More Than a Carpenter (5 page)

If Jesus wanted to get people to follow him and believe in him as God, why did he go to the Jewish nation? Why go as a common carpenter in an undistinguished village in a country so small in size and population? Why go to a country that so thoroughly adhered to the concept of one God? Why didn’t he go to Egypt, or even to Greece, where they already believed in various gods and various manifestations of them?

Someone who lived as Jesus lived, taught as Jesus taught, and died as Jesus died could not have been a liar. Let’s look at other alternatives.

Was Jesus a Lunatic?

If we find it inconceivable that Jesus was a liar, then couldn’t he actually have mistakenly thought himself to be God? After all, it’s possible to be both sincere and wrong. But we must remember that for someone to mistakenly think himself God, especially in the context of a fiercely monotheistic culture, and then to tell others that their eternal destiny depended on believing in him, is no small flight of fancy but the delusions and ravings of an outright lunatic. Is it possible that Jesus Christ was deranged?

What Do You Think?

Why do you think Jesus took his message to the Jewish nation? Do you think there was any advantage to him being a carpenter before his ministry began?

Today we would treat someone who believes himself to be God the same way we would treat someone who believes he is Napoleon. We would see him as deluded and self-deceived. We would lock him up so he wouldn’t hurt himself or anyone else. Yet in Jesus we don’t observe the abnormalities and imbalance that go along with such derangement. If he was insane, his poise and composure was nothing short of amazing.

Eminent psychiatric pioneers Arthur Noyes and Lawrence Kolb, in their
Modern Clinical Psychiatry
text, describe the schizophrenic as a person who is more autistic than realistic. The schizophrenic desires to escape from the world of reality. Let’s face it—for a mere man to claim to be God would certainly be a retreat from reality.

What Do You Think?

Is there anything you detect in Jesus’ behavior (other than his claim to divinity) that would suggest he was deranged? If you had lived in his day, would you have wanted to hear him?

In light of other things we know about Jesus, it’s hard to imagine that he was mentally disturbed. Here is a man who spoke some of the most profound words ever recorded. His instructions have liberated many people in mental bondage. Clark H. Pinnock, professor emeritus of systematic theology at McMaster Divinity College, asks: “Was he deluded about his greatness, a paranoid, an unintentional deceiver, a schizophrenic? Again, the skill and depth of his teaching support the case only for his total mental soundness. If only we were as sane as he!”
⁷
A student at a California university told me that his psychology professor had said in class that “all he has to do is pick up the Bible and read portions of Christ’s teaching to many of his patients. That’s all the counseling they need.”

Psychologist Gary R. Collins explains that Jesus

was loving but didn’t let his compassion immobilize him; he didn’t have a bloated ego, even though he was often surrounded by adoring crowds; he maintained balance despite an often demanding lifestyle; he always knew what he was doing and where he was going; he cared deeply about people, including women and children, who weren’t seen as important back then; he was able to accept people while not merely winking at their sin; he responded to individuals based on where they were at and what they uniquely needed. All in all, I just don’t see signs that Jesus was suffering from any known mental illness. . . . He was much healthier than anyone else I know—including me!
⁸

Psychiatrist J. T. Fisher felt that Jesus’ teachings were profound. He states:

If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene—if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out the excess verbiage—if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount. And it would suffer immeasurably through comparison. For nearly two thousand years the Christian world has been holding in its hands the complete answer to its restless and fruitless yearnings. Here . . . rests the blueprint for successful human life with optimism, mental health, and contentment.
⁹

C. S. Lewis writes:

The historical difficulty of giving for the life, sayings and influence of Jesus any explanation that is not harder than the Christian explanation is very great. The discrepancy between the depth and sanity . . . of His moral teaching and the rampant megalomania which must lie behind His theological teaching unless He is indeed God has never been satisfactorily explained. Hence the non-Christian hypotheses succeed one another with the restless fertility of bewilderment.
¹⁰

Philip Schaff reasons:

Is such an intellect—clear as the sky, bracing as the mountain air, sharp and penetrating as a sword, thoroughly healthy and vigorous, always ready and always self-possessed—liable to a radical and most serious delusion concerning his own character and mission? Preposterous imagination!
¹¹

What Do You Think?

Why do you think so many psychologists see Jesus as a model for health? Why was he so content?

Was Jesus Lord?

I cannot personally conclude that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic. The only other alternative is that he was—and is—the Christ, the Son of God, as he claimed. But in spite of the logic and evidence, many people cannot seem to bring themselves to this conclusion.

In
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown claims, “By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable.”
¹²
Novelist Brown wants people to believe the idea that Christ’s deity was invented at the Council of Nicea. Although discussed prominently in popular culture, the “fact” has been rejected by well over 99.9 percent of biblical scholars who study documented history. Here’s why.

The New Testament itself provides the earliest evidence for the belief that Jesus is divine (See chapter two). Since these documents were composed in the first century just decades after the events surrounding Jesus, they predate the Council of Nicea by more than two centuries. While they were written by different people for a variety of purposes, one unmistakable theme they share is that Christ is God.

