120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont..
37. The "historical Jesus" is the same as the "Jesus of faith"
Ankerberg: Some of the other scholars say that the disciples, because they were Christians, just padded the case. Therefore the historical Jesus is different again from the Jesus of faith, because they just went on and made it up to talk about their own experience and to kind of impress the crowd. It was almost like an evangelistic tool to bring people in. What would you say to that?
Witherington: Well, I would say that it takes, and it did take, in the first century A.D. a great deal of courage to be a Christian, and to claim that a crucified manual worker named Jesus from Nazareth, against all expectations, turned out to be the savior of the world. Now this is a fantastic claim. Early Jews were not looking for a crucified Messiah, so far as we can say. Greco-Roman persons were certainly not looking for a crucified manual worker being their Messiah. So here we have these people, evangelizing the world and claiming this is the truth that you need to know about: Jesus died and rose again, and this demonstrates who he is. It takes an awful lot of guts to put that message out there
Now you can say an awful lot about what people are willing to live for, but what people are actually willing to die for is another question. These early Christians were prepared to die for an honest testimony about those facts. It’s hardly likely that these are things that they would make up about Jesus. |
