Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Was Jesus a Real Person? | Who Is Jesus?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. This week, we're starting a new series on 10-minute Bible Talks called Who is Jesus? And that's not a statement. It's a question. We are going to have some YouTube videos that will deal with the exact same question. We'll have a lot of downloadable content that we'll be highlighting as well.

Starting point is 00:00:31 But maybe most importantly, I want to ask you, what are the questions? that you have about Jesus, join us on our Facebook page or shoot me an email, and I would love to discuss your questions on the podcast. Now, who is Jesus? I realize that this might sound like an absolutely basic question. You've probably got an answer to that question, but nothing can be further from the truth. This is not basic at all. Just go, seriously, do a Google search of Jesus, and you will discover that there is a white Jesus, a black Jesus, a Catholic Jesus, a Protestant Jesus, a Velociraptor writing Jesus, there's football Jesus, there's Thomas Jefferson Jesus, there's atheist Jesus. I mean, come on, would the real Jesus please stand up? It's an unarguable

Starting point is 00:01:15 fact of history that Jesus is one of the most influential people throughout time. His life and teachings have shaped cultures and lives on absolutely every continent. I mean, maybe not And Hard to Cal though I'm sure there are some people following him there. It's besides the point, whether or not you're religious or you're irreligious or you're something else, I think that Jesus merits your study and your consideration. His teachings, they deserve our thoughts if we take history seriously, at least. In fact, one of my hopes with this series is that there would be a lot of episodes that aren't just thought-provoking for people who follow Jesus, but would also be thought-provoking for people who aren't following Jesus. Maybe there's going to be some episodes

Starting point is 00:01:55 in this series that you could share with a friend who's on the fence about Jesus, or maybe not interested in Jesus at all. Say, hey, listen to this and let's talk about it. Maybe it could be a great conversation starting. Help your relationship with that person move into a different place and start having conversations about God. Another one of my hopes is just to deal with a lot of common misconceptions about Jesus out there. The popular Western notion of Jesus is saddled with misconceptions, so many that it's so heavy that I think you need a rocket just to get it off the ground. Maybe you're coming to the podcast and you're looking to have a fresh experience with Jesus. Maybe you want to hear his voice and his wisdom anew. Maybe you want to

Starting point is 00:02:36 encounter him as he really was in his historical setting. Or maybe your walk with Jesus has just slowed to a standstill. And you're looking for something to get your legs pumping. Well, I'm hoping that this series is for you, that it's going to do that and a lot more. So let's start at the obvious place to start with a basic question. And maybe this was an episode you were tempted to skip, but if you've gotten this far, you haven't skipped yet. I think this is an incredibly important question if we want to encounter Jesus as he is and not as we imagine him to be. And here's the question, was Jesus a real person? Now, a few weeks ago, I was having lunch with an intelligent friend who was asking me how I could be sure that Jesus is real,

Starting point is 00:03:18 that he actually existed in the past, and I would say in the present. Now, to be honest, I hadn't really heard a serious person, Christian or non-Christian, ask that particular question. But it's obviously a question that demands an answer. And I don't think my friend is alone. I've actually heard more and more people asking this question. So anyways, I'm talking to him, and I ask him, what led you to ask this question? And he goes on to say that he'd read some blogs and some articles from what appeared to be very reputable sources, claiming that science had debunked most of the evidence which Christians claimed proved Jesus's existence. Well, this was news to me. So I said, well, like what? Can you share? And he said, well, lots of church.

Starting point is 00:04:00 Churches claimed to have splinters from Jesus' cross. But if you take all of those splinters together, there would be enough wood to build a big boat. It's not a cross. Okay, well, he keeps going. Well, he pointed out the shroud of Turin, which some Christians claim Jesus was buried inside of this shroud, and it now bears kind of a ghostly outline of his face and his body. Well, he said that that shroud had been shown to be a fraud and that it was manufactured by an artist. Or he said, what about those lead Bibles they found? People said that they were the oldest references to Jesus that we had, and they dated them almost to the time of his life. And he said, well, guess what? Those led Bibles have been proven that they're fakes, they're frauds. And so he looks at me and he goes, well, what do you

Starting point is 00:04:43 think? I mean, did Jesus really exist? God, it took me a second, but I said, well, you've got great proof that there's some gullable Christians out there who are pretty easily taken in by some hucksters, but I'm not sure that you have any proof that Jesus never existed. You see, if you had ever asked me why I believe Jesus is a real, was a real, is a real historical person, I never would have talked about splinters from the cross, the shroud of Turin, or led Bibles. I never even thought about that stuff. I don't believe in any of that stuff. And that's because we have the physical remains of very few historical people. We don't believe in most people from the past, whether or not you think we do, we don't believe in most people from the past because we've got

