Darren Tappouras - The Man Who Changed the World - Study 5 - The Resurrection of Christ

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   This morning we're going to consider a reading, that reading being 1 Corinthians 15 verses 1 through to 11. And we'll ask Brother Nat Pogson to come forward and read that for us. We'll now look forward to our first session with our Brother Darren to the theme, The Resurrection of Christ, Many Infallible Proofs. Thanks Brother Darren.

2. 0:16

   Thanks Brother Hayden and Good Morning Bible School. Good morning. All right, just a quick recalibration of where we've come so far this week. Our objective has been taken from Philippians 3 to know him. So the focus has been on Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection. And so that's sort of been the sort of guiding principle that's taken us through these studies.

3. 0:47

   And some of the things that we've expressed and focused on are things like Jesus Christ is everything. Jesus Christ is our Lord. He is the reason we wake up in the morning. He's the reason we live our lives. It is for his sake that we do things and we don't do things. He is the, also the, biblically speaking, he is the center and the object of God's eternal purpose.

4. 1:20

   We looked at that in one of our early sessions. He's the fulfillment and the focus of the entire Old Testament. The Spirit of Christ, as 1 Peter says, saturated the entire Old Testament record. The stories, the narratives, the events, the prophecies, the types, they were all screaming out Jesus in anticipation. Historically speaking and technically speaking, we saw that Jesus Christ existed.

5. 1:50

   He's a fact of history, a bedrock fact of history. And it is an incontrovertible fact of history that he lived, that he was executed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. He was executed by crucifixion. And history confirms that his followers proclaimed the resurrection as the explanation of why there was an empty tomb where he had been buried.

6. 2:16

   And these are facts. Now, this morning, we want to turn our attention to the empty tomb and make some observations about that as we look at the power of the resurrection. The reality is there were no CCTV cameras. There is no footage of what happened at the empty tomb. So we have reached a point in which we've identified facts, historical facts that we can know and which can be verified.

7. 2:44

   But we reach a point where it is now up to us to make a decision. And we have reached a point where historians and scholars can no longer help us. Their opinions matter nothing at this point. Their opinions do not hold any more weight than you or I. We've engaged with scholars because we want to know the facts, the historical facts, and be certain of that.

8. 3:08

   But at this point, we're now looking into an empty tomb. And we're now arriving at our own conclusions in regards to that. I want to introduce you quickly to a mechanism used by historians when they're evaluating historical facts and historical scenarios and historical claims in particular. And it's called the IBE, which stands for the Inference to the Best Explanation.

9. 3:36

   So it's a methodology to look at the facts that surround a historical event or a historical claim and look at what makes up the best explanation to explain all those facts. And we're going to come back to that as we end this session this morning. So it's an inductive argument where we observe the facts that we know and we look at competing and alternative theories as well.

10. 4:00

    And we evaluate them as we look at how they may work out. Now, you might think, well, we don't come to Bible school for a logic lesson and to learn about how to evaluate facts. That's not where we're here to study the Bible primarily. But I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.

11. 4:16

    And I want to just introduce to you a logic factor that comes through very early in the story of Acts. Remember, the apostles are arrested. They're taken to the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership at the time, to be arraigned and possibly sentenced. And on that occasion, they're taken out of the room at the request of Gamaliel.

12. 4:43

    Now, Gamaliel was a legendary figure in Jewish history. We won't go into that right now. But he was held in high honor, as the text here says in Acts 5. And at the council, Gamaliel stood up. And I imagine everyone in the council would have been in awe of what Gamaliel says. So they sit back and they listen to this revered person as he stands up.

13. 5:07

    And he says, men of Israel, take care of what you're about to do. He says, he puts to them this logic, this way of seeing what's happening and then making conclusions about it. He says, men of Israel, I want to tell you a little bit about our recent history, what's happened in our local area.

14. 5:33

    He says, before these days, someone called Thudus rose up, another pretender, another pretend Messiah. He claimed to be somebody. He took a number of men, about 400, and they were claiming that he was going to be the Messiah. What happened to him? He was killed. And all those who followed him were dispersed.

15. 5:58

    And, of course, his whole claim and his whole movement came to nothing. It just ended at that point. He says, another gentleman by the name of Judas from Galilee, also from Galilee, like this Jesus character is, he rose up in the days of the census, if you remember, and he drew away a big following.

