120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont..
24. There’s more to the New Testament than the Gospels, and others add to the claim of historical reliability.
Ankerberg: Talk about, also the fact that we have other books besides the four Gospels in the New Testament that also add to the credibility of the historical account. You have Peter—First Peter, Second Peter—where Peter claims "we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made unto you the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." You also have James and then of course, you have Paul who has the majority of books, and these books, well Paul is rather early, where do they put Peter and James?
Witherington: Well, a good case can be made that the, what I would call the sermon, not letter of James (I think it’s really a homily), comes very early on. I think a very credible case could be made that this goes to the historical James, the brother of Jesus. And one of the most interesting things about that letter is that, imbedded in that document are all these illusions to Jesus’ teachings on the Sermon on the Mount. There’s about 15 places where there’s a sort of indirect echo of some of Jesus’ significant teachings that we find in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. It seems reasonably clear that this person is most certainly a Jewish Christian, certainly an authority figure, he asserts authority over the people that he’s writing to. And he affirms the teaching of Jesus indirectly by citing it and using it as an authoritative teaching for these people. So we do have evidences beyond even the Pauline corpus that there were these authority figures in the early church bearing witness, and that they had much to say.
25. Paul, Peter, James and others became convinced that Jesus was more than just a man.
Ankerberg: Cite some things from your memory of what Paul picked up, Peter picked up, James picked up, whoever, when they looked back at Jesus, that what Jesus said to them registered with them that he was more than a man. What did they see?
Witherington: Well, that’s a really interesting one. I think that there’s a nice nugget of genuine Petrine tradition in 2 Peter where there is a recounting of the transfiguration. It’s very interesting. It’s the only place outside the Gospels that we have any sort of account of the transfiguration. And what that account tells us is that there were these revelatory moments even during the ministry of Jesus, where we got an inkling a sort of inside look of who Jesus really must have been, who Jesus really was, of what God thought about Jesus after all. So, I mean, there are Petrine traditions like that. Of course, in 1 Peter we have all this stuff about Jesus being the suffering servant, and we as Christians having to follow in that pattern or paradigm as well. We have all this about Jesus being the great shepherd as well. Certainly, I think that when someone like Peter looked back on the life of Jesus, he saw Jesus in the light of Isaiah 53. He’s the suffering servant. He’s the one who was despised and rejected by human beings. We deemed him smitten by God and we thought God had rejected him. He was crucified, you know. And yet God brought him back from the dead. And so, you know, if a measure of the significance of the greatness of the meteorite is the size of the crater that it has made, certainly if we look at something like James and he’s all the time alluding to the teachings of Jesus; and if we look at something like 1 Peter; well all of this stuff about the suffering servant and the great shepherd and all of that; the impact was just enormous. The truth, however, is that they didn’t understand. They certainly didn’t fully understand the significance of Jesus until well after the fact.
26. Jesus was more than a social reformer.
Ankerberg: A lot of the Jesus Seminar folk pick up on the fact that he was a social reformer. Associate that with the true message of the Gospel.
Witherington: Well, as I have said before, I think certainly it’s true, if you live by the teachings of Jesus you are going to live a different kind of social existence. There is no doubt about that at all. So there was a social edge, there were social implications to the teachings of Jesus, but certainly, as well, there were spiritual implications to the teachings of Jesus, and this is a matter of putting body and soul together in Jesus’s teachings. Jesus’s spiritual gospel was also his social gospel and vice versa. The problem on either end of the spectrum is reductionism. If you reduce the gospel of Jesus simply to some sort of spiritual pablum, you’ve missed the fact that Jesus wanted to reform the world. No doubt about it. He didn’t like the world the way it was, he prayed "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. That’s where this is supposed to go. So there’s a certain social transformation that Jesus wanted to happen to the world. But on the other hand, the other kind of reductionism is equally bad. If you reduce the Gospel to nothing more than some kind of political agenda, you have trivialized the spiritual heart of the gospel, and that’s an equally big mistake. |