Starting point is 00:05:24 hard physical evidence of their existence. Now, he thought that this was kind of a dumb excuse. And so I asked him, I said, well, do you believe that your great, great, great grandfather was a real person? And of course, he's like, well, yes, I do. Of course, I believe that. And I said, well, do you have indisputable physical evidence of his existence? And he kind of laughed, and he saw the point. Because, of course, the answer was no. He had nothing from his great, great, great grandfather. no gravestones, no remains, no letters or books that he wrote, no possessions that he could prove for his great, great, great, great, grandfathers. So I said, well, why do you believe in him? And he said, well, we actually have a few public records that show that he existed. And I've got

Starting point is 00:06:05 the testimony of my family members who've kept our family tree up today. So that's why I believe that he was a real person. Well, exactly. That's actually how we know about most historical people. It's based on the records recorded and the eyewitness testimonies about, them which have survived to this day. So what kind of records do we have from the past, from thousands of years ago, that we used to know things about real historical people, not just Jesus, but any historical people from the time of Jesus. Well, let me tell you what those things are. There were, in those days, a rare few people with extravagant wealth who could build monumental structures, and then they would engrave their names on those structures in the stone. Now, for us to use

Starting point is 00:06:47 those as proofs of their existence, those structures have to survive to today and their edifices, the place where those inscriptions went, those also have to survive for thousands of years. And as you can imagine, both of those things, that's not always very common. Okay, so what's the second way that we know about people from the past? Well, there are public records. But those public records, they have to be stored in such a way that the papyrus, and that's kind of like ancient paper. They have to be stored in a way that that papyrus doesn't disintegrate because papyrus is just very fragile and it's easy to disappear turns into dust just like modern paperwood by the way and so as you can imagine those public records they are very very very very

Starting point is 00:07:26 they're among the most rare things out there which is why we have very few papyrus documents that have survived from the time of jesus okay so how else do we know about all these historical people if the monuments are rare and the public records are rare well the last way we know and this is by far the most common way that we know things about the past is that either people wrote their own works, so they wrote a book or something like that, or someone else wrote about them in a history. Now, of course, the only way that we still have these documents is if they were copied again and again by very careful copyists. And you have to understand this was incredibly expensive and difficult. And so only the most important and reliable documents would have been copied again and

Starting point is 00:08:08 again and again. Just to put a reference point, in today's financial terms, a single copy of a document the size of Paul's letter to the Romans would have cost, get this, between $2,000 and $4,000 to produce. I mean, wow. So let's recap. How do we know about people from the past? Monuments with stone inscriptions, public records, personal writings that are preserved for posterity and historical writings, which are also preserved for posterity by copyists. The vast majority of what we we know about the past actually comes from that last category. Do you believe in Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Mark Antony? Well, if you do, if you think that those were all real people, we only have things from that fourth category, histories written about them or personal documents

Starting point is 00:08:55 written by them. And by the way, we don't have their originals. You can't find a letter from Plato to one of his students. These are all copied. In fact, many of the copies we have from or about these people, they're actually dated much later than the documents that we have about Jesus. In other words, we have documents about Jesus that come from the first century, but our oldest copy of Plato comes somewhere from the third or fourth century. So it's a much younger document. It's pretty interesting when you get into it. But let's go to the basic question. What about Jesus? What evidence do we have that Jesus was a real person? Well, do we have any monuments or inscriptions? Well, the answer to that one is no. Like most people, Jesus was not wealthy enough.

Starting point is 00:09:35 to commission this kind of thing. But here's a fun little fact. For a long time, scholars debunked the gospel accounts by pointing out that there were no, zero, zip, none historical records of a governor named Pontius Pilate in Judea. Now, Pontius Pilate, according to the gospels, is the guy who basically allows Jesus' execution. And so scholars, they use this proof. They said, well, you can't trust the gospels. They name a guy who never existed. We have no proof of his existence. Well, at least we didn't until we finally did a dig of Cesarea Maritime. And lo and behold, the archaeologist there, they uncovered a Latin inscription with the name Pontius Pilate on it.

Starting point is 00:10:13 And so it turns out that he was actually a governor in Judea, but it was for such a short period of time that he didn't make any of the other history books. And that actually shows us how reliable the Gospels are. Okay, what about public records? Any public records about Jesus? Well, unfortunately, all of Judea's public records were burned by the populace about 35 years after Jesus died. You see, at the time, there was a rebellion happening against Rome, and the first thing that the ordinary people did were burned down all the records, namely of their debts. Kind of makes sense.