16. 6:19

    He had a big following as well. He too perished, probably brutally perished. And those who followed him were scattered. That was just the natural outcome once one of these pretenders is smashed and broken and everyone scatters. So he draws this conclusion. He says, so in this present case, if we're just dealing with another pretender, he says, if this person, this Jesus of Nazareth is just like them, he says, just be careful in this case.

17. 6:55

    For if this is just a man-made claim, it will basically come to nothing. It will also fail, just as all the other attempts have failed. In fact, Josephus records about 30 different pretend messiahs who had risen up around this period in history. So it was not a unique thing. And all of them, of course, were brutally suppressed.

18. 7:18

    So he says, this will come to nothing. And that is logical, isn't it? That's absolutely logical. That's what happened to all the other claimants and all the other pretenders. They came to nothing. And he says, so this will be the case here. But, he says, but, but, if it is of God, then that won't be the case.

19. 7:38

    Because you cannot overthrow God. And in fact, you will be opposing God. Now, that is pretty logical and tight, isn't it? But there's been lots of pretenders. They've come to nothing. If this Jesus character is also a pretender, he'll come to nothing. And that really should have been the end of the story.

20. 7:57

    History would have forgotten him like they've forgotten all those other people. No one's ever heard of much about these people. It should have all been over Red Rover. That would be the end of it. However, if it is from God, then it's not going to be the end of it. And that is the logic that we're drawing on this morning.

21. 8:15

    So, we spent a little bit of time establishing the fact of Jesus, the reality of Jesus, that he is a character in history, a very central character in history. As we saw, our entire dating system is based in reference back to him. We used those established facts to go back into the Old Testament and look at some messianic prophecies very quickly, I know.

22. 8:36

    But these prophecies gave really specific details about this Messiah character that would come. And we saw how Jesus, in his verifiable life, fulfilled these prophecies that were written. And we did reckon that they were written at least 200 or 300 years before the fact. And then we spent a whole session almost looking forward in history from that established fact and seeing the effect that Jesus has had in our world.

23. 9:05

    And it's undeniable. So, those two sets of facts anchored back to a historical reality are very strong and very undeniable. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. So, we're claiming that what we have here in Scripture and in the historical record is a miracle. The explanation following Gamaliel's logic, the exclamation is this could only be from God.

24. 9:34

    This could not be a... No naturalistic explanation is really satisfactory. Think of what this entails. Think of the facts behind this man. He was a nobody. And I can't express that enough. He came from a poverty-ridden village in the back of nowhere called Nazareth. From a very insignificant family who lived in poverty.

25. 9:59

    Even his birth is really low level, isn't it? He's born in an animal shelter. He grows up in poverty. And there's internal evidence for that. He lived in this backwater village called Nazareth, the back of nowhere. He was a carpenter, a person who worked with his hands. And his father had more than likely apprenticed.

26. 10:21

    His father is sometimes called the carpenter. Or sometimes Jesus is called the son of a carpenter. So it would appear that his father, who seems to have passed away in the story relatively early in Jesus' life, apprenticed him. And if Jesus worked as a carpenter up until his public ministry commences, it's a long period of time, 18 or 20 years.

27. 10:44

    The son of God, this genius son, the divine begotten son of God, is learning obedience by the things he suffers in the backwaters of this unknown village, working with his hands day in, day out. And that's how God works with all his children. All of us see ourselves reflected in that. He had no armies at his disposal.

28. 11:08

    He has no education. He has no money. He has no formal education in the sense of a classical education like the Apostle Paul had. He doesn't travel. You know, Jesus never went more than 100 kilometres or so in his entire life from where he was born. His public ministry is three and a half years.

29. 11:30

    That's nothing. That's a blip of time. Never travelled, never went to the big centres of influence like Alexandria in Egypt or to Athens or Rome itself. He just lived in this area, this sort of forsaken area, Galilee of the Gentiles, this sort of backwater part of the world. And when he does eventually launch his sort of public ministry, if you want to call it that, he's followed by 12 nobodies, 12 working class by and large fishermen that are not extraordinary men at that stage of their life at all.

