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.

Guest (Male): Throughout his public career, which was quite brief, just a year or three, Jesus was doing things which had a particular meaning in the world of his day. When he announced to an individual on the street, your sins are forgiven. He was giving that person the kind of assurance of God's forgiveness which that person would normally have got by going to the temple, offering sacrifice, doing the standard things, and then having a great party, a great feast to celebrate God's goodness and forgiveness. Jesus said right here your sins are forgiven and they had the party right there.

Who did he think he was? What was he doing? It was like in our culture, somebody offering to issue you a passport or a driver's license just there on the street. And in his culture, that must have meant he was doing things which were kind of upstaging the temple. And his whole public career was like that. There is one exception which we need to note that when he cleansed lepers, on one occasion he said, go and show yourself to the priest and make the offering. The reason for that is quite clear. If the leper had gone back to his village and said, I met someone wandering prophet who tells me I'm clean. They would have said, oh yeah, sorry, you know, it doesn't work like that. He needed to do that in order to get the bill of health for his family. But usually it was just on Jesus's say so.

Now, this meant that Jesus throughout his ministry, not only at the end, was embodying a kind of radical alternative to the temple, which he seems to have believed it was his vocation to do. So when he arrived in Jerusalem, it was him and it was the temple. And who was representing the will of God and the coming kingdom of God? And so, on top of that, we have in Judaism already at the time, quite a popular descent from the temple and critique of the temple. Not only the Essenes, but a lot of the poor people felt that the temple was an oppressive structure which the high priests ran to their own advantage. It's noticeable in Josephus that at the start of the war in 66, the first thing the rebels did when they got hold of the temple was to burn the records of debt. That's like somebody going into the central bank and exploding the computer that's got all the overdrafts on it, you know.

So the temple, a lot of people thought the temple was a bad thing. But Jesus is going beyond that and is saying, God is now doing something which is making this system redundant. Now, why does his action mean that? Turning over the tables of the money changers stopped for a few moments, maybe half an hour, an hour or so, the flow of sacrificial animals which were coming in, being bought. You had to buy the animals there because if you brought a sheep from Galilee, a wolf might nip its ear on the way down and then you have to go all the way back and get another one because it wouldn't be pure anymore. So, it's not a protest against commercialization. You know, people sometimes come into Westminster Abbey and say, what are you doing with the bookshop here? You know, we should cast the traders out of the temple. That's not the point. It's not a protest of that sort. It's a way of symbolically stopping the regular sacrificial protest. And what that says is this whole system is under judgment and one day before too long, the system will stop completely because the temple will be destroyed. And the whole of the sequence in Mark's Gospel from Mark 11 where that happens through to Mark 13 is all about the temple and its destruction, ending with the discourse on the Mount of Olives, which is Jesus answering the disciples' question, when is the temple going to be destroyed?

Now, from that moment on, Jesus's fate is sealed, it seems to me. But what he is doing in the course of that is saying quite radically, what you have in and through my work is the reality to which the temple pointed. People often say like people said to Paul about the law, does this mean the law was a bad thing? Does this mean the temple was a bad thing? And often historians of religion have said, oh yes, it was a kind of an early development. They thought they had to do stuff with the sacrificial system and killing animals and so on. And we've now grown up and we know we don't have to do that. So how stupid were they? Jesus never says that. For him, the temple was a true signpost to God's future. And it is now ripe for destruction, not because it was a bad thing that needed to be abolished, but because it was a true signpost to the reality. But when the reality has come, if people insist only on looking at the signpost, they've missed the point and they're on the way to ideology or even idolatry. It's rather like if you're trying to show an animal something, a dog something, and you point at the object, the dog looks at your finger instead of looking at the object. In Jesus' day, people were looking so hard at the temple, that they could that he was offering the reality to which the temple pointed. And that's what we then find in the Last Supper and on the cross, Jesus doing the reality to which all along the temple had been pointing.

