There are actually four versions of
Jesus life. One of those is the oral
gospel that you hear being proclaimed by
the preaching and teaching and
speeches given in the book of Acts. Another is our four Gospels: Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John in the New Testament.
There's a lot of other stuff written
from the second to fifth century AD, and
most of it is, like, heresy.
It doesn't really represent the real
historical Jesus, but you get a lot of
this kind of stuff referred to in books
and movies like The Da Vinci Code. Then
there's a fourth kind of version of the
gospel, and that's what we're going to be
focusing on we're going to be looking at
this point number four, the Gospel of
Public Domain. I wrote on the number
three, these Gospels that were written
from the second to fifth century AD, and
I actually wrote an article. It's
published, and it's even out there on the
internet, so you don't even have to leave
your house. All you've got to do is click
on this. I can provide the PowerPoint to
Pastor Chris—Pastor Scott—and he can
make it available to you, and all you've
got to do is click on on that link
that's down at the bottom of your screen
right now in blue, and that takes you
directly to this article, "Will the Real
Jesus Please Stand Up?" and hope that that ends up being of interest to some of
you, and a blessing. But we're not going
to be dealing with that. What we're going
to deal with is this fourth point down
at the bottom of your screen now, The
Gospel of Public Domain. In other words,
what's the marketplace saying about
Jesus? Not early Christians—not even
early Christians who are believing in
heresy—but these people who are
unbelievers and most of the stuff that
we're going to look at is actually
antagonistic toward early Christianity.
They don't like early Christians, and
they don't believe in the Christian
gospel. They've never even read it. This is sort of the scuttlebutt of the
late first, early second century AD. Most,  all of it is non-Christian, all but
two of the sources are anti-Christian. We're going to
dealing with literary and archaeological
evidence from the first and second
centuries AD, and the material, as you
will read it for yourself
on the screen, is not stuff where they're
quoting the Gospel of Matthew or the
Gospel of John at any point. The first
text that we want to look at comes from
a first-century source you see it right
there. He was born in AD 37 and he died
somewhere around 100 or maybe 105 AD
he's a contemporary of the Apostles. And
this is what we are told, and I'm gonna
mute me. I'm gonna reduce me, so that I
can actually see what you're seeing. At
this time there was a wise man who was
called Jesus. So right out of a gate,
right out of the chute,
first sentence, we are hearing from a
non-Christian author who never became a
Christian. Josephus was actually Jewish,
and never came to faith in Jesus. And he
says that in his day there was a man
named Jesus. So what else do we get from
Josephus? His conduct was good and he was
known to be virtuous, and many people
from among the Jews and other nations
became his disciples. When you hear about
somebody having disciples in
the ancient world, that meant that this
person is a rabbi. Only rabbis had
disciples. Greek philosophers had
students, but they didn't call them
disciples. Pilate condemned him to be
crucified and to die, so we're being told
more things. That Pilate was the one who
was responsible for putting Jesus to
death. He was the Roman governor. And he
died by crucifixion. And those who became
his disciples did not abandon his
discipleship. They reported that he
appeared to them three days after his
crucifixion. Question for you: is that
what the Gospels in the Bible say? Yes, it
absolutely is. That he appeared to his
disciples three days after he
was crucified, and that he was alive. So
the one who died now come
back to life. We call that resurrection. So do the Gospels teach that? They
absolutely do. Accordingly, he was perhaps the
Messiah concerning whom the prophets
have related or recounted wonders or
wondrous acts. So is that the
nature of Jesus? Was Jesus' ministry a
miraculous ministry? Survey says: yes. We
have another account from Josephus. It
comes at another point in his work, "Antiquities of the Jews," and it's in a
different book. Now we're at the very end
of "Antiquities of the Jews," and he says
this: Ananus, the high priest, thought
he had an opportunity because the
procurator Festus—by the way we hear
about him in the book of Acts—was dead,
and Albinus, who was his successor, was
still on the way. So he convened the
judges of the Sanhedrin—we hear about
the Sanhedrin in the New Testament—and
brought before them a man named James,
the brother of Jesus who was called the
Christ, and certain others. He accused
them of having transgressed the law and
delivered them up to be stoned. So we
hear about Jesus in two different
passages from this first-century author
named Josephus. We actually have a little
bit of a follow-up here. This is what is
called an ossuary, which is a fancy Latin
name for a bone box. After your body lie
exposed to the elements for about a year,
you decompose down to your bones. And
then in a secondary stage of burial in
the first century, your bones were
collected by your family members and
placed in one of these boxes that are
called a bone box or an ossuary. This one,
you might be able to see this if you can
see my pointer, you can see that there's
an inscription. There's writing on this
bone box. Let me give you a close-up of
that with a artist's reconstruction of it
down at the bottom in the white. This
says [speaking in Hebrew]. James, the son of
Joseph. Joseph the carpenter, Jesus'
father. The James the son of Joseph, the brother
of Yeshua, Jesus. So this is James who was
the leader of the church in Acts 15 and
the book of Galatians, who was the
natural brother of Jesus through the
same mother Mary. And this is his bone
box. So that's the James that was
delivered up to be stoned by the
Sanhedrin that Josephus reports in the
previous slide. Really interesting. By the
way, we have other bone boxes like this.