30. 12:10

    How does this man change the world? What is the explanation for that? I just took this out from a writer. He says, it's really inconceivable that a peasant class carpenter with no money, no army, no social position, no resources could generate a world-shaking force like Christianity. There is no logical human way to explain how his teachings grew so rapidly and went on to revolutionise human civilisation, not just survive.

31. 12:42

    His early followers, uneducated, lower class, largely illiterate, existing in isolated groups of believers, bonded together for mutual support in a hostile environment. Not in the sort of dominant culture, but they were underground in a hostile environment. Groups like that are rarely noticed in history. They don't even warrant a mention, let alone change history.

32. 13:08

    And this is a phenomenon that we're considering. From a village in the back of nowhere, today there are people who claim to be his followers, who look to him as their spiritual inspiration, their spiritual leader, all over the globe. And there is, as we speak, particularly in the third world, in Africa and Asia, a boom of people interested in Jesus.

33. 13:34

    It's incredible. In Asia, there's 300 million people claiming to follow Jesus. China, 100 million. In fact, I read an article just this week that says, by 2030, China will be the largest Christian nation in the world. I mean, that's just phenomenal. From a communist nation only decades ago. 480 million in South Africa.

34. 13:55

    In South America, rather. 360 million in Africa and growing all the time. Two out of three followers of Jesus, if you like, live in either Asia, Africa or South America. So no longer is Christianity the colonial religion of the white cultures that it once was. Now most followers of Jesus are brown and black who live in far-flung parts of the world.

35. 14:25

    And so even places like Iran, Christianity is growing rapidly. I put this quote up from an atheist historian just to show you the effect that Jesus has had on the world. And I'll quickly repeat it now. And it's from Bert Ehrman, who's an atheist, who is not a Christian at all, quite anti-Christianity, but he's an expert in this history.

36. 14:46

    He says, the profound impact of Jesus' ethical teachings, love, compassion and concern for others, were revolutionary when they were given and continue to be so. Jesus' teachings about loving your neighbour, caring for the poor and the marginalised, even loving your enemies, were groundbreaking in their historical context and have had a lasting influence on Western moral thought.

37. 15:11

    I mean, how do you explain this naturally from a village, a peasant in a village in the back of nowhere, to now influencing, a lasting influence on Western thought? We said all over the world, every day of the week, the date pops up on mobile phones, computer screens, business transactions, banking documents. All over the world is a testimony to the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

38. 15:37

    Everything that happens in our world, world wars, political events, catastrophes, are all anchored back and dated to the birth of this man. How do you explain that? That is just a phenomenon, isn't it? And so we want to, this morning, just add some more, if you like, weight to the reality of Jesus and particularly the reality of the resurrection.

39. 16:01

    We're going to look at very, very briefly this morning, the power of what we call eyewitness reports. Because as we said, there was no video footage. And even today with AI, you can't even trust video footage anymore, can you? So how do we know anything happens in history at all? How are we confident of any historical figure or any historical event?

40. 16:24

    Well, like every other historical event or character, we have attestation is the technical term, or we have eyewitness reports. It's not unique to Jesus. It's not unique to the Bible. It's how we know every single thing that's ever happened in history. It's eyewitness reports. And so it's up to us to look at the credibility of those reports and to believe it or not.

41. 16:51

    You know, as I think we might have mentioned this, the Bible, the New Testament particularly, is evidentiary. It's written as a piece of evidence. It's evidence of something. As John expresses it in his Gospels, evidence that Jesus is the Son of God. The preface to Acts, the preface to the Gospel of Luke.

42. 17:13

    These are evidentiary documents written from that perspective to give you and I confidence that God's Son walked this earth. And we saw him and touched him and felt him. And we have the witness statements from these characters. And this is how the apostles actually saw their role. When Judas is replaced, the replacement had to have been with Christ from the beginning, had to have seen the risen Lord.

43. 17:36

    Because their primary role would be living testimonies, to be living pieces of evidence that the Lord had risen from the dead. That's what the apostles' primary role was. So how can we know, living 2,000 years later, how can we have confidence in this character that existed and lived that we know from history, but also that he rose from the dead?

44. 18:00

    Well, the same way we know anything in history, the testimony of eyewitnesses. So we have this really beautiful statement of the Lord's in John 20. This is the record of where, if you remember, Jesus appears to the apostles when Thomas was not with them. Thomas refuses to believe and says, unless I touch his hands and his side, I'm just not going to believe.

