Ankerberg Show

Dr. John Ankerberg: Welcome to the Johnny Kerberg 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. N. T. Wright: When people look at the dramatic things that Jesus is said to have done in the Bible, often in our world they come with a kind of a split-level universe where things are either natural or supernatural. In the world of the Bible, it's not quite like that. I noticed that in the Psalms, it says that God feeds the young ravens when they call upon him.

Now, is that a supernatural act or is that what we would call just nature and instinct? You know, how God feeds the young ravens is that they squawk and the mummy bird brings brings food for them, whatever. And the Bible says God's in that, God's involved with that. So that we don't have a God who is normally outside the process and occasionally reaching in and doing things, and then we say, wow, that's supernatural.

God does a lot of extraordinary things all the time, and some of the extraordinary things are just so bizarre that people say, this is very, very special, like the magicians of Egypt saying, this is the finger of God and make no mistake. But in the New Testament, we don't have a single word for miracle. We have words like paradox, words like deeds of power and so on.

People were saying, this is extraordinary, this doesn't normally happen. And this doesn't mean that they were plugging into what we mean by supernatural where you have this split-level universe. It means that they who believed that God was always present and active, were discovering that some of the time where Jesus was, God was doing extra special, extraordinary things.

Now, of course, they believed that all sorts of people had healing powers. They believed that the prophets had been healers, Elijah and Elisha were healers. That didn't mean that they were the incarnate son of God. Christians have often said, because Jesus did these miracles, therefore he's the incarnate second person of the Trinity. You better be careful, or you'll make Elijah and Elisha the second person of the Trinity as well. And that really wouldn't help. Likewise, people have said, well, Jesus could predict the future because he was the incarnate son of God.

Well, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, they predicted the future because they were inspired prophets. So, we have to be careful not to short circuit the argument. Having said all of that, it's one of the remarkable gains of contemporary history on Jesus that a majority of current Jesus scholars, including many who are not Christian believers, agree that Jesus did do remarkable healings, and that that is the main explanation for why he attracted crowds and drew so many followers.

It wasn't just that his teaching was exciting, though it was, they came because things were happening. You know, a great aunt who had been sick for 50 years, bring her and Jesus will heal her. You know, that draws the crowds and would do today if it happened here in Westminster.

And so, right at the heart of what's going on, Jesus was a healer. And as I want to stress, that doesn't mean that we're plugging into this nature-supernature divide, it means that the God who is always present and active does extraordinary things through Jesus, and everybody knew that. And the reason that we can be absolutely sure of that is because they accused him of being in league with the devil. They wouldn't have done that unless he'd be doing things that they couldn't explain any other how, and we can be sure that the early church didn't make that up.

The word sign is one way of talking about what Jesus was doing because Jesus never seems to have done remarkable things just for the sake of doing something remarkable. They are always pointers, but they're not just pointers either to his own divinity, for the reasons I've already given, they are pointers to the nature of the Kingdom. God is renewing Israel, God is healing. The eyes of the blind shall be open, the ears of the deaf unstopped and all that.

Straight out of the book of Isaiah, these are prophecies about what will happen when God is renewing the covenant, bringing Israel back from her exile, when God himself is coming back to rescue her. Many scholars and indeed many ordinary Christians in our day, when they look at the language of the creeds which gets into some quite complicated theology about Jesus being of one substance with the Father and all the Trinity language, they say, Jesus of Nazareth couldn't have gotten into that stuff. Jesus was just a simple Jewish boy. He would have been horrified to hear all this stuff said about him.

Now, one of the first things to say is we shouldn't imagine that the early fathers who wrote those creeds were ignorant about what they were doing. Indeed, they had a great debate precisely about that phrase of one substance because they knew that it didn't occur in the New Testament and yet they said, we in faith used this as a way of clarifying for our people and our language what was said in the New Testament.

Now, in fact, when you go back to the New Testament, to the very earliest documents, take the letter to the Galatians, which I think is the earliest Pauline letter, but even if you say it's mid-50s, it's still very early. What we have there in Galatians 4:1-7, for instance, is Paul talking about God's action, like a kind of a new exodus, redeeming people from slavery, and what does this action look like? It looks like God sending the Son and God sending the Spirit.

And Paul says, unless you're on track with this, you are going back to the elements of the world, to the principalities and powers. In other words, he's saying, if you want to know who the true God is, over against the false gods, we're talking about the God who reveals his saving redeeming action by sending the Son and sending the Spirit. You want a shorthand for that, you either have the Trinity or you have paganism.