This is a very ornate bone box. And when
you look on the side, the inscription on
the side reads—if you can follow my
cursor again— [speaking in Hebrew]. This is
the bone box of Joseph, son of Caiaphas. That's the Caiaphas that you know of
from your Gospels who was the high
priest who turned Jesus over to the
Romans for execution. We've got all kinds
of really interesting stuff that
corroborate the biblical narrative to
the nines. Not going to spend much time on this
slide, but there was a guy named Thallos,
who was a writer of an early history of
about 55 AD. It didn't survive ancient
times or antiquity but was excerpted by
another author Sextus Julius Africanus
in the second century, who wrote this: In
the third book of his histories, Thallos
calls the darkness that occurred at the
time of Jesus crucifixion an eclipse of
the sun. Sextus Julius Africanus takes
issue with Thallos on this, and he says
this doesn't seem to be the right
identification. It doesn't seem to be
this thought that the darkness that
occurred at the crucifixion of
Jesus does not seem to be the result of
an eclipse of the sun. Now it's still
saying though, that there was a
crucifixion of Jesus. There was a
darkness that came over the face of the
earth that happened at the time of the
crucifixion. What caused it is what is at issue
between these two ancient authors. We
have another text that is an Aramaic
letter written by a guy named Mara ben Serapion. And he's writing to his son
here, and he says what advantage did the
Jews gain by killing their wise king? Oh
in AD 73, or at the time of Jesus, the
Jews didn't have a king. They were ruled
by a Roman military governor that Romans called Procurator or Prefect. Pontius
Pilate was one of 12 of these. And so
there is...the only king that we have of
the king of the Jews that we know of
from ancient times is Jesus. So this
passage has to do with the death of
Jesus. What advantage did the Jews gain
by killing their wise king? Because their
kingdom was taken away. Socrates is not
dead because of Plato, who was his
student who recorded his writings, nor is
the wise king dead because of the new
teachings that he laid down. And the
assumption...the insinuation is
these were recorded by Jesus' disciples. We know them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
We have another text and this comes
to us...this is an official correspondence
between Pliny the Younger, who was the
Roman governor of the province of Bithynia—
Bithynia is mentioned in the
Bible—and he's writing to the Emperor
Trajan in the in the year AD 111. This he
says...he says in his text...his letter to
Trajan the Emperor: the Christians were
in the habit of meeting on a certain
fixed day (we know of that is being
Sunday) before sunrise and reciting an
antiphonal hymn to Christ as God. So we
hear about Jesus. Jesus' title is Christ
or Messiah...The Anointed One, and we're
hearing about this in an official Roman
correspondence from a governor to the
Emperor.
So we're knowing, again, that Jesus
existed and in Bithynia
and in the early the late 100s AD or
the early...the late first
century or the early second century...that
Jesus is being described as the Messiah
or Christ, and He's being sung to as
being divine. He's being worshiped as
God. Here we have an official Roman
historian. His name is Cornelius Tacitus.
You see his dates there. He is late first
or the second half of the first century
and early second century. And he wrote a
book called Roman Histories, or Annals.
He says Nero—you've probably heard this
quoted or paraphrased by pastors from
the pulpit from time to time. This is the
exact text, and I give you the exact
location in Tacitus' Annals, so if
you wanted to and you were online, you
could look this up at like Perseus dot com.
