhere except for the intolerant. So the one place where people disagree with you, namely on your definition of tolerance, there we will shut you down legally and through the courts and any other way because we define you to be intolerant.” It becomes a morally indefensible sort of stance.
This clearly has some huge bearing on religious discussion. Part of my job takes me to many corners of the world, and I enjoy talking with people of other faiths, but I want such discussions to be of the sort where they feel free to tell me I’m wrong and why and where and I feel free to tell them they’re wrong and why and where, in the most respectful way. Then you have genuine tolerance.
Otherwise, what you have is a kind of mushy-headedness that pretends we’re saying the same thing when we’re not. For example, most Muslims, not quite all, deny Jesus died on the cross. They say he was taken down and actually lived for quite a long time in private beyond what would have been his death at 33. No Muslim believes Jesus rose from the dead. Christians claim both, that there are historical reasons for believing he died historically on the cross, that there are witnesses, and that he rose from the dead.
With all due respect, those are historical claims on both sides, and the two sides cannot both be right. How are we going to talk about these things? Aren’t we going to talk about them by a certain kind of courteous interaction? “Why do you believe that? On what ground? What is the evidence?” Or do we simply say, “Well, you have your opinion, and I have my opinion, and that’s the end of it. I can’t ever say you’re wrong, and I call that tolerance”?
Many of us live and breathe and move in that framework. A few years ago, there was a poll done of thousands of American undergraduates across the nation. It was done in selected universities across the nation to ask which person was more tolerant, A or B. Person A was the one who sided with Voltaire; that is, the person who was quite prepared to disagree with others but still insisted they had the right to speak.
Person B was the one who insisted it is wrong to say anybody else is wrong, especially in these sorts of domains. That is, the one thing you must not say is somebody else is wrong. Who then is the more tolerant? Eighty-five percent of American undergraduates opted for B. That was simply incoherent 35 years ago. We too live in certain cultural times, and those times can shape our perceptions of how discussion is going. I simply want to raise that.
If, then, for example, we ask, “What are the biases of the New Testament writers when they write?” it’s a good question to ask. (I’ll return to that question in a few moments.) We should surely ask what are our biases when we ask the question, for the fact of the matter is most of us end up examining everybody else’s biases in previous generations, but we prove to be remarkably unaware of our own biases. We are all culturally located, and we must do our best to try to come to grips with some of these things.
Second, I want now briefly to survey some popular treatments of the Gospels in particular since they are our primary forms of access to who Jesus is and the claims of the resurrection and the like. For example, many voices today are arguing a document called the Gospel of Thomas is as early, or earlier than, the four canonical gospels, that is, the Gospels that make up the first part of our New Testament, named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Until fairly recently, most scholars, probably still today a majority, it’s touch and go, think Thomas was written in the second part of the second century, but people have tried to bring his date back and back and now argue Thomas is earlier than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Part of the problem here is dating methods and understanding Coptic and technical discussions like that, but there is another issue I want to raise.
If you read the New Testament at all, you know Christians speak of the gospel of Matthew, the gospel of Mark, the gospel of Luke, the gospel of John. Nobody in the first century spoke like that. They spoke of the gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark, the gospel according to Luke, and so on.
If you are taking Greek, then you will notice at the head of each of these books is the little phrase, kata Matthaion or kata Markon, “according to.” Why? Is that just a little technical point you can ignore? No, in the first century, gospel was not a genre word. It was not a word that referred to a certain kind of book. Gospel simply meant the good news.
So the gospel according to Matthew meant the good news according to Matthew. The gospel according to John meant the good news according to John. In every case, then, they thought of this as the good news of Jesus Christ according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. In other words, there was just one gospel, but according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
In other words, all of first-century Christians were perspectivalists. They understood Matthew brought a certain perspective and Mark brought a certain perspective and Luke brought a certain perspective. So did John, but there was still just one gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Someone has said there are only two kinds of perspectivalists in the world: those who admit it and those who don’t, because at the end of the day we’re all finite. Inevitably, we approach things from a certain angle. It’s simply the entailment of finitude. The only being who can be non-perspectival is an omniscient being. In that sense, of course, we’re all perspectivalists, and the first centuries understood it.
