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120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont..
20. There really is no mystery to why the "legend of Jesus" would spread so far and so fast.
Ankerberg: Critics have said that it was kind of an enigma, a mystery if you want, that the legend of Jesus would spread, because according to the way they present him, there was no reason that it should spread.
Witherington: Well, if you wanted to scotch the rumor that Jesus was a Messianic figure, all you really had to do was make sure that he got crucified. Because there was no positive evaluation of crucifixion in the first century A.D.
Ankerberg: Let’s talk about that in terms of the way the Jewish people thought about Messiah, they certainly didn’t see a Messiah coming to get crucified.
Witherington: No. A crucified Messiah was an oxymoron. It was an inherent contradiction of terms. The interesting thing is that, so far as I can tell, early Jews, before Christian Jews, did not interpret Isaiah 53 to refer to Messiah. They thought it might refer to the nation as a whole, suffering for the sins of the world, and that sort of thing. But they didn’t expect Isaiah 53 to be fulfilled in some kind of Messianic figure. It appears that Jesus and the early Christians were the first that thought that. So this idea of crucifying the Messiah would have been seen as a contradiction in terms. On the basis of understanding the Pentateuch. I mean, there is this verse in Deuteronomy where it says "cursed be he who hangs upon a tree." God has cursed the one who hangs upon a tree. Now, in its original context that saying is actually about the laying out of a corpse after having been killed. Hanging it on a tree was a way of shaming that person for the crimes that they had committed. They had committed a crime, they’d been executed by capital punishment, then you hang them.
Crucifixion was a means of shaming a person in public, and his family, and absolutely making clear that whatever this person, this rascal may have done, or may have claimed, it has to be absolutely false, and it’s show to be false by the fact that he ended up like this. Now ancient people believed that how a person died showed what God’s evaluation was of that person. If Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on Good Friday in A.D. 30, that should have put an end to all of this nonsense, if nothing happened after the crucifixion.
Ankerberg: So now you’ve got to ask, from the pits, from the depths of being shamed, how did this guy become God?
Witherington: Well, that is the $24,000 question. How did you get from there to all of these courageous followers of Jesus, evangelizing the Greco-Roman world? How did you get from A to B? And it seems to me that the only thing that could have reversed that downward trend with the disciples deserting, denying, betraying, abandoning, leaving town, you know Luke 24, that poignant moment, here are the disciples going down the road to Emmaus: "We had hoped [past tense] that he would be the one to redeem Israel." The crucifixion proved beyond any shadow of doubt, no way, Jose, is that going to be the case. How could that downward spiral have been reversed? I think that the only adequate explanation of that is the resurrection of Jesus. And the resurrection is viewed throughout the New Testament as the vindication of Jesus and his claims, both implicit and explicit claims.
21.
The evidence for Jesus’ resurrection was strong enough to convince even hardened skeptics of his own time.
Ankerberg: Take us through some of the characters in the New Testament, their emotional conversion, their intellectual conversion, for example, Peter, James, Paul, why these are such strong individuals, strong evidence in terms of the truth that Christ did come forth from the dead.
Witherington: Well, you know, the interesting thing to me about the New Testament is that it doesn’t gild the lily. It tells it like it is. I mean, we have a figure like Thomas. I once heard an excellent sermon entitled "Late for the Holy Spirit." The first appearance of Jesus in the upper room, Thomas is not even there, and Jesus breathes on them and says receive the Holy Spirit. Well, you can be sure he was there the second time around. He had to see for himself. He was one of those "give me the ocular proof" kind of guys. You know, he is "seeing is believing" as far as he is concerned, "otherwise I’m not buying this story."
Now we have the story about a disciple who had profound doubts. Doubts that were only overcome by having seen the risen Lord. Now I think it must be true that Thomas is a figure of many of the earliest followers of Jesus. He is a representative of all of the doubts and fears of those folks. We even have an account in Matthew 28, which I find quite astounding, of Jesus appearing to the disciples in Galilee, and it says, "Many believed and some doubted." And you go, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute here. The risen Jesus has appeared to them and there’s still some going, ‘I can’t believe my eyes. I can’t believe I’m seeing this.’" Well, these are self-effacing accounts. They’re honest accounts. They recognize that many believed, but some didn’t believe.
Ankerberg: What was happening to those guys that didn’t believe?
Witherington: Well, that’s a good question. I guess that they believed that they were in a bad B grade movie or were having an hallucination, or they’d had too much wine before breakfast, or something. You know, whatever it was, they came to a different conclusion, at least at that moment, than the others who had seen the risen Lord.
Ankerberg: But the very fact that it was part of the record¼.
Witherington: ¼shows the honesty of the account. It wasn’t "And everybody stood up and saluted the flag of Jesus as the risen Lord instantly when he appeared." No, that’s not how it happened. In fact, most of the accounts say that the initial reaction to seeing the risen Lord is they don’t even recognize him. They don’t recognize him. Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize him at the tomb. Men going down the road to Emmaus don’t recognize him. You know, they don’t recognize who he is. Well, you know, if you’ve actually seen somebody die a horrible, brutal death, psychologically it’s hard to overcome that impression as something that’s final, absolute, complete. Dead, gone, never going to see this person again. I have to say that one of the things I wish I could have done as an archaeologist, could do as an archaeologist, is discover the tombstone of Lazarus. I mean, imagine this: Died A.D. 29, Died A.D. 35, you know. That ought to confuse a few people! Then imagine that scene in John chapter 12 where Lazarus is sitting at table with Jesus and the other disciples. I mean, what do you say to a dead man? Well, how was it on the other side, Lazarus, we’re glad to have you back? I mean, death is one of those things that we in our culture still say there’s nothing more certain than death and taxes. When somebody comes back from the dead, at first the reaction has got to be disbelief, unbelief. But that was overcome by the persistent appearance of Jesus to many people, in various different places, even at the end of the process, to an ardent disbeliever named Saul of Tarsus. |