Nero substituted as culprits and
punished in the most unusual ways those
hated for their shameful acts, whom the
crowd called Chrestianoi. Nero is a
Roman emperor that ruled in the late 50s
and early 60s AD. The founder of this
name, Christ, had suffered the extreme
penalty which is a way of saying—a nice
way of saying crucifixion—during the
reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of
our procurator's Pontius Pilate. So there
you have it from Cornelius Tacitus. Same
thing Josephus said. Suppressed for a
time, this deadly superstition—notice
he's no friend of early Christianity. The
phrase there is actually an unhealthy
fear of demonic spirits. So you can tell
that Tacitus is no friend of early
Christians or Christianity.
This deadly superstition erupted again not
only in Judea, the home of this origin...
of this evil, but also in the city
of Rome where all things horrible and
shameful from everywhere come together
and become popular.
(Another swipe at early Christians and
early Christianity.) Therefore these early
Christians were covered with the skins
of wild animals and torn together to
death by dogs, or they were crucified, and
when the day ended, they were burned as
torches. You've heard this probably
referred to in Christian sermons. Here's
a contemporary of Tacitus, he's
more of a popular writer his name is
Suetonius. And in his Life of Claudius
(Claudius is one of the early Roman
emperors): He, Claudius, expelled the Jews
from Rome. We hear about this in Acts 18.
Since they were always making
disturbances on account of the
instigator Chrestus, which is just a
common Latin misspelled spelling for the
Greek Christos or Christ. 
Suetonius in His life of Nero, another
book that he wrote. Punishment was
inflicted upon the Christiani, those
belonging to Christ (is the way that you
translate the Latin there), a class of
people and a new and evil-doing
superstition. Again, not a friend of Early
Christian. Lucian of Samosata is a
writer of plays. And in his play that's
called "The Death of Peregrinus," he writes
that Peregrinus was second only to that
one that they still worshiped today. The
man in Palestine who was crucified
because he brought this new form of
initiation into the world. You know who
he's talking about. But he continues. That
first lawgiver of theirs persuaded them
that they are all brothers. You ever
noticed in the Gospels that when Jesus
talk says if your brother smites you on
one cheek, turn him to the other. If your
brother wants to take you to court, then treat it like
this. So Jesus is referring to fellow
covenant community members as brother
and brothers. We're still using that kind
of language today in many corners
of the Church. They're all brothers the
moment that they transgress and deny the
Greek gods and begin worshiping that
crucified philosopher and living by His
teachings or customs or laws. It could be translated
any of those ways, and we know that this
is simply Jesus. He can only be
talking about Jesus. So there we have
another reference to Jesus from the
second century AD. Celsus was a
philosopher, and his work True
Doctrine is quoted by an early church
leader whose name was Origen. Not o-r-i-g-i-n,
like as in "beginnings," but this
guy's name is o-r-i-g-e-n. In his
writing against Celsus. So he's quoting
Celsus and he says, "He fabricated the
story of his birth from a virgin." Oh! Okay. 
So now what we're hearing from the
Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke—
that Jesus was born of a virgin—this guy
is actually telling the story of what
he's heard about early Christianity and
he's saying yes, the early Christian
believers believed that Jesus was born
of a virgin. He comes from a Jewish
village. Anybody know the name of that
village? I know you're muted, right? I can
read your lips, though. Nazareth. Exactly.
He came from a Jewish village called
Nazareth. He came from a... He was from a
poor country woman. Anybody know her name? Who was the mother of Jesus? Mary, or in
Greek, Marias, or as in Luke gives it, Mariam. Miriam. The full form of Mary's
name. She gained her substance by
spinning, meaning that she was creating
twine for clothing to be made of. She
was driven out by her husband, we know of
his name is being Joseph, who was a
carpenter by trade. Exactly what the
Gospels tell us. Is this not Jesus the
son of Joseph, the carpenter? And then
when she was convicted of adultery—we
have in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke,
we have genealogies. The lists of Jesus'
ancestors who both of those genealogies
presumably being given to counter the
charge that we're told in John chapter 8.
We know who our father is. In this
insinuation in John eight by these
religious leaders is that Jesus was born
of questionable parentage.
So she was convicted of adultery and had
a child by a soldier, probably a Roman
named Pantera, because that's the word we
know as panther, mountain lion, in Latin.