They also understood there was one gospel. What made up that gospel? Look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, their witness. In every case they spoke in some way or other of the beginnings of Jesus, his public ministry, his teaching, his miracles, his claims, and in every case the narrative moved toward his death and resurrection.
In other words, the good news about Jesus was not that he went around saying some good things and that was it; the good news was who he was and not only what he taught but what he accomplished by his death and his resurrection. I will come back to that in much greater detail tomorrow night.
In brief it is they believed by his death he bore the sins of his people and he was vindicated by his resurrection, that God vindicated him and this is in anticipation of a final transformation of the entire universe, that Christian hope is not simply an ethereal being where we all sit around in nightshirts and play guitars in some sort of quasi spiritual atmosphere, world without end, amen.
But what we hope for is a renovated resurrection existence, something akin to Christ’s resurrection existence. It’s a sweeping vision. That was the good news according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now come to the gospel of Thomas. It’s made up a 114 sayings. There’s no history in it. Well, that’s not quite true. There are two tiny little snippets. That’s it. There’s nothing about Jesus’ death and nothing about his resurrection. It’s not a gospel at all.
Besides, everybody knows it wasn’t written by Thomas. Conservative, liberal, anywhere in between, fundamentalist, right-wing, left-wing. Everybody knows it wasn’t written by Thomas, but in the first-century sense, it’s not the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Thomas in any case; it’s a collection of sayings. That’s all it is, because by the time it was written, it reflected the rise of a massive movement later history came to call Gnosticism.
Gnosticism taught you were saved (whatever that means) by gnosis, by knowledge. To have some clearer understanding of reality and the spiritual nature of reality was at the heart of it all. Gnosticism, gnosis, was not some clear-cut denominational structure. It had many, many flavors. Somebody has called it a theosophical hodge-podge, so it is very difficult to say things about it that are unambiguous across all the vast array of Gnostic literature.
Typically, for example, it says matter is bad and spirit is good and your salvation is in some sense bound up with the kind of knowledge that drives you to the more and more spiritual and leaves aside the material and concern for the body and resurrection. Death and resurrection being at the heart of our salvation is simply incoherent to the Gnostic.
So, as a result, the various forms of Gnosticism had an array of ways to marginalize the cross and the resurrection that the first century saw was essential to Christianity. For example, in the so-called Valentinian school of Gnosticism, you may recall Jesus when he’s dying on the cross he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
According to this stream of Gnosticism, then, what Jesus was really doing was Jesus the God, Jesus the Spirit, Jesus the Son of God was actually taken away by his Father, and Jesus the man, Jesus the physical being, Jesus what was left after the God left him, said, “My God, my God, why are you forsaking me?”
In other words, the spiritual Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, was removed, and what you had left was just the man. It wasn’t the God-man dying. It was only the man that died, and the Spirit abandoned dear old Jesus. That is so far removed from the New Testament where it’s precisely who dies that is critical. It’s the God-man dying, not for things he had done but for things we had done. This isn’t the gospel in any sense. It’s a later development.
You may have seen all the kerfuffle about the gospel of Judas. One of the ambiguities that came up in the kerfuffle was over what is meant by authentic. We’ve known about the gospel of Judas a long time. Irenaeus, writing about 180, speaks in his day of a gospel of Judas he knew about. He knew of it as a heretical Gnostic document, but we didn’t have a copy until about 30 years ago when it was discovered. Then more recently it has been translated into English, and people started proclaiming it as authentic.
Yes, it is authentic, but no, it’s not authentic. It depends on what you mean. It almost certainly is authentically the gospel of Judas of which Irenaeus spoke at the end of the second century, but that doesn’t make it a gospel that was written by the historical Judas who actually betrayed Jesus. There simply is not a scrap of evidence to support that view … none … so it’s difficult to see precisely why this document in any sense overturns anything that is taught by first-century writers who are putting down their reports 130, 140, or 150 years earlier.
