More Than a Carpenter (12 page)

Church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette writes:

The effects of the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples were . . . of major importance. From discouraged, disillusioned men and women who sadly looked back upon the days when they had hoped that Jesus “was he who should redeem Israel,” they were made over into a company of enthusiastic witnesses.
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N. T. Wright, former professor of New Testament Studies at Oxford University in England, explains,

The historian has to say, “How do we explain the fact that this movement spread like wildfire with Jesus as the Messiah, even though Jesus had been crucified?” The answer has to be, it can only be, because He was raised from the dead.
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Paul Little, who was associate professor of evangelism at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, asks:

Are these men, who helped transform the moral structure of society, consummate liars or deluded madmen? These alternatives are harder to believe than the fact of the Resurrection, and there is no shred of evidence to support them.
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The steadfastness of the apostles even to death cannot be explained away. According to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
the philospher Origen records that Peter was crucified head downward. Church historian Herbert B. Workman describes the apostle’s death:

Thus Peter, as our Lord had prophesied, was “girt” by another, and “carried” out to die along the Aurelian Way, to a place hard by the gardens of Nero on the Vatican hill, where so many of his brethren had already suffered a cruel death. At his own request he was crucified head downwards, as unworthy to suffer like his Master.
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Harold Mattingly, who was an emeritus professor at the University of Leeds, writes in his history text: “The apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, sealed their witnesses with their blood.”
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Tertullian writes that “no man would be willing to die unless he knew he had the truth.”
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Harvard law professor Simon Greenleaf, a man who lectured for years on how to break down a witness and determine whether or not he was lying, concludes:

The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like heroic constancy, patience, and unflinching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidence of the great facts and truths which they asserted.
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History professor Lynn Gardner rightly asks,

Why would they die for what they knew to be a lie? A person might be deceived and die for a falsehood. But the apostles were in a position to know the facts about Jesus’ resurrection, and they still died for it.
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Tom Anderson, former president of the California Trial Lawyers Association, states,

Let’s assume that the written accounts of His appearances to hundreds of people are false. I want to pose a question. With an event so well publicized, don’t you think that it’s reasonable that one historian, one eyewitness, one antagonist would record for all time that he had seen Christ’s body? . . . The silence of history is deafening when it comes to the testimony against the resurrection.
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J. P. Moreland points out, “No historian I know of doubts that Christianity started in Jerusalem just a few weeks after the death of Jesus in the presence of friendly and hostile eyewitnesses.”
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Furthermore, as William Lane Craig, research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, concludes,

The site of Jesus’ tomb was known to Christians and Jews alike. So if it weren’t empty, it would be impossible for a movement founded on belief in the Resurrection to have come into existence in the same city where this man had been publicly executed and buried.
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The apostles went through the test of death to substantiate the veracity of what they were proclaiming. I believe I can trust their testimony more than that of most people I meet today. I grieve to find so many who lack enough conviction in their lives even to walk across the street for what they believe, much less to die for it.

What Do You Think?

How much credibility do the disciples deserve for offering their lives as confirmation of their beliefs? Could they have done anything more to show their sincerity?

Chapter 8: What Good Is a Dead Messiah?

Many people have died for causes they believe in. In the 1960s many Buddhists burned themselves to death in order to bring world attention to injustices in Southeast Asia. In the early seventies a San Diego student burned himself to death protesting the Vietnam War. In September 2001 several Muslim extremists hijacked airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon to inflict damage on a nation they consider an enemy to their religion.

The apostles thought they had a good cause to die for, but they were stunned and disillusioned when that good cause died on the cross. They believed him to be the Messiah. They didn’t think he could die. They were convinced that he was the one to set up the Kingdom of God and to rule over the people of Israel, and his death shattered their hopes.

What Do You Think?

Have you ever heard of someone having a messiah complex? Can you explain what that means? How does Jesus’ behavior differ from what people expect from a messiah?

In order to understand the apostles’ relationship to Christ and why the Cross was so incomprehensible to them, you must grasp the national attitude about the Messiah at the time of Christ. His life and teachings were in tremendous conflict with the Jewish messianic understanding of that day. From childhood a Jew was taught that when the Messiah came, he would be a victorious, reigning political leader. He would free the Jews from bondage to the Romans and restore Israel to its rightful place as an independent nation that would shine like a beacon to all the world. A suffering Messiah was “completely foreign to the Jewish conception of messiahship.”
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Professor E. F. Scott of Union Theological Seminary gives his account of the expectant atmosphere at the time of Christ:

The period was one of intense excitement. The religious leaders found it almost impossible to restrain the ardour of the people, who were waiting everywhere for the appearance of the promised Deliverer. This mood of expectancy had no doubt been heightened by the events of recent history.

For more than a generation past, the Romans had been encroaching on Jewish freedom, and their measures of repression had stirred the spirit of patriotism to fiercer life. The dream of a miraculous deliverance, and of a Messianic king who would effect it, assumed a new meaning in that critical time; but in itself it was nothing new. Behind the ferment of which we have evidence in the Gospels, we can discern a long period of growing anticipation.