After she had been driven out by her
husband, when she was wandering
disgracefully, she secretly bore Jesus. Now because Jesus was poor, he hired
himself out as a laborer in Egypt. Please
understand we're not getting this stuff
from the Gospels, and this guy's not
getting this stuff from the Gospels. But
we are told that Jesus was in Egypt when
he was...during his his youth, and
eventually returned back to Israel after
Herod the Great died which was in the
spring of 4 BC. So there he learned
certain magical powers, meaning that
there's a miraculous associated
with Jesus from the Bible and also from
the works of this early philosopher who
was not a Christian whose name is Celsus.
He learned certain magical
practice powers in Egypt, which the
Egyptians are proud to have. He returned
full of pride. Returned meaning he
returned to the land of Israel. It's
exactly what we get in the Gospel of
Matthew. An angel of the Lord appeared to
Joseph in a dream in Egypt and said,
"Arise and take the child and his mother
and returned to the land of Israel,
because those who sought the child's
life are now dead." So he returned and
full of pride in these powers—again the
miraculous connected to Jesus—and gave
himself the title of God. Now again the
the divinity or deity attached to the
word which was God and became flesh
and dwelt among us full of grace and
truth. What we hear from the Gospels. Now
we go to archaeology again. This is from
the Roman catacombs that comes to us
from the middle of the second century.
This is called the [Latin]. Why is that? Watch my cursor.
Some of you with the best eyesight can make
out the donkey's head. And then you can
see a human body with legs stretched out
and with arms stretched out and
superimposed on a cross. Then you can see
down here a man's head and his hand
lifted up in worship. And then you can
see a Greek inscription carved into the
walls of the catacombs in Rome. Let me
give you a different exposure here that
shows it a little bit more clearly.
Here's the donkeys head. Here's the arms
outstretched and the legs on the
patibulum right here where the feet
could rest. And then you have a cross
here and here. This is a crucified man
being made fun of with the donkey's head.
Then you see the man's head that is
worshiping with the hand uplifted and
you see this Greek inscription here. And
let me give you an artist reconstruction
of the same thing. Hopefully you can see
it clearly here. And I'm going to read
and translate in Greek. [Reading Greek], you
make it out because some of the Greek
letters look like English letters. Alpha,
Epsilon. This is an L. Alexamenos worships. And then [Greek],
gods. And then you probably have to put a
comma here which they didn't have in
ancient times, that's a modern invention. And then you have an X which is an
abbreviation. It's the letter Chi in Greek that is the
first letter and therefore abbreviation
for the word Christ or Christos in Greek.
Alexamenos worships his gods—it's given in the plural because these
are polytheists—worships his gods, Christ.
So you have yet another example of the
historical reality of Jesus that
He was crucified. This guy's making fun
of Jesus because he draws Him with a
with a donkey's head
then he's making fun of some guy that he
knows by name whose name is Alexamenos,
and he's worshiping his God, Christ. And
so this term Messiah or Christ, the word
Anointed One, this is being ascribed to
Jesus the same way it is in the Gospels.
Now we come to a section of material
that comes to us from the earliest
rabbis. And I've given to you up at the
top of the page the exact location of
this saying, this teaching of the rabbis,
and then you get the exact words and
translation of course from Hebrew. It is
taught that Rabbi Eliezer said to the
Sages—the one the the wise men, the the
rabbis themselves—Did not Ben Stada
bring spells from Egypt in a cut in his
flesh? Keep listening don't let me lose
you here. Ben Stada is Ben Pantera, and
you saw that word before.
Remember the soldier Pantera? Ben, if you
watched Ben Hur, either the old Kirk
Douglas version or was it
Charlton Heston in Ben Hur,
or the more recent version that was made
I think about 10 or 15 years ago, Ben Hur.
Ben means "son of."  So is...Ben Stada is the son of the Panther. The son of
the Roman soldier named Pantera. Rabbi
Hisda says the husband was Stada; the
lover was Pantera. Again this insinuation
that Jesus was born of some kind of
sexual illegitimacy and was
therefore not reliable, untrustworthy. The
mother, that would be Mary, the mother was Miriam the dresser of women's hair.
Now she's not a spinster; now she's a dresser of women's hair.