In fact, a friend in Britain, Simon Gathercole, rather amusingly says the gospel of Judas is as authentic as a newly discovered diary of Queen Victoria on a CD discussing the merits of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Or Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker: “The finding of the new Gospel … no more challenges the basis of the Church’s faith than the discovery of a document from the nineteenth century written in Ohio and defending King George would be a challenge to the basis of American democracy.” It’s that kind of anachronism you’re working with.
Shall we go one more to The Da Vinci Code? I love something an acquaintance of mine put out on a CD. He said he approached The Da Vinci Code, the work of Dan Brown, with a certain amount of reservation because he had read Dan Brown’s earlier novel, in which the heroine, a CIA agent, arrives at Dulles International Airport to go out to NSA quarters.
His description of NSA headquarters is that it’s nestled in the wooded foothills of Maryland and well back from the road without any signs because, after all, it’s the NSA. It’s remarkably secret. Actually, she’s brought in, and there’s immense security, and so on.
My friend comments, “Doesn’t Dan Brown ever check out the geography of the places he describes? The NSA has signs posted all over the place. There are no woods around there. You can see all the towers of the dishes of NSA from the road. Nobody in his right mind would go to NSA through Dulles. It’s 37 miles away. Fly into Baltimore; it’s closer.” In other words, he was already prepared to discount the historical researches of Brown before he actually came to the book itself.
The problem with the book apart from the unbelievability of certain particular bits is just at the level of facts it gets too much wrong. Of the six or eight major books that have taken it to task, the one by Witherington documents 100 fundamental facts where Brown just plain gets it wrong historically by anybody’s account of history. These are not even disputable matters.
For example, it is argued in the Jewish temple there were sex rites going on behind the sacred curtains. Anyone who knows anything of the Jewish history of the temple and before that the tabernacle knows how completely implausible that is without a scrap of evidence for it anywhere.
To argue it was the post-Constantinian church, that is, after AD 300, that invented the doctrine of the deity of Christ is so utterly implausible to anybody who has simply read the New Testament respectfully once or twice, where you find far too many claims for Christ’s deity worked right into the text. We’ll come to some of those tomorrow night as well. Again and again, I am tempted to say these new reconstructions which undermine the faith of many turn out on close inspection not to be very reliable.
It has been argued at great length, for example, the textual variations you find in the New Testament manuscripts undermine the Bible’s authority, its ability to tell the truth. If you want to see how this works, simply take any book at all and try to copy out 20 pages without making a mistake. Don’t put it through spell check. Just copy them out. Then give them to a friend to proof against the original. I guarantee no matter how careful you are, you will have introduced some mistakes.
Remember the biblical manuscripts were copied and copied until the invention of the printing press. Until Gutenberg invented the printing press, it was not possible to have flawless copies time after time. In fact, when Gutenberg first invented the printing press and all the plates had errors in, what it did was reproduce errors again and again.
Eventually, you can clean up the plates and clean up the plates until eventually you have copies that are perfect according to those plates and that are reproduced in their thousands and tens of thousands and even millions. Until then, what do you have? You have manuscripts that are copied. So it is argued there are so many, many errors in these manuscripts you can no longer trust the believability, the credibility, of the documents themselves.
I’ll say a few things about this, but if you are interested in this subject at length, of the many reviews that have been written of this perspective, the most trenchant by far and informed is that by Daniel Wallace on a website called www.Bible.org. If that interests you, I recommend strongly you go and read it. It’s only about 30 pages or so, and it is immensely informed.
Suppose, for argument’s sake, God had so arranged things that no author could have made a mistake in copying. How would that work? What would it look like? Would it be, for example, if an author tried to change something maliciously, he or she would be holding the quill pen and would be trying to change a pronoun and found his pen wouldn’t work or completely preserved miraculously from any possibility of leaving out a letter in spelling?