The Gospel of John has been a difficult subject for historians to handle for these last couple of hundred years because there's been an assumption out there that Matthew, Mark and Luke are kind of the historical bit and John is the theological bit. Now, just as we now know that Matthew, Mark and Luke are every bit as much theological, I think it's time to start looking at John and saying, maybe there's more history there than met the eye. Now, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a movement of British Johannine scholarship which was saying, there is a lot more history in John than we'd supposed. But I didn't think that movement really went far enough. What I think I've shown in my works which are based on Matthew, Mark and Luke, particularly, is that actually the Jesus of history, reconstructed from Matthew, Mark and Luke, did believe that Israel's God was present and active in himself. Did believe that he really was Israel's Messiah.

Because you see, when we read in John, Jesus saying, I'm the light of the world, I'm the bread of life, I'm this, I'm that. We have short-circuited the meaning of those phrases. We have thought that they meant without remainder, I'm the second person in the Trinity. But actually, I think if you had been present with, say, Simon Bar Giora at the last stages of the Jewish war in 70 AD, if you've been present with Bar Kokhba in 132 to 135. I think he'd have said, I'm the light, follow me and you won't walk in darkness anymore. I'll give you the bread of life. You come to me, you'll never be hungry again. This is Jewish Messianic language. I don't think it means, I am some supernatural being, you know, I think we've misread John like that. Now, I haven't done all the work to follow this through, but one other insight which I've struggled with sometimes, but I think is true.

What we have in Matthew, Mark and Luke comes out quite neat in chunks of about 10 or 14 or 15 verses, usually, some slightly longer. That's why it's so easy to find bits to read out in church. If you want a nice little chunk, it'll come away clean. Then there's another bit, and there's another bit, with little connections between. It's very hard to do that with lots of John. Some of those discourses in John seem to go rambling around and around and around like this. I once saw a world-class actor do a performance of John's gospel from memory. And he said at the beginning, he said, sooner or later in this performance, I'm going to forget where I am. He said, I've got a little copy here and I will look at it. Sure enough, halfway through Chapter 8, he just got a little bit lost, just checked it out, carried on. Didn't happen again. And that's because I think John's gospel is has not been shaped by the church telling this story so often that it fell into an anecdote form, a nice easy thing and this bit, so that it just made sense like that. I think John's gospel grows out of the memory of an old man who has been praying over this stuff again and again and again. I can't prove that, but it makes quite a lot of sense to me. And within that, of course, his life of prayer and preaching and devotion and holiness has colored the way he says it. But I think John's gospel goes back, as John A.T. Robinson said, to source rather than to sources. And that when we look at that source, it really does turn out to be Jesus, as whoever wrote John chapter 21 says, we know that his witness is true. But I think in the process of discovering that truth, we may have to unthink some of the rather superficial ways that we have read those sayings of Jesus and to put them back into their first-century Jewish context better than we've done. That's a whole task that I haven't really anything like completed myself, but maybe another generation will be required for it. After all, as you know, whoever wrote the bulk of John's gospel seems to have died just before it finished. Half the main commentators on John this century died just before they finish it. Maybe I shall write half a commentary on John and somebody else will finish it.

The very early Christians, of course, didn't have gospels. They had oral traditions about Jesus. The gospels got written quite soon, but in the second and third and fourth centuries, there were all sorts of other traditions and stories about Jesus and gradually people came to say, yes, but these four tell the actual story of how God has redeemed the world and us through Jesus. And so these came to be the canonical gospels not because they were politically convenient. They weren't. People got killed for believing them, but because these were the ones that really told it like it was. Then from, say, 500 to 1700 AD, basically the church lived with that lot. But particularly in 16, 1700, the church was perceived by a lot of people to be very heavy-handed and politically dominant and restrictive. And so people associated the story of Jesus that they found in the gospels with that heavy-handed church. And then in the Enlightenment period, they started to say, hey, maybe if we do some historical research on these texts, we'll have a freer, easier, more liberated view of who Jesus was. So the first quest for the historical Jesus from roughly the middle of the 18th century to the end of the 19th century was a lot of people struggling this way and that with what happens if we forget what the church told us and try and put Jesus in his historical context.

