Ankerberg Show

Dr. John Ankerberg: Welcome to the John Ankerberg Show Classics Edition. For decades, we've been privileged to host esteemed scholars discussing a wide range of topics from apologetics and science to biblical prophecy and beyond. Join us as we revisit these timeless conversations and make them accessible to you wherever you are.

Some people that have looked at the information from the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran have said that Jesus was an Essene. What do you think?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, the Qumran scrolls are fascinating documents. They reveal the life of a sect of early Judaism that shared some things in common with Jesus. For one thing, they believed that the eschatological age was at hand—that the final crucial actions of God were coming down in their own day and in their own time, and they needed to be ready. That's why they'd gone out to the Dead Sea and were hunkering down and waiting for God to do His thing—to clean the land out and refound Judaism. That was part of the essence of who the Essenes were.

But the other thing about the Essenes is they were, perhaps even more than the Pharisees, sticklers about ritual purification, about precise, punctilious observance of the Mosaic law and a host of things like that. They were a kind of scribal community, copying documents, collecting documents, preparing themselves for the end to come. They were more like monks in a monastery.

Jesus, on the other hand, was a public figure. He went out to the least, the last, and the lost. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. His message was public; he was preaching in Galilee, he went up to feasts in Judea. He had not simply anathematized whatever was happening in Jerusalem and written it off and gone off into the desert like the Qumran people.

So, I think there are some aspects of what we find in the Qumran scrolls—they believed that there would be a messianic figure coming. Jesus certainly seems to have believed that as well in regard to himself. There were some similarities between these two, but the truth of the matter is there are more differences than similarities between the Essenes and Jesus.

Dr. John Ankerberg: I will say that I think there are some fairly strong similarities between John the Baptist and the Qumran community. Some of the folks were saying that John the Baptist was a wild and crazy guy. What do you think?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, I think he was a prophetic figure, much like many other Old Testament prophetic figures like Ezekiel, who did prophetic sign acts, like Daniel, like Jeremiah—very much like some of the later prophetic figures. And that's how he was viewed.

He dressed in a fashion like another northern prophet, namely Elijah. He acted in a fashion very much like Amos, proclaiming, "Here comes the judge, here comes the judge. God is going to judge the people; they need to repent and be prepared for His coming." I think that John is a very significant figure. He's certainly an eschatological prophet, and he in many ways was far more like the Qumran folks than Jesus was. He was out in the chalk wilderness of Judea, saying, "You need to come out here and be purified." Well, that's what the Qumran community was doing as well.

There are these similarities with Qumran between John and Qumran. Jesus is less clearly associated with Qumran and less similar. He was more of a public figure, and his message was not all doom and gloom; his message was, "This is the good news."

Dr. John Ankerberg: But how do you weigh it then when you evaluate the evidence of Qumran, John, and Jesus? If they took this stance, and part of it was against the Roman rule of that day and they were talking about an eschatological arrival of God's kingdom in power—all right, the Jesus Seminar says you put all that together, that's why Jesus died. Because he went against the time, he got caught in the political process. Is that the message that the New Testament is presenting?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, I would not want to rule out that there is a political factor here. You need to understand that it's true to say that religion and politics were interwoven throughout the fabric of first-century Jewish society. That's absolutely true. I think it is certainly true that part of the reason why Jesus died as he did is because his movement had political implications.

His was not a revolutionary movement in the sense of taking up arms and storming the legions of Rome, but his movement certainly had political implications. He was a politically hot potato; there's no doubt about this, and this is part of the reason why he died. But he didn't just die for that reason. After all, the people who were critiquing him, who brought him to justice or injustice, were in the first place Jews—not in power, not the Romans.

They only handed him over to the Romans at the very end of the process. Early Jews were the ones who most objected to him, whether we think of Herod Antipas as a ruler in Galilee, or the Pharisees, or some of his other dialogue partners. That tells me that the issue was not just purely political; it was also theological.

Dr. John Ankerberg: When you're taking this in, John Dominic Crossan says that as far as he's concerned, Jesus is a political figure. The primary emphasis of his life is just that. If you're saying that it's a part of it, how do you separate that part from the other? Where do you put the emphasis?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, that's precisely the question. Are we going to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable or not? What I would want to say about that is that for Jesus there is both a spiritual gospel and a social gospel. There are two sides to this Jesus picture. There are social implications, political implications to being a follower of Jesus. If, in fact, you turn the other cheek, if, in fact, you do some of the things that Jesus urged his disciples to do, this changes the social situation. There's no doubt about that.

But if the heart of the matter has to do with atonement for sins, if the heart of the matter has to do with the fact that Jesus believed Israel was lost, the question is, what is the solution to that problem? Where's the heart of the solution to that problem? In Jesus's view, the ultimate sacrifice had to be made to redeem the people of God and indeed redeem the world.