To the people at large the Messiah remained what he had been to Isaiah and his contemporaries—the Son of David who would bring victory and prosperity to the Jewish nation. In the light of the Gospel references it can hardly be doubted that the popular conception of the Messiah was mainly national and political.
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Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner writes: “The Messiah became more and more not only a preeminent political ruler but also a man of preeminent moral qualities.”
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Jacob Gartenhaus, founder of the International Board of Jewish Missions, reflects the prevailing Jewish beliefs in the time of Christ: “The Jews awaited the Messiah as the one who would deliver them from Roman oppression. . . . The messianic hope was basically for a national liberation.”
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The
Jewish Encyclopedia
states that the Jews

yearned for the promised deliverer of the house of David, who would free them from the yoke of the hated foreign usurper, would put an end to the impious Roman rule, and would establish His own reign of peace and justice in its place.
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At that time the Jews were taking refuge in the promised Messiah. The apostles held the same beliefs as the people around them. As Millar Burrows of Yale University Divinity School states, “Jesus was so unlike what all Jews expected the son of David to be that His own disciples found it almost impossible to connect the idea of the Messiah with Him.”
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The disciples did not at all welcome Jesus’ grave predictions about being crucified (see Luke 9:22). Scottish New Testament professor A. B. Bruce observes that there

seems to have been the hope that He had taken too gloomy a view of the situation, and that His apprehensions would turn out groundless . . . a crucified Christ was a scandal and a contradiction to the apostles; quite as much as it continued to be to the majority of the Jewish people after the Lord had ascended to glory.
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Alfred Edersheim, once Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint at Oxford University, is right in concluding that “the most unlike thing to Christ were his times.”
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The reality of the person was utterly at odds with the heightened expectations of the day.

We can easily see in the New Testament the apostles’ attitude toward Christ. Everything about him met their expectation of a reigning Messiah. After Jesus told them that he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer, James and John ignored the gloomy prediction and asked him to promise that in his Kingdom they could sit at his right and his left (see Mark 10:32-38). What type of Messiah were they thinking of—a suffering, crucified Messiah? No. They saw Jesus as a political ruler. He indicated that they had misunderstood what he had to do; they didn’t know what they were asking. When he explicitly predicted his suffering and crucifixion, the idea was so foreign to the apostles’ mind-set that they couldn’t figure out what he meant (see Luke 18:31-34). Because of their background and training in the general Jewish messianic expectation, they thought they were in on a good thing. Then came Calvary. All hopes that Jesus was their Messiah died on the cross. They returned to their homes, discouraged that all those years with Jesus had been wasted.

What Do You Think?

Have any of your ideas of who Jesus was been shattered? Been confirmed? Why do you think the disciples had so much difficulty knowing exactly who he was?

George Eldon Ladd, former professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, writes:

This is also why his disciples forsook him when he was taken captive. Their minds were so completely imbued with the idea of a conquering Messiah whose role it was to subdue his enemies that when they saw him broken and bleeding under the scourging, a helpless prisoner in the hands of Pilate, and when they saw him led away, nailed to a cross to die as a common criminal, all their messianic hopes for Jesus were shattered. It is a sound psychological fact that we hear only what we are prepared to hear. Jesus’ predictions of his suffering and death fell on deaf ears. The disciples, in spite of his warnings, were unprepared for it.
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But a few weeks after the Crucifixion, in spite of their former doubts, the disciples were in Jerusalem, proclaiming Jesus as Savior and Lord, the Messiah of the Jews. The only reasonable explanation I can see for this change is what I read in 1 Corinthians 15:5: “He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve [apostles].” What else could have caused the despondent disciples to go out and suffer and die for a crucified Messiah? Jesus “appeared to the apostles from time to time, and he proved to them in many ways that he was actually alive. And he talked to them about the Kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).

These men learned the truth about Jesus’ identity as the Messiah. The Jews had misunderstood. Their national patriotism had led them to look for a Messiah to save their nation. What came instead was a Messiah to save the world. A Messiah who would save not merely one nation from political oppression but all of humanity from the eternal consequences of sin. The apostles’ vision had been too small. Suddenly they saw the larger truth.

Yes, many people have died for a good cause, but the good cause of the apostles had died on the cross. At least, that is what they first thought. Only their contact with Christ after the Resurrection convinced these men that he was indeed the Messiah. To this they testified not only with their lips and lives but also with their deaths.

What Do You Think?

Have you ever had your expectations radically overturned? How do you think the disciples felt the very moment they realized Jesus was the risen Messiah?

Chapter 9: Did You Hear What Happened to Saul?

Jack, a Christian friend of mine who has spoken at many universities, arrived at a campus one morning to discover that the students had arranged for him to have a public discussion that night with the “university atheist.” His opponent was an eloquent philosophy professor who was extremely antagonistic to Christianity. Jack was to speak first. He discussed various proofs for the resurrection of Jesus as well as the conversion of the apostle Paul, and then he gave his personal testimony about how Christ had changed his life when he was a university student.