She works at a beauty salon. So
ladies that totally legitimizes any
amount of money or time that you spend
in the beauty salon from now until Jesus
comes back. Hopefully you appreciate that.
Miriam. Miriam
is that...Miriam is that name that is
given to Jesus' mother by Luke. Luke never
calls her Mary or the Greek Marias. He
always gives the full form for which
Mary is a nickname. I actually have a
friend who lives in Israel and her name
is Miri. It's the first...spelled a little
bit differently m-i r-i,
and it's just the nickname. It's an
abbreviation, sort of like Tim is for
Timothy or like John is for Jonathan.
That that kind of thing. It's a shortened
version of the the actual full name that
only Luke of our four Gospel
writers has preserved for us. Miriam was
the dresser of women's hair.
She was false to her husband. She was
unfaithful to her husband. Here's another
text. This is from a rabbinic work called
The Babylonian Talmud. Jesus escaped to
Egypt. That's exactly what we're told in
the Gospel of Matthew chapter 2. And the
teacher has said, which is a technical
way of saying the earliest rabbinic
stratum. The earliest rabbis Jesus the
Nazarene practiced magic and led Israel
astray. And this is really significant, 
because it's telling us there was a
Jesus, he was from Nazareth, and he was associated with the miraculous.
But he used the miraculous in the same way that a false prophet like the one
described in Deuteronomy chapter 13.
Deuteronomy 13 says if a prophet arises
and shows a true sign or wonder, but then
uses that to lead Israel astray to the
worship of other gods, then that prophet
is supposed to be taken out and stoned.
I give you the reference in
Deuteronomy 13 there. So the reference is
yes there was a Jesus and he was
associated with the miraculous, but he
used those powers to lead Israel astray
to the worship of false gods. Who would
those false gods be? Him. Himself. Here's
another text. This is all early rabbi stuff.
An early rabbinic account recounts an incident involving
a guy named Ben Dama in which a
snake bit him. Following the attack
Ya'akov of K'far Sekhanya, who was a
heretic. Why was he a heretic? Because he
was a disciple of Jesus the Nazarene. He
came to—the Hebrew there reads "to heal
him." But Rabbi Yishmael, who was his
brother-in-law, would not let him. And Ben
Dama said to him, Rabbi Yishmael, my
brother, let him heal me and I will be
healed. But Ben Dama did not manage to complete
his sentence before his soul departed
from his body and he died. We have again
a reference from the early rabbis that
wasn't Jesus. He had disciples. One of
these guys was known for his ability to
bring healing of sickness, disease. And
like an accident as we have in this
passage. And he was known as a healer
by the early rabbinic community. And this
one particular individual wanted him to
come to pray the prayer of healing over
him so that he would be healed.
We follow this up by Rabbi Eliezer who is
a very early rabbinic source. He says,
Once I was walking in the upper
marketplace of this town called Tsipori.
It sits 3.4 miles directly north from
Nazareth. And he says I found a man who
was one of the disciples of Jesus the Nazarene. More evidence there was a Jesus.
And his name was Ya'akov of K'far Sekhanya. And he said to me Jesus the Nazarene
taught me this: since the coins of a prostitute's hire
come from filth, then let them go back to
a place of filth. In other words, let's
build a public restroom with that...with
that money. And I was pleased with this
saying. Because of this, they came and arrested me for heresy. Why? Because I received as
authoritative one of the teachings of
Jesus the Nazarene who had disciples who
was out there teaching stuff that Jesus
taught in the early 2nd century. Now do
we hear this from lips of Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew or
Mark or Luke or John? And the answer is
no. We don't hear this from Jesus in the
Gospels. So this guy could not have
gotten that from the Gospels. He's
hearing this information from the
earliest disciples of Jesus who were, by
word of mouth, spreading this the
teachings that Jesus left behind. Here's
one last couple of texts from the
rabbis. The rabbis taught: Jesus had
five disciples. Well we know that he had
12, but other great rabbinic figures like
Yohanan Ben Zaccai,
who is the leader of the Pharisaic
movement, the Pharisees, the early rabbis
at the time that the temple was
destroyed. We know that he had five. And
other important rabbinic figures were
famous...were known for having five major
disciples. So they decide that they're
going to give the name Mattai, which yes,
you are right that would be Matthew in
Hebrew. Naqai, yes, you're right again
that would be a shortened version of
Nicodemus. Netzer which is just that root
for the word Nazareth, so I think that
there's some confusion there. Buni is
actually given to us by the Gospel of
Mark. James and John are called [speaking Hebrew], the sons of rage or thunder or
anger or something like that. 