That's the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is not whether or not you turn the other cheek. The heart of the matter is how in the world can the people of the world, especially the people of God, be redeemed? That's the heart of the matter.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Is there any way for the disciples to have written that in after the fact?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, all kinds of things are possible, but not all possible things are equally plausible. What we know about the Old Testament, whether you read Leviticus or other parts of the Old Testament, is a system of purification, of atonement for sin was at the heart of Judaism. Every day in the temple, sacrifices were offered for sin.

This was the heart of the matter for early Jews as to how they would get in right relationship with God. This was the most crucial matter, far more crucial than the food laws or the ritual purifications that were just ritual ablutions. The heart of the matter is: how do we recover a right relationship with God? What are we going to do? And Jesus believed that in himself he was embodying the heart of that matter and was dealing with it.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Give me some of the words that lead you to that conclusion that Jesus spoke.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, obviously Mark 10:45, which we've already referred to: "I did not come to serve but to be served and give my life a ransom for many." Now, he also talks with his disciples about drinking the cup. In the larger context of the Old Testament, talking about drinking the cup of God's wrath has to do with judgment, has to do with God's judgment on sin. It's not a neutral statement about just suffering a martyr's death.

Dr. John Ankerberg: What about the supernatural feats, the miracles? Did Jesus do miracles?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, I certainly believe he did. Whenever a historian is evaluating that kind of issue, what we have to understand is miracles are by definition unrepeatable events. They're unique incursions into space-time. They're not ordinary events, and they're not subject to scrutiny in a scientific laboratory. We can't reproduce a miracle in a laboratory.

So, it's no good talking about the scientific evidence for miracles if we mean by that the kind of things that we could reproduce and prove or falsify in a laboratory. We're talking about unique historical events. When we're evaluating whether Jesus did miracles or not, what we're dealing with is the veraciousness of the testimonies about Jesus as a miracle worker.

Now, what's interesting to me is that it's not just the New Testament that claims that Jesus was a miracle worker. Later Jewish traditions, who rejected that Jesus was the Messiah, also attest that Jesus did miracles. It is also true that some of the later Greco-Roman sources as well also attest that Jesus was a miracle worker, and then, of course, we have the famous testimony of Josephus to the same effect. So, do we have credible testimonies that Jesus did miracles? I think we do have some of those. If you have presuppositions that miracles don't happen, then none of that's going to work.

Dr. John Ankerberg: A lot of the scholars, for example, that are being quoted in Time or Newsweek would say, "Yeah, Jesus did miracles, but you've got to take the context of 2,000 years ago where people just kind of believed in that thing." Tom Wright at Oxford says, "We're the last 200 years, we think we're the only guys that understand what history is. Those people didn't." What's the tip-off? What's the evidence that shows those people weren't so easy to fake in terms of these miracles? They knew the difference between a guy coming back from the dead and somebody that was just passed out.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, the very fact that they use terms like "signs and wonders" or "mighty works"—dynamis is the Greek word that's used by Mark about Jesus's miracles—distinguishing those events from other ordinary events like sleeping or eating or whatever shows that they're critically sifting their historical experience. Some things are miracles; some things are not miracles.

Now, if you want to paint ancient people as simply naive, gullible people who, bless their hearts, they couldn't possibly tell the difference between a miracle and a fake—well, I think the response to that is that is an arrogant modern assumption about ancient people. The truth of the matter is if you actually read ancient sources, ancient peoples critically dealt with these kinds of issues just as we do today.

Dr. John Ankerberg: One fellow was quoted as saying when Jesus is said to heal people and cast out demons, this can only be true in the sense that in the first century, sick people were thought to be possessed by evil spirits. So here you have it coming up again.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: The theory that whenever we're dealing with the demonic, it's some kind of psychosomatic illness which can be healed through therapy or something like that. Well, I think it is fair to say that first-century persons lived in the age before modern medicine. It's plausible from a historical point of view to say, okay, some things that they attributed to the demonic were simply natural diseases. I think that's a plausible thing to say. I think you could actually demonstrate that that's the case.

But what you cannot say is that all the accounts, for example, of exorcisms in the case of Jesus's exorcisms could actually be explained that way. That's what I would want to say about it. There are some exorcism accounts which simply don't have the cash value of some kind of psychosomatic illness. We're dealing with something far more profound and frightening, frankly, than a psychosomatic illness. And so, that sort of issue would have to be weighed and sifted as well.

Dr. John Ankerberg: What do you think about the accounts of Jesus walking on water or of healing the blind?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, in the Old Testament, it's not ever claimed that any of the great prophetic figures healed the blind. Now, this is interesting. If it was true, as some have claimed, that the stories about Jesus are simply taking Old Testament stories and predicating them of Jesus and claiming, "Well, if they did these sort of things, Jesus did them as well," the interesting thing about that is nowhere do any of the prophetic figures in the Old Testament give sight to the blind.

Yet we have in all the layers of tradition, whether we're thinking of Mark, Matthew's special source, Luke's special source, the Gospel of John—in all of these sources, Q as well—in all of these sources, we have evidence that Jesus gave sight to the blind. We have multiple attestation to this fact from the sources that we have. Now, if we have multiple witnesses to this, then the evidence has got to be taken as strong that he did such things.