The ante-Nicene fathers provide additional support that Jesus was considered divine long before the council of Nicea. The ante-Nicene fathers were early Christian thinkers who lived after the close of the New Testament period (c. 100), yet before the council of Nicea (325). The ante-Nicene fathers included men such as Justin Martyr, Ignatius, and Irenaeus. There is no doubt that they understood Jesus to be divine. Consider some quotes from their ancient works:

Ignatius of Antioch (
AD
110): “God incarnate . . . God Himself appearing in the form of man.”
¹³

Justin Martyr (
AD
100–165): “. . . being the First-begotten Word of God, is even God.”
¹⁴

Irenaeus (
AD
177): “. . . the Father is God and the Son is God; for He who is born of God is God.”
¹⁵

Melito of Sardis (circa
AD
177): “He was man, yet He is God.”

Probably the most convincing evidence that Jesus was considered divine before Nicea comes from non-Christian writers. The Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata (c.
AD
170), the Roman philosopher Celsus (c. 177), and the Roman governor Pliny the Younger (c. 112) make it clear that early Christians understood Jesus as divine. Pliny persecuted Christians because of their belief that Jesus was divine. Pliny acknowledged: “They had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately among themselves in honour of Christ as if to a god.”
¹⁶

Given these facts, in addition to many more, the authors of
Reinventing Jesus
conclude: “To suggest that Constantine had the ability—or even the inclination—to manipulate the council into believing what it did not already embrace is, at best, a silly notion.”
¹⁷
The evidence is clear: Jesus was believed to be divine long before the council of Nicea.

When I discuss the material in this chapter with most Jewish or Muslim people, their response is quite interesting. I share with them the claims Jesus made about himself and then put to them the options: Was he contained in the trilemma (liar, lunatic, or Lord)? When I ask if they believe Jesus was a liar, they give me a sharp “No!” Then I ask, “Do you believe he was a lunatic?” Their reply is, “Of course not.” “Do you believe he is God?” Before I can get a word in edgewise, I hear a resounding “Absolutely not!” Yet one has no more choices.

What Do You Think?

If the evidence for the deity of Jesus is so clear, why do you think so many people still reject it?

The issue with these three alternatives is not which is possible, for obviously all three are possible. Rather, the question is, “Which is most probable?” You cannot put him on the shelf merely as a great moral teacher or a prophet. That is not a valid option. He is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord and God. You must make a choice. Your decision about Jesus must be more than an idle intellectual exercise. As the apostle John wrote, “These are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and”—more important—“that by believing in him you will have life by the power of his name” (John 20:31).

The evidence is clearly in favor of Jesus as Lord.

Chapter 4: What about Science?

Many people try to put off personal commitment to Christ on the assumption that if you cannot prove something scientifically, it is therefore not true. Since one cannot scientifically prove the deity of Jesus or his resurrection, then twenty-first-century sophisticates should know better than to accept him as Savior.

Often in a philosophy or history class someone confronts me with the challenge, “Can you prove it scientifically?” I usually say, “Well, no, I’m not a scientist.” Then I hear the class chuckling and several voices saying things like, “Then don’t talk to me about it,” or “See, you must take it all by faith” (meaning blind faith).

Once on a flight to Boston I was talking with the passenger next to me about why I personally believe Christ is who he claimed to be. The pilot, making his public-relations rounds and greeting the passengers, overheard part of our conversation. “You have a problem with your belief,” he said.

“What is that?” I asked.

“You can’t prove it scientifically,” he replied.

What Do You Think?

Besides historical facts, are there any other things we know to be true that are not provable scientifically? If so, what are they?

I am amazed at the inconsistency to which modern thinking has descended. This pilot is like so many people in this century who hold the opinion that if you can’t prove a thing scientifically, it can’t be true. We all accept as true many facts that cannot be verified by scientific methods. We cannot scientifically prove anything about any person or event in history, but that doesn’t mean that proof is impossible. We need to understand the difference between scientific proof and what I call legal-historical proof. Let me explain.

Scientific proof
is based on showing that something is a fact by repeating the event in the presence of the person questioning the fact. It is done in a controlled environment where observations can be made, data drawn, and hypotheses empirically verified.

The “scientific method, however it is defined, is related to measurement of phenomena and experimentation or repeated observation.”
¹
Dr. James B. Conant, former president of Harvard, writes:

Science is an interconnected series of concepts and conceptual schemes that have developed as a result of experimentation and observation, and are fruitful of further experimentation and observations.
²

Testing the truth of a hypothesis by the use of controlled experiments is one of the key techniques of the modern scientific method. For example, someone claims that Ivory soap doesn’t float. I claim it does float, so to prove my point, I take the doubter to the kitchen, put eight inches of water in the sink at 82.7 degrees, and drop in the soap.
Plunk!
We make observations, we draw data, and we verify my hypothesis empirically: Ivory soap floats.

If the scientific method were the only method we had for proving facts, you couldn’t prove that you watched television last night or that you had lunch today. There’s no way you could repeat those events in a controlled situation.