And what is this Trinity? It is the Jewish monotheism of the Exodus stories seen in the light of Jesus and the Spirit. In the light of that, I want to say, if the early fathers didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent them. It is as though what we have in the New Testament is like a little rosebud. You know when a a rose grows on a branch, it's a very tiny little thing about the size of my thumbnail. And if you just looked at that, you'd say, oh, that's just a small, insignificant little thing, there can't be much of a flower in there.

Give it a few days and it'll open up and there's more and there's more and there's more inside it. And you'll look at it and you'll say, who would have thought that all that stuff was inside that rose, but it was there. Now, that's not to say that every development in the creeds, in the church must have been there at the beginning, but the big ones, Trinity, atonement, resurrection, incarnation, they're there from the beginning, all right. And I've shown in my works that they go back to the mind of Jesus himself. It's not they were invented by Paul.

If you want to understand Jesus himself, you have to say, here is somebody who believes that in his own person and presence, the one living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is now present and active and going to die for the sins of Israel and the world. He doesn't express it with all the language of the early fathers or for that matter of Luther and Calvin, but what they are doing is drawing out for their generations the significance of what was there in that tight little rosebud right at the beginning.

The early church used an ancient Jewish word to talk about the significance of this, the punch of this. It was the word gospel or good news, and that goes back to the book of Isaiah, which talks about God's comforting news for Israel in exile, or the news that God is redeeming Israel by defeating all the evil that has stood against her. This is the great news God is doing something which is changing everything.

Now, interestingly, when the early church used that word gospel, which goes back to Isaiah, they must have known as well that in the world of their day, the word gospel was what Roman emperors used to talk about their own enthronement or birthday or accession day or whatever. So when they said, the early Christians said, the scriptures are fulfilled and Jesus the Jewish Messiah is now the Lord of the world, they knew that this was at the same time an invitation to anyone, anywhere who was tired of whatever system they'd got and needed release from sin and death and all that was cramping them as human beings.

But at the same time, it was a slap in the face for old Caesar on the throne because Paul's gospel is not, I have a new religious experience which you might like to try on for size because it might be kind of fun. Alas, a lot of Christians try and water it down into that. Paul's gospel is Jesus, the crucified Messiah of Israel is the Lord of the world. And that's why the invitation to believe in the gospel cannot simply be an intellectual, here are a few propositions you might like to believe, nor can it simply be a spiritual, here is a kind of a nice rosebed that you might like to lie on because it'll be soft and pleasant.

It is always a challenge to what Paul calls the obedience of faith because if Jesus is Lord, the summons to believe is the summons to allegiance, and allegiance means a total change in how you live and a change which is going to be very subversive politically because as we look out in our world and see, well, Caesar is harder to define in our world, but it is still the case that there are many forces out there that claim our allegiance, but for Paul the gospel is that Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't. And that gospel grasps my head, my heart, my mind, my soul, my strength, and sends me out to live very differently from how I would otherwise.

It's interesting that in both Britain and America, when people ask about the truth of Christianity, often they seem to be interested in the empty tomb and in the virgin birth. And as though those two things were some somehow equal and parallel. It's very interesting in the New Testament that the resurrection is everywhere, but the virginal conception of Jesus is only in those two little bits at the beginning of Matthew and Luke.

And really for Paul, for Hebrews, for John, you can say the whole of the Christian gospel without mentioning the birth of Jesus. That's not to say it's unimportant, it's just to say it isn't nearly as important as Jesus' death and resurrection. Take them away and you haven't got a gospel at all. Having said that, what we find in Matthew and Luke are two very strange stories because Matthew and Luke both I'm sure knew that out there in the wider pagan world, there were people who told stories about Alexander the Great being conceived when his mother was a virgin, about Augustus, similarly, about various heroes and demigods.

And since Matthew and Luke both want to talk about Jesus as the fulfillment of Judaism, which didn't have stories like that, this is really kind of a dangerous thing, dangerous ground for them to be getting into. And so I ask myself as a historian, why would they do that? Particularly when the obvious sneering retort to such a report is, oh, well, we know Mary was just sleeping around with Roman soldiers or whatever, which is precisely what some of the enemies of Christianity went on to say.

So it seems to me that Matthew and Luke would not have included those stories unless they really believed that something very strange like this had happened. And indeed what we can see in Matthew, the way he tells the story of the genealogy from Abraham through David, through the exile to Jesus, he tells it in such a way as to highlight the strange births that happen from time to time in that sequence, for instance, David and Bathsheba, illicitly getting together and producing Solomon.