Toda just means thank you in Hebrew, and
by this point, they're just kind
of playing. So we'll move on. This is a
very important text. The early rabbis
teach this: they crucified him on the eve
of Passover. That is hugely important. Because we are told by the Gospels that
Jesus died at 3 p.m., and that he died as
the Passover lamb. Well the Passover
would begin for most of Judaism, there
are some that celebrated the day before
as Jesus and His disciples did at the
Last Supper—what we call the Lord's
Supper, but most of Judaism, following the
teaching of the Pharisees, celebrate the
Passover or celebrated the Passover in AD 29 or AD 30,
whichever of those years Jesus actually
died in, they celebrate the Passover at
sundown. Sundown begins the next day, so
when they say the eve of Passover,
They are concurring exactly with
the details—down to the exact time of
Jesus death at 3:00 p.m. And that's what
Josephus and the Mishnah tell us that at
3:00 p.m., they began to sacrifice the up
to a quarter-of-a-million sacrificial
lambs for the celebration of Passover
that will happen after sundown that day.
So Jesus dies at 3:00 p.m., and at
sundown that day Passover begins. Why did
they crucify him? Notice the text is
telling us very clearly, like the Gospels,
they crucified him—that was his form of
death. When did it happen? On the eve of
Passover. Perfectly in conformity to what
we get from the Gospels. Because he
practiced magic, meaning he was
associated with the miraculous. Do you
remember in the Gospels where they go
yeah we know that Jesus cast out demons,
but he does this by the power of
Beelzebub? Well that's just the nickname
for Satan. Beelzebub is a
nickname for the devil. Because he
practiced magic and he enticed Israel to
go astray. In other words, yes, we admit he
was doing the miraculous, but he was
doing it by the dark side of the force.
Alright. Another text. Rabbi Yochanan, early rabbi,
said in the beginning he was a prophet,
so he had a good start, but in the end he
was a diviner, meaning that he was doing
the miraculous by magic...by
illegitimate means. Rabbi Papa said, Rabbi
Papa said, This is what they say.
(Now he he's gonna change channels and
he's gonna start talking about Mary or
Miriam again.) She was a descendant of
princes and governors. We're told that
both Joseph and Mary was were of Davidic
descent and so they are they are, to some
degree, royalty. She was the
descendant of princes and governors, but
she played the harlot with carpenters. That's a reference to Joseph the Carpenter,
and that again there was some kind of illegitimate sexual liaison
between the two. One of the last texts
that we want to deal with is again a
rabbinic text. The early Pharisees: Woe to
him who makes himself alive
by the name of God. So this goes back to: 
we know that he was practicing the
miraculous and we know that he was
raised from the dead. Notice that he
doesn't say he he will make himself, "he's making himself alive." He's
living on he's still alive, but it's only
by the power of the dark side of the
force. It's by the power of Beelzebub. Some kind of way, these guys know that
Jesus was resurrected from the dead on
the third day. And the same thing that
Josephus said. His disciples say he
appeared to them alive on the third day.
But they say yes he was resurrected from
the dead, but he's some kind of way
managed to manipulate the name of God
and use it in some kind of magical
incantation to bring him back to life
after he was dead. Some of that is very
clearly unacceptable. Some of it actually
though confirms or corroborates the
testimony of the Gospels themselves. It's
in the Gospel of John in chapter 2. Jesus
says destroy this temple and in three
days I will raise it up. Jesus then in
that respect becomes responsible for his
own miraculous resurrection from the
dead. And we're gonna go ahead and skip
over these and this and go to the
conclusions. One is there was a man who
was called Jesus. We get this in all 17
of the sources that we just surveyed. He
was from a Jewish village. We hear that
from that philosopher Celsus. His earthly
father was a carpenter. We hear that from
Celsus and from the early rabbis. His
mother's name was Mary or the longer
version being Miriam which Luke gives us.
Mary was a royal descent. He and
his family were poor. His opponents
claimed that Mary was unfaithful.
