Ankerberg Show

Narrator: 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.

Dr. John Ankerberg: What's the important thing that students and people that aren't Christians should look at then? How do you focus on the Jesus of history? How do you come to the right conclusion?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: I think first of all that if I'm dealing with a person who really is seeking the truth about Jesus, I would say you need to come with an open mind to the evidence. You need to not rule out things in advance that the text may tell you about Jesus. You need to reflect carefully and prayerfully about the material, sift it, weigh it, consider whether you think it might be plausible or not.

Listen to a variety of witnesses about Jesus from the whole spectrum of opinions about Jesus. Don't take any one person's word as the gospel about this. Interact with the Gospel yourself and find out in this process of discovery what you think about Jesus.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Let's talk about 12 facts, if they are accepted by all scholars all across the spectrum. Is it a fact that Jesus actually died?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: I'm sure there may be somebody out there that believes Jesus wasn't really a person and he didn't live and die, but I don't know any responsible scholars from anywhere on the spectrum that would deny that Jesus lived and died.

Dr. John Ankerberg: And died by crucifixion.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Very few would object to that either.

Dr. John Ankerberg: How about the fact that he was buried?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: We do have some recent claims, a distinct minority opinion offered by John Dominic Crossan and perhaps a few others that maybe Jesus wasn't buried. This flies right in the face of that early tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 that says that Jesus not only died but was buried according to the scriptures.

And what we know about early Jews is that corpses were the main cause of uncleanness. You get seven days' worth of uncleanness from touching a corpse. The idea that early Jews would just leave Jesus's body, even if they were not sympathizers with who Jesus was, leave him to lie in a ditch and die like that and never bury him is historically just very implausible.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Is that a spot where you can fault the Jesus Seminar because many of their scholars would say that Paul did write that and that tradition is early? So then how can you discard one point of that information?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: I guess what we'd have to say about that is that for some people, arguments from silence are more powerful than arguments from evidence, and I have a problem with that.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Is it a fact that Jesus' death caused the disciples to despair and lose hope, believing that his life had ended?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: We are told, in fact, and it's a very unflattering picture, that the 12 denied, deserted, betrayed, and abandoned him. We're told very clearly that's true in regard to the male disciples, the 12.

We are not told that about the female followers of Jesus. They were last at the cross, first at the tomb, and the first to see the risen Lord. Now, here we are in the midst of a first-century patriarchal culture. The likelihood that early Christians promulgating an evangelistic religion would make up the idea that the essential 12 apostles who'd been with Jesus all along denied, deserted, and betrayed him is remote.

But on the other hand, the women who were his disciples, they were there at the cross, at the tomb, and they were the first to see the risen Lord. The idea that in a patriarchal culture, you would make up women as the primary witnesses to that crucial triad—died, buried, was risen—is just so historically implausible that it is beyond belief.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Is it a logical conclusion that a few days later, the tomb in which Jesus was buried was discovered to be empty?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: All the evidence that we have suggests it was. Even the indirect evidence. Let's go back to that phrase again in 1 Corinthians 15: "he died, he was buried, and on the third day he rose." To a Jew who believed in resurrection, it was a bodily resurrection. It wasn't some sort of spiritual event that didn't involve the body.

When you go through the sequence—died, buried, was raised—this necessarily implies the body isn't in the tomb anymore. So we have even an indirect piece of evidence to the empty tomb in the Pauline tradition.

Dr. John Ankerberg: So what you're saying is that if the Jesus Seminar wants to object to the kind of resurrection, now you're bypassing the Jewish culture which was stating that.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Exactly. Part of the problem here is taking 20th-century ideas anachronistically and predicating them of first-century people, and that's not good historiography either. Whether you agree with what first-century people believed or not is neither here nor there. The question is, did they believe this and did they present the evidence in this sort of fashion that resurrection was a bodily thing? Yes, they did.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Is it a fact that the disciples had experiences which they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus? Do most critical scholars accept that as a fact?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: All right, this is where it begins to get a little fuzzy. Some people want to talk about the appearances of Jesus as visions. What the word "vision" connotes to a 20th-century person is some kind of subjective impression in the back of your cerebral cortex that doesn't necessarily correspond with anything objective out there in reality beyond your own head.

When a first-century person talked about visions, they did not necessarily mean something radically subjective like that. They meant seeing something that was real, apart from your own psyche, that was out there that you hadn't previously seen. That's normally what the word "vision" means: it's a revelation of a reality that's beyond yourself that you hadn't noticed or hadn't been unveiled to your eyes before.

Most scholars would certainly say the disciples believed that they saw Jesus. Many of them would just want to leave it there and say it was a subjective phenomenon that happened here. But if you interpret those gospel documents about the resurrection appearances of the risen Lord, and you interpret the Pauline evidence and the rest of the New Testament evidence, they were claiming far more than that.