Perhaps as a way of sort of softening the blow that this is really very strange, but this is actually how God did it. Now, of course, I cannot prove the virginal conception of Jesus, and I don't think you can prove it in the same way as I would prove the resurrection, that you can't explain the rise of early Christianity without it because as I say, you can explain Paul's theology without ever mentioning the virginal conception because Paul never does. So that it's not the same kind of argument.

What I want to say is though, that if the resurrection happened in the way that the New Testament says it does, and frankly, if it didn't, I can't explain as a historian how Christianity got off the ground, then that forces me to hold my modern mind open to say, if God was really in Christ reconciling the world to himself, ought I not to expect some other strange things as well?

And when I then have these stories which look so strange, and yet why would they do that? Maybe it really did happen because you see, as far as I know, nobody in Judaism was going around saying, aha, Isaiah 7:14, Messiah must be born of a virgin. I don't know that anyone was taking that text like that before. So it's not that Matthew had that text in mind and had to pin it on Jesus.

I suspect that Matthew would have been quite happy not to mention that, but it's rather the case that he's got this story and he wants to find something in the Old Testament to go with it. And likewise, Luke, it's not the case that he has stories about angels and shepherds which he's wanting to pin on Jesus. Rather, these are this is the stuff that he's got to work with.

Now, having said all of that, again as a historian, I can't prove that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It is historically likely that he might well have been born in Nazareth. However, we have these two quite different stories. One in Matthew about the wise men coming to Herod in Jerusalem, et cetera, and one in Luke about the census and so on. And it looks as though they are both aware that even though you wouldn't have expected it, Jesus was in fact born in Bethlehem. And there you've got a small amount of multiple attestation, two totally different stories, agreeing on this surprising fact which doesn't emerge anywhere else.

Nobody else makes anything of it. Nobody in in Paul never says, ah, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, therefore he's the Messiah. So, I think as a historian, I'm perfectly happy to say, quite reasonable to suppose that at this point they actually got it right. But my faith does not rest there. As a Christian, I do not every day think, if it wasn't for Jesus being born in Bethlehem, my whole faith ceases to exist, whereas take away the resurrection of Jesus and I would take off this collar and go and find something more suitable to do with my life.

It seems to me likely that when the high priest had his retainers bring Jesus before him, we we don't know if it was an official trial, a proper court, that's very difficult to decide. But when the high priest confronted Jesus, the sequence of thought begins with Jesus' action in the Temple. That's really what has precipitated this whole thing. Jesus has done and said things which make it look as though he thinks the Temple is going to be judged by God and demolished.

And naturally for the high priest, the Temple is his power base. That that's where he is what he is. This is pretty devastating stuff. So we've got a head-to-head. The place isn't big enough for both of them. It's either Jesus with his vision that the Temple is going to be destroyed as a great act of judgment and he and his movement are going to be vindicated, or it's the high priest sitting here with the Temple as his power base and this is how God is operating.

And once you've got that picture, the rest of it follows. Because Jesus doesn't answer his question about the Temple. And so the high priest cranks the thing up a notch because if Jesus is really pronouncing the doom of the Temple, he may just be a wacky prophet, but it's likely that he thinks he's the Messiah because ever since David planned the Temple and Solomon built it, it's the Messiah who has authority over the Temple. And here we play into a bit of tricky Judaism stuff as to whether the chief priest or the king is really the supreme authority. See, there's a bit of that in there as well.

So he says, okay, if you're not going to talk about the Temple, do you think you're the Messiah? And Jesus says, yes. And he backs it up with a double quotation from Daniel chapter 7, from Psalm 110. Both of those are texts he's already referred to in Mark's Gospel and elsewhere, and texts which, of course, become significant for the early church. Psalm 110 is precisely about a king who is superior to priests, and who ends up sitting at God's right hand.

Daniel 7 is about the suffering representative of God's people who after his suffering is vindicated, coming on the clouds, not in a return, but in an upward movement of vindication. Put those together in this dense little saying in in Mark chapter 14, and I suspect that the conversation went on a lot longer between Jesus and Caiaphas, but Mark has no doubt shortened it.

And this is what you get. You will see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, that's Psalm 110, and coming on the clouds of heaven, that's Daniel 7, which is a way of saying, yes, the Temple is going to be destroyed and you and that will be part of my vindication. Yes, I am the Messiah and God will exalt me as such. Yes, I Jesus am in the right, and you Caiaphas are in the wrong. And that when I am vindicated, and I take that to refer to the resurrection, ascension, destruction of the Temple, and ultimately the second coming way off in the future.