In other words, in addition to whatever miracle is involved or providence is involved in God’s producing the material in the first place, you’d have to have a miracle every time anything was copied, world without end. It hasn’t happened. On the other hand, what is sometimes overlooked is the manuscript evidence is so astonishingly rich, about 5,000 copies of the Greek testament of whole or in part, about 8,000 early translations, of all the many, many tens of thousands of little errors, only 1 percent are in any way significant, because there is enough textual evidence to say what the original was.
Even in that 1 percent of textually interesting ones, in no case, not one, is there any Christian fundamental doctrine or truth or the like that is overturned by the variation. For example, if in John 1:18 where there is a very difficult textual variant to sort out, whether this is claiming Jesus is actually God or the unique Son, people have sometimes argued this variation proves the deity of Christ was not affirmed. It was the Son that was being affirmed, not the deity of Christ that was being affirmed. Thus, all of John’s gospel has to be read in a different way henceforth.
The difficulty is teaching Jesus truly is God does not just depend on that verse. Already, 18 verses earlier at the very beginning in material that is textually certain, this one called the Word, Jesus the Word, was said to be with God and was God. At the end of the book, the confession of Thomas that Jesus really is God is astonishingly clear.
In the middle of the book, Jesus says something really shocking. He says, “Before Abraham was …” Who had bumped off 2,000 years earlier. “… I am,” which is claiming at very least preexistence, and because he’s taking on his lips the name of God, he’s claiming even more than that.
In other words, the whole doctrine and structure of who Jesus is is not affected in any case by one textual variant, despite what quite a number of critics say. Again, I don’t have time to run down that track, but these are the documents we’re finally dealing with when we start talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now let me turn to some bits and bobs that are interesting in this entire discussion. Let me read you the opening lines of our third gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Luke.
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eye witnesses and servants of the Word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”
Isn’t that an interesting way to begin a book? Luke claims to have done his homework. He claims to have investigated the sources, and you can place Luke at all the major Christian centers. He spends some time in Jerusalem. He spends some time in Ephesus. He spends some time in Antioch of Syria, all major Christian centers. He had access to the original archival material.
It’s Luke’s gospel that preserves the most detailed account of the virginal conception of Jesus. What I’m going to tell you now is on the edge of speculation, but it strikes me as fairly reasonable speculation. Luke is a doctor. You can place him in the same place Mary is. I suspect the reason why he includes more along these lines, and this is what the church has taught for centuries until the contemporary skepticism set in, is precisely because he had a chat with Mary. He had access to the information.
There are certain passages in his account of the early movement of the church where he stops writing about Paul and they and them and Peter and starts talking about we because he was traveling with them. That’s the natural way of reading the text instead of trying to understand it as some sort of literary creation.
In our culture the mayor of Chicago and the mayor of Charlottesville and the mayor of New York and the mayor of Dallas is in every case simply called “the mayor.” In other words, the chief executive magistrate of any decent-sized town other than a hamlet is a mayor. In the ancient world the chief magistrate of a city had a peculiar title depending on how the city was governed. Was it governed out of the Roman Senate? Was it a free-standing city? Was it governed out of the executive power of the Roman emperor through various delegates?
In each case the particular person whom we would call a mayor had a different name, and these changed depending on what was going on politically at the time. Insofar as Luke can be tested on such a minor front, he always gets them right. Let me run through these. I don’t expect you to remember these; I just want you to feel the power of it.
Sergius Paulus and Gallio, for example, in Acts 13:7 and 18:12, are called anthypateuō. The magistrates at Philippi are called stratēgos. The city officials in Thessalonica are called politarchēs. The townclerk in Ephesus is called the grammateus and Felix the governor, the hēgemōn. The chief official of the Isle of Malta is called the prōtos.
In every case there’s a special term that is used for that particular official of that particular place, and in every case, so far as he can be tested by public records, Luke has it right, which suggests he has done some homework. He has done some reading. He has done some checking. He has been to these various places.