Dr. John Ankerberg: What did Jesus's family think of his ministry?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, I think you have to say that there's a pre-Easter period to this and there's a post-Easter period to this. What we know about the post-Easter period from little texts like Acts 1:14 is that Jesus's mother and also his brother James and perhaps other members of his family did become followers of Jesus after the fact.

What the Gospels tell us about the pre-Easter period is—John 7:5 says that the brothers didn't believe in him. Mark 3:21 and following tells us that his family thought he was 15 degrees shy of plum, and they came to take him home. They thought he was not well; he was out of a normal state of being. Well, the truth is, of course, that was so in a sense. He was an unusual person pursuing an unusual career path, unlike any of the other family members, and they thought that there was something not quite right. So, the evidence is mixed, and we have to pursue the whole trajectory of the story of Jesus's family from doubt and then belief.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Let's hit it while we're there. Why did James doubt him all of his life and then after Jesus died, all of a sudden James becomes the leader of the church in Jerusalem and says he believes in Jesus? What happened?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, this is where 1 Corinthians 15 again—a piece of evidence from Paul from the mid-50s, but he's quoting much earlier evidence—he says, "I have this that was handed down to me that I'm passing on to you: that Jesus appeared to James, the brother of the Lord." The most plausible explanation I would have for somebody doing a complete about-face on that issue would be that James had seen the risen Jesus.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Go back to another point, and that is what is the meaning of Jesus touching the lepers? A lot of the fellows in the Jesus Seminar will use his action there to say that he was bringing hope to the common man, to the outcast, to the leper, to the sinner. Those days of not having hope are over; I've come to heal this kind of people. Is that all that Jesus was saying there?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, I don't think it's all he was saying, and I don't think it's all he was doing, but he certainly wanted to bring the outcasts back into a whole relationship with Jewish society. This is why at one point when he's dealing with a person like this, he says, "Go and report to the local priest and show him what's happened to your flesh," because if the local priest verified that he was normal and his skin was whole, he could once again resume normal life in Jewish society.

So of course, it's true that by doing this Jesus was bringing hope that they were no longer to be outcasts from Jewish society. But there's something far more profound going on here too. He's also saying that the old ways of dealing with issues of clean and unclean, now that the kingdom is breaking in, those days are over and gone.

The Jews believed that if you touched such a person as this, you were defiled by those persons. Jesus believed, "If I touch these people, they are cleansed," just the opposite. Now, that's what the coming of the kingdom means. The coming of the kingdom means redemption, cleansing, renewal, being a new person. So it's more than just offering cold words of comfort or hope; it's more than just touching somebody who's an untouchable. It's actually curing them that's the issue here.

Dr. John Ankerberg: In John Dominic Crossan's view, if that's all that Jesus was doing, then wouldn't it be a disaster if he just died? I mean, what's the hope? Just to proclaim an idea? Whereas, spend a little bit of time right here and talk about why the traditional view of Jesus opens up this beautiful message of the gospel, which includes this point.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, I guess part of the issue here is whether we want to value the death and resurrection of Jesus as, in a sense, the fulcrum of history—the real turning point. One of the things that is going on in a lot of the more recent spate of Jesus books is that they want to ignore the passion and resurrection narratives and say Jesus was an important historical figure just on the basis of the things that he said and he did during his earthly ministry.

Well, I think that's certainly true, but I'm not sure that Jesus would be remembered if all he did was offer aphorisms and parables and he healed a few people. If he was remembered, he'd be remembered no more than, say, Honi the Circle-Drawer or other early Jewish figures who were sages or miracle workers or holy men.

So, the real question is: why is Jesus a historical figure? Why is he a historical figure? Is it because he told this parable or touched that person? Well, at the end of the day, I think the answer to that is no. His real historic significance lies in what happened to him and what he did during the last week of his earthly life. And part of what's going on with the Jesus Seminar is a desire to value the earlier ministry of Jesus more highly. Now, I think that's a laudable thing to do. It's too easy just to skip from the birth to the death and resurrection of Jesus. I mean, half of the Gospels are not about that. These other traditions are very important. And that's a laudable thing to hold those up, but not at the expense of ignoring the crucial bit of the last half of the Gospels.

Dr. John Ankerberg: The Jesus Seminar seems to talk for all scholarship. Is that true?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Well, no, anymore than I can speak for all scholars or any one of us can speak for all scholarship. The truth of the matter is that the realm of scholarship is like the many colors of the rainbow. You've got people on all points in the spectrum, and no self-ordained, self-appointed one group of scholars can pretend to speak for the whole realm of scholarship.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Stay tuned as we revisit these timeless discussions and join us in celebrating the wealth of knowledge that continues to encourage and educate. To learn more, please visit jashow.org. That's jashow.org, or subscribe to us on YouTube.