The results of that were so devastating that for a long time through the first half of the 20th century, most scholars didn't really want to go that route anymore and were studying Paul and the early church instead. Then after the war, Ernst Käsemann, one of the greatest German scholars of of the period, said, this ain't no good. We've got to study Jesus himself because if we don't do that, we will invent Jesus to suit our ideologies. He had the Nazi ideology in mind. The trouble was the new quest which he launched, never really got beyond agonized discussions about what criteria you might use and so on. There were some books written, but it didn't really get very far. Then with the new explosion of knowledge about first century Judaism, there's been a whole wave of studies, including my own, trying to locate Jesus within that. Kase, Vermes, Jesus, the Jew. Ed Sanders, Jesus and Judaism. Paula Fredriksen, J.P. Meier, Jim Charlesworth. A whole bunch of us. That's what I have called the third quest. Now, people get muddled about this because that's what I meant when I invented that phrase. But also simultaneously with that, we've had what Robert Funk calls the renewed new quest, which is what he thinks he and Crossan and people are doing. It's interesting that Funk agrees with me that that whole line that he's in, including the Jesus Seminar, is a very different thing from the third quest, even though many people have now used the third quest more loosely to mean everything that's happened since 1970. Now, I don't care about the phrase. I don't have copyright on it. But that's how it came about. But where we're at at the moment, I think is two significantly different movements. The Jesus Seminar, who have a Jesus who, as far as I can see, has only tangential relationship with first-century Judaism, or the Jesus that I'm trying to describe that Paula Fredriksen is describing from a different angle, Ed Sanders, many others, who has both feet firmly anchored in the world of first-century Judaism, which was waiting for the Kingdom of God. And we then find, surprise, surprise, that's the world described by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, not by Thomas or the others.

So who was Jesus? Jesus was a prophet announcing the kingdom of God, a first-century Jewish Palestinian, announcing that God was now becoming king. Jesus believed that he was the one who was bringing that kingdom in himself, that he was Israel's Messiah. He believed that he had to do this through his own suffering and death in obedience to a vocation shaped by Israel's scriptures. And he believed that in being and doing all of this, he was the very embodiment of Israel's God come to redeem his people. That remained when Jesus went to the cross as the most extraordinary set of beliefs. It looked as though the crucifixion had disproved it, but the very early church said that when God raised him from the dead, God vindicated and validated what Jesus had believed all along.

One of the most explosive things we've had this century in scholarship this last century has been the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I'm continually fascinated by. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a kind of a parallel to early Christianity in some ways and not others. Or if you like, in family relationships. The Dead Sea Scrolls are like a sort of a second cousin to early Christianity because the people who wrote those scrolls believed that God had secretly renewed the covenant with them so that they had forgiveness of sins, they had the Holy Spirit. They were the real returned from exile people. The early Christians believed all that as well. Some people think that the Essenes had had somebody they believed was the Messiah, the teacher of righteousness. That's controversial. The early Christians believed that Jesus was the Messiah. However, the Essenes drew from all that the conclusion that they should belong to a community which was more and more tightly defined with ever decreasing tight circles of Torah obedience. The early Christians believed that what had happened meant that they had to go out into all the world, irrespective of the restrictions of Torah, and invite all and sundry to come and celebrate. That's radically different. Why did they believe those different things? Because of the different people at the heart of the movements. The teacher of righteousness had been a teacher of an ever stricter form of priestly holiness. Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified and raised from the dead. Therein lies the radical difference between the two movements. Now, John the Baptist is poised uneasily in between. I don't think John was an Essene, but I think it's highly likely that he drew some original support from the Essenes, because it's the Essenes who in their chronology had calculated that the Messiah ought to be born sometime around what we call the end of the first century BC. So it's quite likely that Essenes in the 20s of the first century would have been looking for somebody in his 20s to show up who might be a Messiah or a prophet or somebody. It's quite likely that some Essenes went with John. John's baptism was a one-off. It wasn't a regular washing like the Essenes' regular washings. And John was pointing to a Messiah who was going to come, not back to a teacher of righteousness who would give you a tighter Torah. So there are differences between John and the Essenes, but I think any Essene might well have looked at John just up the road and said, maybe this is actually what we've been waiting for. And then I think it's quite possible that many Essenes might then have gone to Jesus. They would have found a movement which like finding a cousin you didn't know you had, looks a little bit like family, but also is doing some things radically differently.