They were claiming to actually have a physical encounter with Jesus after his death—that he ate, that he was tangible and could be touched, that he was still moving in space and time as a real person. So they were claiming more than just having had a vision of Jesus.

Dr. John Ankerberg: That's a good point because a drunk can say that he's seeing pink elephants, and he probably is. That doesn't mean they're there. So what's the difference here? They believed it, but how do you know they were actually seeing something?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: In terms of the psychological profile of the disciples, if we believe that it is true that they denied, deserted, and betrayed Jesus, that they had given him up for lost when he died on the cross, psychologically, something significant had to have happened to change all of their minds about this particular issue after the crucifixion of Jesus.

Remember, no early Jews were looking for a crucified Messiah. If you wanted to scotch the rumor that Jesus was Messiah, get him crucified. That would prove he was cursed, not blessed by God, not the anointed one of God. So here they are, completely shattered. Their world has been turned upside down. They've spent the last year, two years, three years of their life apparently for nothing following Jesus.

What was going to change that opinion? Something from outside of themselves had to impact them like a sledgehammer hitting them over the head to change their mind about the fact that Jesus was dead and gone. Something dramatic had to have happened. Martin Dibelius, a German scholar, once said you need to posit an X big enough between the death of Jesus and the birth of the early church to explain the connection. If you don't posit an X big enough, then you haven't explained the historical connection.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Is there any doubt among scholars the message that was preached by those people that had fled and now were standing up in Jerusalem—or the early church—that the message was Jesus rose from the dead, we saw him, he's alive?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Again, I'm sure there must be a few folks out there would say this is not what the early Christians were claiming. But the vast majority of scholars, whether they believe this claim or not—whether they're liberal or moderate or conservative scholars—would say, "Yes, this is certainly the heart of what early Christians were preaching, that Jesus is the risen Lord."

Dr. John Ankerberg: Do they agree that that was the message that was preached in Jerusalem, the very city that had just watched Jesus die on a cross?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: So far as I can tell, there's not a whole lot of dispute that that was the claim of the earliest Christians who were followers of Jesus before they became Christians.

Dr. John Ankerberg: And as a result of preaching this message that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, was put into a grave, he arose the third day, we saw him, the church in Jerusalem grew.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: The interesting thing about that is that all of that's true, but there's an additional component. No church growth without the coming of the Holy Spirit. So there was one more component. Jesus had to leave and the Holy Spirit had to fall on this group of people if there was going to be a compelling testimony and a convicting, convincing, and converting action happen amidst the Jewish people who would hear the testimony of the earliest disciples.

That whole package is part of the picture here. From a sociological point of view, you need to have an X big enough to explain the dramatic rise of the early Christian movement. What caused this to happen?

Dr. John Ankerberg: Is there any naturalistic explanation that scholars have brought up to replace the resurrection that is more plausible than what the disciples said?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: In my mind, there's nothing more plausible. There are other explanations, and they have varying degrees of possibility or plausibility. But certainly none are sufficient to account for the phenomenon of the rise of early Christianity.

Dr. John Ankerberg: One of them is that Jesus didn't die on the cross; he just swooned. What would you say about that?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Even if that were true, if Jesus was a true human being, which everybody agrees that he was, then he went on to die at some point. So it's neither here nor there if there was a false start on Jesus's death. But the truth of the matter is that the way the Romans did public executions—A, flagellation; B, crucifixion—many victims never even survived the flagellation, never mind the crucifixion.

The idea that in a public execution during a Passover feast which, according to all the traditions we have, was guarded by Roman soldiers, the idea that that person could have survived that and been revived in the cool of a tomb—the chances of that are more historically remote than the chances that Julius Caesar was actually the god Neptune.

Dr. John Ankerberg: You're a scholar in terms of doing a lot of study on Paul. Paul is a real mystery to a lot of scholars because the psychological profile of Paul... there's no reason why he would have become a Christian. There had to be that X again. Describe for the folks that are listening what we're talking about.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: Remember Saul's background. He's a Hebrew among Hebrews; that means he spoke the traditional language of Hebrew or Aramaic. He's a Pharisee among Pharisees; that means he belonged to one of the strictest sects of early Judaism, very punctilious about the obedience to the Mosaic Law down to the last jot and tittle and even more traditions than that.

We're talking about a person who, according to his own testimony in Galatians 1, was a persecutor of early Christianity, persecuted it violently, he says in Galatians Chapter 1, and of course Acts confirms this as well as a secondary piece of evidence. What kind of thing could have happened to him to change him from an all-out zealot against the early messianic movement that we call Christianity to a strong, zealous advocate of the same?