When I am vindicated, this will be the fulfillment of the prophecy of Daniel about the coming of God's Kingdom. You see, Josephus tells us at one point in his writings, that many Jews in the middle of the first century AD were relying on a particular prophecy in their scriptures which said that at that time a world ruler would arise from Judea. Now, I have argued in my writings that that must be the book of Daniel because that's the only book that has a specific time sequence, and we know that they calculated how that was going to pan out from Daniel chapter 9, but also chapters 2 and 7.

Jesus I believe is plugging right into that exercise in guesswork and saying, you want to know when it's happening, it's happening in and around me, my movement, my death, my vindication. And that is enough for Caiaphas to say, blasphemy. He thinks that God is vindicating him to his right hand. He thinks he's sharing God's throne, what can this be except blasphemy? That's how I think the trial sequence works, even though I'm quite sure, as I say, that in Mark, we've just got a little bit like that, and I suspect it went on a lot longer.

One of the longest running stories in Judaism, going right back into the Old Testament and right through into the 20th century, is which of these Jews is the really loyal one. We find in the days of Elijah, when Elijah meets King Ahab, Ahab says, is it you, you troubler of Israel? And Elijah says, uh-uh, it isn't me that's troubling Israel, it's you and your father's house. We find again and again in movements during the Bible times and in the post-biblical period, questions about, we think we're the really loyal Jews and we think you are being disloyal to Judaism.

And that is a constant debate which runs through. So when you find then John the Baptist, was John the Baptist being disloyal to Judaism or being anti-Jewish because he said the axe is laid to the roots of the tree and God can now call children for Abraham from these stones? No. This is a strange new fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies. So, with all that in mind, when we see what's going on in the trial of Jesus, when we see what's going on even between Jesus and his disciples, all of whom seem to misunderstand him.

It's not that some of them are being anti-Jewish or let alone anti-Semitic, what would that mean? This is an inner Jewish debate. And when Jesus is confronting the high priest or the Pharisees, these are inner Jewish debates. Who is speaking truly about what Israel's God is doing in the world now? Now, we have seen in our own generation, tragically, as Josephus knew in his generation, that often these debates lead to violence.

I remember when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in November 1995, I think it was. I remember saying to my children, watch this on television, it's very sad, but this is a defining moment as part of our generation. Alas, sometimes this has happened. It's not only Jews who do this, of course, it's British people, other people, American people who assassinate presidents, who do all this. And it happens because people disagree sharply about who is speaking for Israel.

So, when Judas, who I take it was a really historical disciple of Jesus, when he decided that Jesus was now so out of line with his Judas' agenda, he turned him in, and he got some cash out of it on the side. And that saying that is not an anti-Jewish thing to say. Of course, it is perfectly possible, and has been done tragically, for Christians to tell the story in an anti-Jewish manner, but it's not anti-Judaism at all.

It's simply this was a typical alas inner Jewish debate, which might have been a typical inner American debate, but it happened to be a Jewish one. And that's the way it went. And when the chief priests handed Jesus over to the ruling authorities, the Romans who had the authority to to to execute, this was simply what they would have done to all sorts of people who would have been troublemakers at the time. And saying this, telling this story, can be done again in an anti-Jewish fashion.

We know that the Passion Play at Oberammergau used to be staged in a very anti-Jewish fashion with with the Jews as sort of cardboard villains, rather like in some of Wagner's operas, some of the characters used to be almost cardboard cutout hate figures in Judaism. Thank God, Germany and Austria have by and large repented of that, and now this last time round, the Oberammergau Passion Play has really got rid of that stuff.

But that doesn't stop the story being told because the story isn't about, let's be anti-Jewish. Jesus himself was Jewish and believed that it was the fulfillment of his Jewish vocation to die for the sins of the world. And really, if the story is anti-anything, it's anti-pagan because it was the pagans whose system had brutalized everybody to the point where this kind of thing could happen.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Now, thank you for listening to the John Ankerberg Show. We're a listener-supported ministry, and your gifts help us continue to share the gospel with millions of people worldwide. To learn more about our resources or to support our mission, visit jahshow.org or please call us at 1-800-805-3030. If you're in Canada, please visit jahshow.ca or call us at 1-866-746-5803. Or you can subscribe to us on YouTube. Your support makes a difference in spreading God's Word.