Starting point is 00:10:44 It's a get out debt free card, but we don't have any records from Jesus' time because of those fires. Okay, so what about the last category? What about personal writings and historical writings? Well, like most rabbis of the day, Jesus never recorded his teachings. In those days, rabbis only passed down their teaching orally from one teacher to their student. They never wrote down their works. And actually, this is really interesting proof that Jesus really was a first century rabbi. The fact that he didn't write anything down shows that he followed the pattern of most rabbis in his day. So what about histories? Do we have any historical documents that tell us about Jesus?

Starting point is 00:11:23 Well, the answer to that is obviously yes. Let's just throw out the Bible for a second. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus records, he mentions Jesus and how Jesus died in his history of Israel, and he only writes this a few decades after the events. So that's very, very close to Jesus' death. Beyond that, we have Paul's letters in the Gospels. And look, here's the deal. Not all scholars agree about how old all of the New Testament is, but they do agree that Paul's letters to the Galatian Church, Roman Church, Philippian Church, and Corinthian Church are most certainly authentic to Paul. And they know that these letters were written only decades after Jesus' death, and they clearly show that Paul and his followers, they believe Jesus to be a real

Starting point is 00:12:10 person. In fact, in Paul's letter to Corinth, he invites his audience to ask. He says, look, go out and find any of the 500 people who witnessed Jesus' resurrection. And they will tell you that when I'm telling you about his resurrection, that he really did rise from the dead, they will tell you that it's true, that it's real. Paul was banking on cooperation, which can only mean that many people really did not only believe in Jesus, but in this case also his resurrection. What about the Gospels? Those are the clearest history of Jesus' life. Well, those appear to have been written about a generation after Jesus' death.

Starting point is 00:12:44 And again, this is super normal in the world of history. For example, if you think that Alexander the Great was a real, person. Well, I hate to break it to you. Most of what we know to him was actually written almost a century after his death. That's how we know a lot about Alexander the Great. In fact, that's how we know anything about it, guys like Socrates and others. There were books written after their death in the next generation. And that's true of the Gospels. Now, Luke interestingly says that his gospel is written based on eyewitness testimony. He says that right in the very first few verses of Luke chapter one. And remarkably, this claim that Luke makes, it's held up really, really well to historical scrutiny.

Starting point is 00:13:24 The most remarkable piece of evidence, at least in my opinion, it's a little bit complex, but a guy named Richard Bacham, he's a scholar who wrote Oxford's introduction to Jesus. So this is a guy who's appreciated in the secular world. Well, he analyzed the names which are used in the gospel. So he takes all of the names in the gospel, every single one of them, and he compares them to names which were common in Israel during the time of Jesus. And get this, the Gospels not only include the right names. So they've got all the right names included. They actually get them in the proper order of frequency. So the most common names

Starting point is 00:13:57 tend to be the most common names in the gospel. There's no rational way to account for this except to say that it really is evidence of eyewitness testimony. To admit that it's eyewitness testimony isn't the same thing as to say, I agree with all of it. It's simply to say these documents, the Gospels, they weren't just made up. They aren't just fairy tales. that they don't invent a historical figure who never existed. They really seem to be rooted in history. Now, none of this should surprise anyone. Scholars, throughout time and even in the last century,

Starting point is 00:14:29 have all agreed whether they're religious or not, that Jesus is a real person. Of course, we debate, do the Gospels have Jesus' true words, and we're going to cover that later, but there's very little debate about his historical existence. Because if you wanted to deny Jesus' historical existence, You'd also have to, if you were being rational, deny the existence of Socrates and Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Alexander, the Great. You'd have to deny their existence because we actually have less evidence of their existence than we do have Jesus' existence.

Starting point is 00:15:00 Unfortunately, in the world of blogs and social media, misinformation that magnetizes clicks, it's the coin of the kingdom. And so maybe our first takeaway is straightforward enough. If you want to know who Jesus is, don't start on Google. start with the best and only records we have, the Gospels. Because Jesus was a real historical person. Whether or not you think he was God, there was a human, and his name was Jesus, and he absolutely changed the trajectory of the world. And if you want to be a serious thinking person, then you have to think seriously about one of the most important teachers and historical figures who's ever lived. I think anyone would agree that that's the case. And that's exactly what we are going to be doing on this series. Thanks for listening.

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Was Jesus a Real Person? | Who Is Jesus?

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