Some dramatic about-face, U-turn had to have happened to Paul on Damascus Road. I know of no better term to describe this than conversion. It's not true that he was going from no beliefs to Christian beliefs. It's not true that he was going from a false religion to a true religion. What he believed was that he was becoming a completed messianic Jewish person.

The belief that Jesus was that Messiah figure was the missing piece in the puzzle that completed the picture and rearranged the whole way that he would look at life. Previously, he had looked at life through the lens of the law; now he was going to see life through the eyes of Christ. I know of no better way to explain that kind of dramatic shift in a person's life than to say he had a close encounter of the first kind with the risen Jesus. And that's what changed his life.

What's interesting to me is that even some of the recent Jewish scholars who have dealt with Saul of Tarsus have been willing to say something dramatic had to happen to him to cause this change.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Where is modern scholarship in terms of evaluating what happened to Paul? What do they attribute to the conversion of Paul?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: There used to be this old psychological profile. Saul was an angst-ridden person, guilt-ridden because he had persecuted some of his fellow Jews who had become Christians, and in agonizing over all of that, he converted to Christianity through wrestling through his own guilt.

The thing that's interesting to me about that is that Paul himself says nothing to suggest this, and the book of Acts suggests nothing like that. He was going to Damascus to persecute some more Christians; he was not going to Damascus to join them. The evidence as we have it suggests that something other than a psychological process along the way is what changed his life.

Dr. John Ankerberg: When Jesus went up to Jerusalem at Passover, did the crowds really greet him? Did he have a big following? In "The Search for Jesus," it sounded like there were very few people that were following him and there weren't a whole lot of people that turned out for him. What do you think the evidence shows?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: On this one, I would have to say that there's this core of followers of Jesus. There's the 12 plus the women plus a somewhat larger circle of followers, including some Judean followers like Mary and Martha who lived in Bethany just outside of Jerusalem. We have Lazarus who lived in Bethany just outside of Jerusalem. We have Simon, we have others that seem to have been Judean followers of Jesus. So yes, there's a coterie of followers of Jesus. There's no doubt about that.

But they're going up to Passover with the Galilean pilgrims. There's no doubt about that as well. So certainly, it's true that the crowds were much larger than the circle of Jesus's followers. I have no way of knowing historically how much of the crowd were actually adherents. What I do know is that the acclamations that are made in our earliest gospel in Mark—"Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord"—were the traditional acclamations that would be made as a person goes up to a Passover feast.

Mark is one of those subtle documents where he sees this as ironic. It's possible that the crowds were saying more than they knew. I think that that's historically very likely to be true. We later knew that what they were claiming actually referred to Jesus. The disciples already had an inkling that that was true. I don't know that I could say that Jesus's followers were just a tiny group of people. I have no way of doing a specific headcount. What I do know is that when Jesus was crucified, all of his followers, so far as we know, except some of the women, abandoned him.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Ben, why did Jesus go up to Jerusalem? He'd avoided it for a long time, then at Passover, he went up there.

Dr. Ben Witherington III: According to the Gospel of John, from time to time he did go up for the festivals. But there are pieces of gospel evidence that suggest that Jesus saw himself in a prophetic light without a doubt, and even indeed said it's just not done for a prophet to die anywhere outside of Jerusalem. If he did see himself in a prophetic light and believed that his prophetic message was for the whole people of Israel, then you need to go to stage center.

You need to go and make your teachings or do your prophetic signs in a place where all the people would be, and no better time than Passover, perhaps the biggest of all the Jewish festivals. This was the time, this was the place for him to present himself to the people of God, make his claims directly and indirectly, and do what he was going to do.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Do you think that he knew he was going to die?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: I don't think it would have taken a clairvoyant person to know that in a politically volatile environment, if you go around doing the kind of things Jesus did and saying the kind of things Jesus said about the coming of the Kingdom of God, you could anticipate a violent end to your life. There's no doubt about that. But also, a lot of the things that Jesus said didn't just have a political edge; they had a spiritual edge to them. What they suggested is that Judaism needed a radical makeover. That also was an unwelcome message.

Dr. John Ankerberg: What has traditional Christianity always said about this series of events? He goes up to Passover in Jerusalem, then all of a sudden you have the turning over of the money tables. What was that all about?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: There's sort of two schools of thought about what Jesus did in the temple. A, it was a cleansing of the temple. That is, unlike the Qumranites, Jesus did not think that the temple was irredeemable—that you needed to level it and start over from scratch—but that it needed some kind of spiritual cleansing or fix of the corruption in the temple, and then it would be okay.