Even before we start coming to doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy and all of those disputed terms, these are careful people who are trying to understand what’s going on by checking out documents, records, interviewing people. That is the way Luke sets out his agenda, and in my judgment he fulfills it in enormous detail.
What about the really difficult issues, the ostensible difference in date for Jesus’ death you find, on the one hand, between the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the gospel of Jesus according to John? If you want to pick up some of those in Q&A, well and good. I’ll refer to one or two of them tomorrow. I’m going to skip them at the moment because I want to press on to something else.
I want to turn now, as we come closer to the end, to the enormous pressure within the Gospels for recognizing who Jesus is. I want to read you a few verses from Matthew, chapter 11. In Matthew, chapter 11, by this time John the Baptist, Jesus’ predecessor, is in prison, but he’s becoming a bit disillusioned with Jesus, so he sends some of his disciples to ask Jesus, John himself being in prison, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” It’s remarkable, isn’t it?
This man, John the Baptist, is having doubts about who Jesus is. Part of the reason.… If you go back to John the Baptist’s preaching, he announced a Messiah who would come and separate the wheat and the chaff, throw the chaff into unquenchable fire, but here is Jesus preaching nice sermons, drawing thousands on hillsides, becoming wonderfully popular, not being cast in prison, and not bringing down judgment on all the corruption of his time, overturning the Roman Empire, overturning the local monarch, not doing any of that sort of thing.
He’s preaching nice sermons and telling stories we call parables, and John isn’t quite sure Jesus is the one he promised would come. So Jesus replies. I don’t have the time to go through his reply in detail, but he gives an answer John the Baptist is expected to understand. Then after he has responded, he turns to the crowd that has overheard this debate between John’s disciples and Jesus.
It’s almost as if Jesus does not want the crowd to think badly of John the Baptist. So he turns on them, and he says, in Matthew 11:7, “What did you go out into the desert to see?” That is, “When you went out to listen to John the Baptist, what did you go out to see? Why did you go and listen to him? Did you go and expect to see a reed swayed by the wind; that is, some wimp blown about by every wind of cultural preference? Is that why you went out?”
Of course, that’s not why they went out. When they heard John the Baptist was preaching, they thought it was fantastic. He was tough. He was strong. He was holding to integrity. He was insisting on righteousness. He was calling the nation to repentance, and he drew a crowd. “Then why did you go out to see him? Did you go out to see him because you thought he was posh, he was a man dressed in fine clothes?”
No, the record says he was dressed in the homespun of a poor prophet, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He was an ascetic. In other words, they didn’t go out to him because he was posh. They didn’t go out to him because they thought he was a wimp. They went out to him because he was strong, and Jesus is saying, in effect, “So don’t you think for a moment he’s a wimp now. Don’t you think badly of John the Baptist.”
Then he asks again, “So what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes …” he says, “… and more than a prophet.” John the Baptist is more than a prophet? In what sense? Jesus then quotes an earlier Old Testament prophet, a prophet called Malachi. “In fact, he is more than a prophet because he is someone who is prophesied about. He is the one who was going to introduce me according to the prophecy of Malachi.”
Then he says, “I tell you the truth, among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.” Do you hear that? Supposing I got up here after Drew Trotter had kindly introduced me this evening and said, “I solemnly tell you the truth, Drew Trotter is the greatest man ever born of women because he introduced me,” it might be good for a belly laugh. Either that or you call the people in white coats and haul me out of here before I embarrass myself further.
That’s what Jesus says. Jesus says John the Baptist is greater than King David. He’s greater than Solomon, greater than Abraham, greater than Moses, greater than Genghis Khan, greater than Julius Caesar, greater than anybody, the greatest born of women, which is pretty comprehensive. Why? “Because,” Jesus says, “he introduced me.” According to Jesus there was a sense in which Abraham anticipated him and Moses pointed forward to him and all those other Old Testament figures in some ways anticipated him and introduced him
But the one who was given the job on the historical setting of actually saying, “Look, there’s the one, whose sandals I’m not fit to undo. There’s the Lamb of God. He is the Promised One. Follow him. He must increase, but I must decrease. I just baptize you with water; he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit,” constantly pointing to Jesus, was John the Baptist.
