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120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont..
22. Something very remarkable had to happen to change James from thinking his brother Jesus was mad to thinking he was the Messiah.
Ankerberg: Take us through Jesus’ brother James and why James also is evidence for scholars in terms of something real had to happen.
Witherington: Well, as has been said many times, the evidence we have is that the family of Jesus during his ministry didn’t appropriately appreciate who he was, or his significance. In fact, John 7:5 just flatly tells us the brothers of Jesus didn’t believe in him at this point in time. And again, this is a sort of self-corroborating account. What we know when we look at the later apocryphal Gospels and all of that, is that the holy family got a bigger and bigger halo around their head. Here we have this story that says, well Mark 3:21 says they all thought he was out of his mind, and they came to take him away. You know we have John 7:5 when the brothers didn’t believe in him. And then we turn around and get to Acts 1:14 or we get to Galatians 1 and who’s there? James is there, believing in the risen Lord, and not only believing, but assuming a position of authority. What’s striking about that is, of course, none of Jesus’ family were among the Twelve. None of them were. And yet we have here, suddenly, a member of the family becoming one of the three pillar apostles of the Jerusalem church. How in the world did that happen? Something dramatic had to have happened to James and his encounter with Jesus after his death.
23.
Paul did not want to believe in Jesus.
Ankerberg: Alright, and finally, take Paul.
Witherington: Well, now here is the sort of ultimate case, really. I mean, it would be possible to argue, yeah, yeah, the followers of Jesus, it’s wish fulfillment. They believed they saw him after he died, bless their hearts, you know, they wanted to believe so badly, and there’s no stories about Jesus appearing to Pontius Pilate or this or that or the other disbeliever. Give me a piece of evidence that says Jesus appeared to a disbeliever. Well, Saul of Tarsus is that piece of evidence. "Last of all" says Saul of Tarsus, "he appeared to me as one untimely born." And it’s not just that he is a disbeliever, or a nonbeliever, he is an ardent anti-believer in this Messianic Jewish movement of followers of Jesus. This is the problem. What kind of psychology did he have to got through, psychological change did he have to go through, to get from point A to point B, you know, from being the ardent persecutor of early Christians to being the ardent advocate of Jesus as the son of God.
Something dramatic had to happen to him in his life. And there’s nothing, from reading Paul’s letters, there’s nothing that suggests that he was a tremendously unstable person before his conversion, or a wishy washy person. On the contrary, he was a great intellectual mind, I mean most scholars would say that he was the greatest amongst the minds of the early Christian writers. After Jesus the greatest figure in early Christendom. Someone who had a very stable set of core beliefs as a Pharisee, was adamant about those beliefs, and yet he totally changed his perspective on Jesus. What did that to him? Some kind of dramatic experience. |