All of this we're getting in both the
outside the Bible and the biblical
materials. His opponents say that Jesus
was illegitimate. Yeah, he claimed virgin
birth. The sources cited in parentheses
to the right of the point. He escaped to
Egypt and later returned to Israel. All
these are things that are confirming
points of the biography of Jesus given
to us in our Bible. He had a brother
whose name was James. He was known as a teacher or rabbi. Why? Because he had
disciples. And he had disciples. This is
something Josephus and the rabbis agree
on. He founded a new community that he
called brothers that were based on his
laws or teaching. He was known to be wise. He was known to be virtuous and godly. He
was known as a prophet. Is this not the
the prophet from Nazareth? That's what we
hear in the Gospel. We're told that in these sources outside the
Bible that he worked miracles, even
though his opponents claim that he was
using magic or the illegitimate means to
work these wonders. His opponents claimed
he led Israel astray. He was called, you
know, all the people will follow after
him if we allow him to go on the way
he's going. We hear in the Gospel of John
after he raised Lazarus from the dead in
chapter 11. And the last point on this
slide, he was he was called the Christ. And we get practically a litany of
references to the Christ or Chrestos or
Christos, even get it in the
archaeological text. He claimed he
claimed to be divine. That's exactly what
we get from the Gospels. He claimed to be
God in the flesh. And you shall call his
name Emmanuel, God with us. He was worshiped by his followers as God.
Absolutely. We have this in the Gospels. We have it in the book of Acts. We have
it in the letters. We have it in the book of
Revelation. Jesus is embraced as being
fully divine and fully human by all
early Christians at every level of the
New Testament. And we get this outside
the New Testament as well.
The governor Pliny,  Lucian, the play
writer, the Elexamenos inscription in the catacombs. He was
condemned by a Jewish court. Absolutely
fascinating. And on the eve of Passover,
the exact time the Gospels give us as a
timeline for his crucifixion. And the
interesting thing, going to the next
point, is that even though He was
condemned by Jewish religious leaders, He
was nevertheless crucified by Roman
leaders. This is a reality that is so
unusual in the ancient world, and yet the
Gospels get it right, and these early
outside the Bible sources also get it
right. He was tried by a Jewish court, but
he was turned over and executed
by Roman official. Absolutely
fascinating, and right on the nines.
Right down to the letter with what we
get from the New Testament. We're also
told that His earliest followers claimed
that He was resurrected from the dead.
And we even get from Josephus on the 3rd
day, and that's exactly what we're told
in the Gospels. It's what we're told in
the early preaching and teaching in Acts,
and it's what we hear all through the
letters of the New Testament. And at the
book of Revelation. The final conclusion,
this last one, is that He was perhaps the
Messiah. And this is, I'm quoting there
from one of those first references that
we got from Josephus, the early Jewish
historian. In other words, every major
assertion in the New Testament that the
New Testament authors make about Jesus
biography, who he was and then what he
did is supported, even back handedly
nevertheless back handedly, by these
early authors and sources outside the
Bible. So the gospel of public domain has
weighed in, whether
they wanted to or not, resoundingly in
favor of the accuracy and authenticity,
the legitimacy, the trustworthiness of
the sources that we have in our Bible.
All 27 books. And for me, and especially
with these last passages that talk about
Jesus crucifixion and about His
resurrection, that just beautifully sets
the stage for our commemoration of today,
Good Friday, and of the intervening time
and then His resurrection on
Resurrection Sunday. And what I trust is
that, even though we haven't read tons of
Bible and we haven't had it on the
screen, I've been sort of voice over-ing in
passages from the Bible and seeing how
they compare, that you will approach this
week with a greater appreciation for the
reality of these things having been
confirmed and corroborated by multiple,
multiple, multiple sources of testimony
that are not Christians, and that there
aren't even are actually anti-Christian
in their orientation. They're not trying
to back up or support the Bible but they
end up doing it anyway. I also trust that
you will have come to a greater
appreciation of the One that died for
you. The One who allowed himself to go
through the trials and then the
crucifixion on what we call Good Friday
and allowed himself to be in the grave
for three days and then brought about,
miraculously according to John chapter 2
and sources outside of Scripture, His own
miraculous resurrection from the dead.
Hosanna! He is risen! So I look forward to
spending time with you again in the
future, but until then, God bless you
richly and have a wonderful wonderful
end of Passion Week and Resurrection
Sunday.