Jesus does not come back and say, “Oh no, John. We’re all in this together. You think I’m great, but frankly, I’m aware of all my sin and my guilt. I think you’re great.” (“I can be more humble than you can.”) Indeed there is a great deal of Christian spirituality that is bound up with an acknowledgement of sin and failure. Often, the holiest people are those who are most aware of their own failures. Along comes Jesus and says, “I solemnly tell you the truth, John the Baptist is the greatest person born of a woman because he introduced me.”
The kind of person who says that sort of thing is either an international class nut, a megalomaniac of the very first water, or he is making claims you have to listen to with the utmost respect to find out exactly what he is saying. This is just one of scores of passages with similar weight.
In other words, the account of the resurrection of Jesus does not come out of left field. Jesus was saying nice little moralisms, “Be good. Turn the other cheek.” Then suddenly he was bumped off, a nasty little conspiracy, and then he came back from the dead. That’s not it at all. All along he knows what he’s doing. He knows where he’s going, and he has this strange combination of genuine humility and care for others with the utmost self-consciousness of his own uniqueness, the one who speaks and God speaks. It’s an astonishing authority.
If you have never read the New Testament documents, that’s where I strongly urge you to start. Don’t just read about them in courses. Read the documents themselves. Almost inevitably, people find themselves then polarizing around this Jesus. They’re either drawn to him inescapably, or they say, “I cannot live with this. I cannot swallow it. I cannot buy it,” and for one of a hundred reasons, they move off in some other direction.
It’s within that framework the accounts of the resurrection of Christ take place in the New Testament in documents claiming to be written either by eyewitnesses or by those in touch with eyewitnesses, the first documents written, according to Paul, when the 500 or more witnesses who actually saw the resurrected Christ were not yet deceased.
“Hundreds of them are still alive,” he says. “If you don’t like what I’m saying, go and have a chat with them. They’re still around,” appearing not only in mystical gloom in a darkened chamber in the context of a sÈance with spooky music playing in the background, but sometimes to one, to two, sometimes to 12, sometimes to 500, by a lake, on a mountainside, in a closed room, many different times and places, multiple attestation, even for people who did not want to believe, until the Christians became so convinced, in fact, Jesus was risen from the dead they had to reckon that also in with the astonishingly self-centered claims he made all through his ministry.
The Jesus I am commending to you this evening is, in fact, the Jesus of the New Testament, the Jesus whom we approach through the lens of history. We approach also in faith. I’ll come to that in great detail tomorrow night, but we approach through the lens of history. At the end of the day, my disagreement with those who want to dismiss the biblical accounts as irrelevant or extremely late or not reliable is not, in the first instance, a theological dispute. I think they’re bad historians before they’re bad theologians.
That’s as far as I want to go this evening. I’d like to open it up to questions and comments and personal views. On some questions, what I may do is answer briefly and then suggest some literature, just for time’s sake. Tomorrow I will tease out some of the more religious elements of it, the nature of faith and what it has to do with it, and what the resurrection is about.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don Carson: In terms of the duration of Jesus’ ministry, the Synoptic Gospels actually report a total of a measurable 35 different days. That’s it. In other words, you don’t have a whole chronology of one year, two years, three years. You don’t. You have summary sections with only about 35 days described.
Scholars have debated for a long time, from every corner of the theological spectrum, the length of Jesus’ ministry. The dominant view is either two and a half or three and a half years in length. Personally, I’m inclined to think it’s two and a half, but it’s not the sort of thing on which anything I know of depends. It really depends on how you do your dating of a whole lot of other things, including the year in which Jesus died, and in my view nothing finally depends on it.
