Pastor Ryan Gaffney

One of my students recently put up a Blog Post. I’d love to link it here, but considering what I’m going to say about it I think I had better not for fear of inciting a flame war.

Suffice it to say she wrote about the disaster in Japan. It was honest, It was vulnerable. She referenced scripture, she provided pictures. She cried out publicly to a God who didn’t appear to be listening. Everything one would expect from a modern psalm of lament.

It should go without saying that I’m totally proud of her for the courage she demonstrated, and for the maturity of faith that invites doubt rather than feeling a need to cover everything up neatly with a little religious blanket. As a minister there isn’t much you can ask for that could be better than seeing your students grow closer to Christ.

But somebody out there decided to take the opportunity to question her motives and make her feel awful about stepping out. He accused her of failing to glorify god, because under his definition apparently glorifying God means you never let ‘em see ya sweat.

Well she’s awesome, so of course she talked to him about how the psalms contain similar statements. And that even Jesus himself says “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”

But guess what he said?

I bet you can guess!

He said “Well are you Jesus?”

…

…

And that’s how it arrives. “Well are you Jesus?” and then the conversation is over of course. Because no self respecting Christian is going to say “Yes I’m totally Jesus and what’s true of him is true of me” and once you invalidate Jesus you really can’t use evidence from the bible anymore So now we just have to shut up. My student goes home with her tail between her legs.

But wait a sec!

Are we seriously going to let him get away with that?

No, No we’re not.

I wanted to give you the context because I feel like without the context it’s hard to separate truth for emotion on this question. But my hope is that in this situation you can see that this is clearly argumentative behavior. It’s used to win arguments that can’t be won using truth. But it’s insidious. I’ve used the “your not Jesus” argument. I bet you have too, and at the time we both felt that we were right to use it, because after all the point we were defending was right… because after all it was our point…

But from an objective perspective, Like the one we get when we see it being used against my student. I think it’s much easier to see it’s wrong. If we disregard everything Jesus said or did as inapplicable because “we’re not Jesus” well frankly we just don’t have a whole lot of Christianity left to work with.

In fact even the word “Christianity” the Christ-Ians or “Little Christs” implies that we are in fact supposed to be like Jesus, to follow his example, and yes even be him.

Galatians 2:20
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

So next time somebody gets into your face and tells you “You’re not Jesus” You just tell them right back “Yes I am! And you should be too!”

In the last article I introduced the new problem of defending the historicity of Jesus the man. And spent time “setting the goalposts” in such a way that there will be no room for wiggling away from what the evidence shows.

When last we left our heroes I suggested that the case should be so fragile when robbed of it’s precious ambiguity that it would almost fall on it’s own weight, and I proposed in this article to blow it out of the park.

Since evidence abounds, I won’t bore you by defending all of it, only some of my favorite early, non-christian  extra-biblical sources. But just to give us all a sense of the mountain I’m mining from, let’s briefly list off what sources I won’t be using:

The 13 Cannonical Pauline Epistles (Romans, Ephesians…) the Non-Canonical Pauline Epistles (0 Corinthians, the Harsh Letter…) The Cannonical Non-Pauline Epistles (1,2,3 John, 1,2 Peter…) The 4 Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) The Apocryphal Gospels (Thomas, Judas, Mary) The Q Document, The Acts of The Apostles, The Ancient Christian Creeds, Early Church Fathers (Justin Martyr, Clement of Rome…) And everything medieval, no matter how reluctant the source (Toletoth Jesu…)

For our purposes, we will assume that all of these documents, or more accurately, all of these groups of documents are inadmissible. We’ll assume that they are either a part of, or a result of, the most elaborate and ridiculously unnecessary prank in the history of pranks that every early christian was in on, and willing to be martyred to protect.

What else have we got?

Well for starters, There’s Mara Bar Serapion:

For what benefit did the Athenians obtain by putting Socrates to death, seeing that they received as retribution for it famine and pestilence? Or the people of Samos by the burning of Pythagoras, seeing that in one hour the whole of their country was covered with sand? Or the Jews by the murder of their Wise King, seeing that from that very time their kingdom was driven away from them? For with justice did God grant a recompense to the wisdom of all three of them. For the Athenians died by famine; and the people of Samos were covered by the sea without remedy; and the Jews, brought to desolation and expelled from their kingdom, are driven away into every land. Nay, Socrates did “not” die, because of Plato; nor yet Pythagoras, because of the statue of Hera; nor yet the Wise King, because of the new laws which he enacted.

This was written before the year 200 and possibly as early as 73, predating even some biblical books. To my knowledge no scholar anywhere denies the authenticity of the text, but some claim that it does not necessarily refer to Jesus and might refer to some other wise Jewish king murdered just before the decline of Judea…

Well there were of course no kings during that time considering the Romans were occupying them. but just to be super safe let’s do another one. How about Tacitus, the roman historian who between AD 56 and 117 wrote the following:

Nero fastened the guilt of starting the blaze and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians [Chrestians] by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontious Pilatious, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

Even Bart Ehrman, counts this passage as confirmation that Jesus existed, and suffered under Pilate. (Ehrman, is probably the worlds leading scholar on the new testament, and disagrees strongly with the claims of Christianity)

Here’s what’s even more interesting. Do you see that little typo up there? The original text had the word Chrestions instead of Christians, as the name of the followers of Christus (the Latin version of the Greek word “Christ”) it appears to have been corrected on the page but the original “e” is visible under ultraviolet light

Now consider this passage from The Twelve Caesars:

“As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome”

Worthless without Tacitus, This now provides valuable corroboration to the claim that Christ existed, and his followers interacted with Rome in the first century. Both major roman historians of the period confirm it!

Is that all?

No, That’s not all, but that’s enough.

During this time in history, experts predict that there were probably hundreds of claims to messiahship in Jerusalem, among the people who didn’t believe Jesus was the real deal, he would hardly have been considered notable, and yet he apparently is…

It’s almost like something was going on here…

Wouldn’t you like to learn what?