Or the more radical interpretation would be that what Jesus is doing is a prophetic sign act indicating that this temple is coming down. It's going to be radically judged by God, it's going to be destroyed, and after that, God will start over again. I have wavered back and forth between these two interpretations. You could take the evidence we have in the gospels either way.

But my best reading of it is that what Jesus does is a prophetic sign act. Because what he's done is he's interrupted the process not only of tribute money that supports the institution and allows it to exist, the temple as an institution, but he's interrupted the process that leads to the sacrifices.

If you've interrupted the process that leads to the sacrifices, what you've in fact done is put a stop right into the middle of the most essential process of redemption in Israel. So I think it is a prophetic sign act. He didn't cleanse the whole of the area. It was probably an action done in a limited corner of the huge courts, but nonetheless an effective prophetic sign act.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Everyone agrees that Jesus came to Jerusalem for Passover. By the end of the week, he was dead. Who wanted him executed? Was it the Jewish priests or the Romans?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: I don't think that's a yes or no proposition. I think that a lot of people could have wanted him dead. Let's take the example of Saul for a minute as a persecutor of Christians before his conversion. The truth of the matter when we're dealing with a figure like a zealous Jew is they were even willing to persecute their own fellow Jews that didn't believe like they did because they saw them as a threat to the existence of Judaism or to the political status quo or a host of other things.

It's perfectly plausible to say there were both Jews and non-Jews that could have wanted a figure like Jesus dead. Pilate would have wanted him off the scene primarily because it upset the political status quo and it could upset his ruling of the province. If there was an uprising at the feet of a messianic figure named Jesus, then he's got to bring down the troops from Syria, he's got to go through a whole elaborate process of restabilizing an unstable military situation and so on. Rather nip it in the bud—cut off the head and the body dies—and so from a Pontius Pilate point of view, there was a good reason to execute Jesus if he was any kind of messianic pretender at all.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Was Pontius Pilate keeping his eye on Jesus?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: I think it's fair to say that somebody was. What we know from the gospels is that there were two kinds of people keeping their eye on Jesus: there were the Pharisees and there were the Herodians. Presumably, the Herodians are those who in fact reported to Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, and he in turn would have had to have dealings with Pontius Pilate.

The Pharisees were closely connected to the temple. They certainly could have reported to the Jewish authorities. I think Pilate's evidence would have been indirect rather than direct, but he had at least two sources of information: Herod's people or the Jewish authorities.

Dr. John Ankerberg: A lot of people say that the trials of Jesus before the Jewish high priest never took place. Why?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: You need to understand that there's this long history of an anti-Semitic reading of why Jesus had to die and who was responsible for this, even into the 20th century where we've had the Holocaust where millions of Jews were killed during World War II under the label "Christ-killers." This is a very volatile issue, and it's understandable that scholars would want to walk through this minefield extremely carefully.

The evidence as we have it suggests that Jews did not execute Jesus. Let me make that perfectly clear: Romans executed Jesus, and I don't think this should cause us to start an anti-Italian movement. The Romans executed Jesus under the aegis of the power of Pontius Pilate.

Was there some kind of Jewish preliminary hearing or a religious trial of Jesus? Perfectly possible. There would be plenty of reason for them to do so if Jesus was even remotely like the way the gospels present him: a public figure, a dynamic public figure, a miracle worker at least implicitly making some kind of messianic claims. Of course this threatened the Jewish authorities whether in Galilee or Judea. Of course they would be interested in what was the case with him.

They would be afraid that their own limited power under Roman rule would be compromised by such charismatic figures who answered to no other authority figure. And so a trial or at least some kind of preliminary hearing of Jesus is perfectly plausible, especially in the volatile atmosphere where you've got not the normal 60,000 people or less who normally lived in Jerusalem, but 250,000, 300,000 people, more people who have come for the festival and a highly tense situation. Under those kinds of circumstances, the Jewish authorities could certainly have pushed the panic button and had a trial of Jesus.

Dr. John Ankerberg: How did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John know what was said in these private trials?

Dr. Ben Witherington III: That's a very good question. I think that in a way we have inside information suggested to us in several of the gospel traditions. In the fourth gospel, we have this person called the beloved disciple who we are told at one point in the account has some kind of relationship with the house of Caiaphas, can even enter the house of Caiaphas. It's possible he was present.

But what we know more assuredly is that there are figures like Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea whom we are told were at least sympathizers with Jesus. According to the tradition, they are the ones who officially arrange for the burial of Jesus. They surely would have been present at the Sanhedrin trial and they could have heard those kinds of things. In terms of the Roman trial, the Roman trial was a public trial. It happened in front of a large crowd of people and there would be official rescripts afterwards telling about the verdict and the reasons for the verdict as well.

Narrator: Now, 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.