On the death of Jesus, it appears on a first reading the meal before Jesus’ death was, in the Synoptic Gospels, the Passover meal. It appears on a first reading of John’s gospel Jesus is actually crucified while the Passover lambs are being sacrificed. That’s a day of discrepancy between Matthew, Mark, and Luke on the one hand and John on the other. For some people this proves conclusively the biblical writers can’t get their story straight and that’s the end of it.
Historically, people have responded in one of three ways. On the one hand, there are some who say Matthew, Mark, and Luke have it right and John changes it for theological reasons but he doesn’t mean it to be taken as history. Some say John gets it right but Matthew, Mark, and Luke change it for theological reasons and don’t mean to be taken as history. I don’t espouse either of those views, but those views have been taken by various writers across history.
Annie Jaubert, a French scholar who is an expert primarily in Qumran, has argued the accounts differ because different calendars were used. Certainly, there were several calendars operating in the first century everybody knows about. In my view that is not the best explanation here either, but it’s at least a plausible one. We’re so used to having just one calendar in much of the Western world we forget how many other parts of the world operate on different calendars.
If you’re a Muslim or a Jew, then there are certainly different calendars you can operate under. The point is the Jews in the first century had different calendars even among themselves, and Qumran did not work on exactly the same calendar as the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. She tries to argue this accounts for the difference; that is, that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are operating on one calendar and John on another. I don’t think that explanation works. Nevertheless, serious scholars have tried to respond that way.
I think there is another whole approach that has been articulated well in certain quarters. I tried to defend it in my Matthew commentary, pages 538 and following, pages of an excursus nobody wants to read unless you’re interested in that sort of question. You can track it down there. In brief, the question turns upon the particular verse.
For example, in John 18, verse 28, when Jesus is at trial, the priests don’t want to enter into the governor’s house because they would become ceremonially unclean and then they would not be able to eat the Passover. That presupposes, therefore, the Passover hasn’t happened yet, it is argued. That proves, therefore, it only happens when Jesus dies and not the night before when he was having his Last Supper, which according to the Synoptic Gospels was really a Passover supper.
People have collected a very long list of passages from Josephus and elsewhere that show eating the Passover as an expression did not have to refer only to the initial Passover meal, but the next day, for example, in the morning there was what came to be called the Hagigah, which was another full meal on the first full day of Passover the priests would eat.
To eat the Passover can refer to the entire seven days of the feast. If they got impure that early morning, then they could not eat the Hagigah. They would not become clean again till that evening. Thus, they could not eat the Passover. In other words, it does not necessarily mean it was the initial Passover meal from the night before.
Am I certain this is the right approach? I went through all the texts and gave parallels in Jewish literature to John’s particular use that would still square with the synoptic accounts. Am I sure this is the right solution? No. I don’t know. Sometimes there’s not enough historical evidence for me to be quite sure what the best historical evidence is.
I confess it goes up my nose a bit when somebody cites the superficial differences between the two and does not wrestle openly with how much evidence there is for alternative explanations and treats the alleged discrepancy as if it were a knockdown, dragout case that proved conclusively somebody has it wrong. History is often a little more messy than that. Does that scratch where you itch? In any case, there’s lots more literature on it. In the commentary I give you some references to other bits you could follow that are of interest too.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I think there’s a great deal of truth to what you say. That is to say, according to the Bible we’re all such rebels that most of us are guilty of lust for power. This can happen in religious structures as in other structures. On the other hand, I would also say very often you get counterfeits of that which is valuable. Nobody counterfeits a one-cent coin. You counterfeit hundred dollar bills because they’re worth something.
If you can find lots of counterfeits of what the Bible says is Christianity, it may not be because there’s no such thing as valid Christianity but rather because the real McCoy is so wonderful people want to latch onto it and control it and domesticate it sometimes. So there’s a fair bit of truth, I’m sure, in what you say.
On the other hand, I would also want to say if you’re going to be faithful to what Jesus actually teaches, it’s not all positive in the sense that he only says encouraging things or nice things or the like. He also says some warning things and threatens judgment. That’s also there in the New Testament, and I would argue that’s positive in the sense that if God said it he meant it and it’s for our good.