It's often said in contemporary scholarship and has been for over a century that Jesus couldn't have thought he was the Messiah because only crazy people think like that and Jesus was such a shrewd teacher, et cetera, et cetera. And the Jesus Seminar have often said, well, Jesus taught people humility and taught that they should be self-effacing. So how could he at the same time have given him such, given himself such airs as to think that he was the Messiah? That's a complete misunderstanding of how first-century Judaism works and of how Jesus vocation works. Of course, Jesus' authority to give him the, the right to do the teaching he was is based on his sense of vocation that he was somebody extremely special in the purpose of God. He was doing a unique thing. And the evidence for Jesus' Messiahship is not that he went around saying, hey guys, I'm the Messiah, you better believe in me. That would be a pretty stupid way of behaving. The evidence is that he did Messianic things, particularly the healings and the way they were explained, particularly the temple action which has Messiahship stamped all over it. And that when challenged for an explanation, he didn't say, well, I did it because I'm the Messiah. At least right in the end of the, in the trial he did, but that by then it was too late. He explained these things cryptically with riddles, royal riddles. When, when they said by what authority do you do this? He said, I'll ask you a question, was John's baptism God-given or was it just a human invention? And they said, we don't know. The point is that at John's baptism, Jesus had been anointed as Messiah. Hence he's got the right over the temple. It's a riddle. So the Jesus Seminar are looking in the wrong place. And often when they come to those riddles, they say, we really don't know what this is about. Well, of course they don't because they've taken away the framework within which it makes sense.

The reasons for Jesus' death go back and back and back. And however deep you go, there's always, and I find as a Christian and as a preacher, there's always more. Any formula you come up with, you'll, you'll want to go beyond it. When we look historically at why Jesus died, clearly several people in authority just thought he was a pain and they wanted to be rid of him. It's very likely that Pontius Pilate actually had some kind of a spy network that would have had a file on Jesus already. And if Pontius Pilate did have that sort of a network, he would have known that Jesus was some kind of odd troublemaker and it's quite likely he'd have wanted him out of the way. But that's just at the sort of the foothills level of the great mountain in the middle, which is that Jesus' own vocation and self-understanding was that he had to bring Israel's history to its climax. He had to do the thing which would redeem Israel and the world. And that at the heart of that was going to be a vocation to suffering, which is there in the prophetic literature. So when we study the motivations of the different characters involved, the Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, Caiaphas, Pilate, they may have been all over the map. But in the middle, there stands a figure who had the chance to get away and didn't take it. Who also had the chance to lead a military revolution and didn't take it. And who on the night he was betrayed, could have been over the Mount of Olives and off to the desert and out of there and they'd never have found him. Or he could have said to Peter and the boys, okay, get some swords together, surprise night attack. He could have been king for a day or a week or maybe a year. And then what, who knows. And instead, and this to me is one of the most moving and poignant things, he chose to stay in prayer in Gethsemane, wrestling with vocation for that last time. So that when we say, why did Jesus die? Well, of course Pilate, of course Caiaphas, of course Herod. They've all got different agendas which combine in this explosive way. But at the heart of it is Jesus' own awareness that this was what he had to do because only so could the promises be fulfilled and the world be saved.

I think Jesus knew from at least the time of his baptism, that this was the path he was set on. I say at least because I'm sure that the baptism was a confirmation of that, but it's a confirmation of something which I think is already formed in his mind. His ministry is very short. We don't get the sense that he had time to go away and do three months of sort of sabbatical scripture study in order to figure a few things out. He seems to have it pretty clear. I think this means that from at least his Bar Mitzvah time through his teens and twenties, as we would call them, he is soaking himself prayerfully in the scriptures. And that as he does this, to his surprise and no doubt horror, he realizes that he has a vocation, he's got to do this stuff. That doesn't mean that he sort of knows it all and sails through. It means that he realizes either he's totally crazy and he must, his family thought he was crazy. His, his brothers and sisters and his mother came and said, you know, he's mad, he's out of his mind. He must have known that they might be right, but he believed that he wasn't wrong and that it was his vocation to go and do this stuff. And when he went to the cross, I think that was the great gamble. I think he knew he was staking his life on this and the resurrection vindicated him.

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 Jashow.org or please call us at 1-800-805-3030. If you're in Canada, please visit Jashow.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.