It’s not because he’s malicious or laughing at us, but the warnings and the threats of judgment are also for our good and part of faithful Christian witness that is trying to explain what Jesus says according to the Scriptures is going to try, at least, to be faithful to all Jesus says. That may strike some people as hard sayings, difficult, challenging. That, I’m afraid, I can’t apologize for, but it should always be done from a Christian perspective of a poor beggar telling another poor beggar where there’s bread.
In other words, no Christian should ever bear witness to Jesus by saying, “I’m smarter than you are.” It’s grotesque because Christians should not only recognize their own finitude but their own fallenness, and Christians should always be people who, when they bear witness to Jesus, are like poor beggars telling others where there’s bread rather than people who are claiming to have, by their own discipline and intelligence and study, achieved certain answers nobody else has been quite bright enough to get. Wherever you get Christians acting or talking along those lines, it finally does real damage to the gospel of Christ.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: Are you saying the message as human beings actually convey it or as the text stands written? Because there’s a huge difference between the two. I would be the first to acknowledge we human beings have often mucked things up, but it’s often by the careful re-teaching and re-preaching of the Word the church goes through another reformation again and tries to become a little more faithful to what Jesus says.
For example, in the time of the so-called Great Reformation in the sixteenth century, one of the slogans of the period was sola scriptura, that is, to Scripture alone, that is, to reform things again. This has often happened in the history of the church. So if you’re asking can we muck things up, yeah, God help us. We can. We have. We do. We will.
On the other hand, if you’re asking does that change anything in the balance and poise and sophistication and truthfulness and faithfulness of Scripture, no, I don’t think so. What it means is we have to go back to it and learn to be faithful again.
Female: [Inaudible]
Don: On the first one, the Gospels themselves insist the Sanhedrin did not have the right to pronounce capital judgment, which is precisely why they turned to Pilate. In other words, they had to get Roman sanction. I’m in agreement, but I don’t see there’s a problem there. On the court proceedings the issue is astonishingly difficult, and the best commentaries work through the matters in great detail.
For example, if you’re reading Mark’s gospel, there’s one by James Edwards that works through the court proceedings as reported there. In the case of Luke’s gospel, there’s one by Green that works through the court proceedings there. If you want some bibliography, you can. Part of the dispute comes from the fact that most of our access to Jewish court material comes from written material whose oral tradition extends back, in many cases, into the first century, but which in written form comes down in Mishnah, which was compiled by HaNasi in about 200.
So there is a huge debate amongst Jewish scholars and Christian scholars alike about how much the proceedings you find there reflect first-century, about AD 30, proceedings. Again, there’s want of evidence to be quite clear on all of that. So it’s not entirely a Jewish scholar versus Christian scholar debate; it’s sometimes a Jewish scholar versus Jewish scholar and Christian scholar versus Christian scholar debate.
I’m sure those from a certain camp will read the evidence in a certain way and others from another camp will read the evidence in a slightly different way. It has much more to do with lack of detailed structures of proceedings in about AD 30, and the best commentaries to which we have access detail that information which you can find readily in any good library.
Female: [Inaudible]
Don: They didn’t overrule him. They did agitate the crowd, but there’s quite a lot of information from public sources on Sejanus and on Pilate; that is, two figures connected with the Roman system. Pilate was particularly vulnerable to that sort of criticism from the crowd because he was already in bad repute in Rome. If there was any sort of threat to have reports go to Rome that Pilate was not quite trustworthy, Pilate could see that as a huge threat, all right.
Do I find that hard to believe? No. In every system, whether it’s in America or in Canada, from which I spring, or in Israel today, it’s easy to start playing politics when you want your way done. You line up the political forces and powers and then bring things about, but in this particular case there’s lots of good evidence Pilate knew he was vulnerable in Rome and, therefore, would be subject to that sort of manipulation.