45. 18:24

    I want that tactile, physical evidence, that direct evidence that I'm not going to believe. He gets the privilege of that evidence presented to him, and he falls down at Jesus' feet and believes. Jesus says, you are very blessed, Thomas, to have received that level of evidence. And he says in verse 29, Thomas, because you have seen me, you've physically seen me, you have believed.

46. 18:49

    That's wonderful. But he says, blessed are those who have not seen me. That's us. This is a special blessing directed at us, who have not seen me and yet have believed. And then the next verse goes on to say, Jesus did many things in the presence of his disciples. A lot of them aren't even recorded in the eyewitness testimonies.

47. 19:18

    But, verse 31 says, but these are written. There is, under the inspiration and the guidance of God, enough data collected and recorded for us that we can have absolute confidence that Jesus existed and that Jesus rose from the dead. These are written. So here's our source, our source documents and the purpose behind these source documents.

48. 19:45

    These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, the son of God. And that believing, as we've looked at the subject of faith with Brother Ken, by believing, living that belief in your life, you may have life in his name. And that's how we're going to end our session, in a sense, going back to the power of the resurrection and the power of life that comes from this reality.

49. 20:13

    So we've got these written eyewitness statements that have been preserved by God for us. Thomas got direct evidence. He got the touch physically and tangibly interact with the risen Lord. We don't have that evidence, but we have what we might call indirect evidence, as all history is, and all history is based on.

50. 20:34

    And then in John 17, in that beautiful little discourse and prayer that Jesus offers before his arrest, he's praying for his immediate followers because they're about to be stressed and put under pressure. But he adds us to the prayer as well. He says, I don't pray for these alone. God, they need you.

51. 20:54

    But I also pray for those who believe in me through their word. Their word. They will be then the custodians of this reality. They will write down their memoirs. They will write down their testimony. Those things will be preserved through the providence of God. And they will be for us. So Jesus' prayer is fulfilled as we sit here today and we read their testimony that God is with us and he's provided us this written eyewitness evidence for the existence of his son.

52. 21:26

    And we can believe through his word. These things are written for us to have absolute confidence. And I want to really emphasize this is how the apostles saw their work. This is what the apostles were all about. I'll just run through a number of references just very quickly. Beginning with the baptism of John and right up until Christ was literally taken from them.

53. 21:51

    The apostles had to be witnesses. Witnesses of the resurrection. God has raised this Jesus to life. Peter says in Acts 2 of which we are witnesses to this fact. That's their role. You kill the author of life in Acts 3, but God raised him from the dead and we are witnesses. This is evidentiary documentation.

54. 22:13

    Peter and John replied, judge for yourselves whether it's right to in God's sight to obey you rather than God. We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard. We are living, walking, talking witnesses. Pieces of evidence, if you like, to the reality of what has happened. We are witnesses of these things and so is the Holy Spirit.

55. 22:32

    We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. And we are the witnesses to that. You do not follow, Peter says, these really well-known words to us as Christadelphians.

56. 22:49

    We did not follow cleverly invented stories as we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were actually eyewitnesses to his majesty.

57. 23:00

    John records, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear and a flow of blood and water came from his side. And the man who saw it has given testimony. That's another word for witness, for evidence. And his evidence is true. He saw it happen and he recorded it in the Gospel of John.

58. 23:17

    This is a beautiful one, isn't it? 1 John 1 says, from the beginning of his ministry, right back at, even as he was baptised of John, etc. We have seen him with our own eyes. We are the eyewitnesses here. We've looked at him. Our hands have touched him. We've felt him. We've interacted with him.

59. 23:41

    We listened to him. We heard his voice. We are witnesses. So the question remains for us to think about is, how reliable is this witness? How reliable is their account of what happened? One way that historians gauge the reliability of an eyewitness account is the proximity to the event itself. The time gap between when the event happened and when the recording took place.

60. 24:08

    So we're going to quickly think about that. How reliable is this eyewitness testimony? How close to the event can we go back and dead reckon it? Because that is a measure of reliability. We want to look at the section of scripture that Nat read for us earlier on in 1 Corinthians 15. And maybe we'll turn to 1 Corinthians 15 because we're going to come back to that a little bit later on, that chapter.

61. 24:37

    We've got this really interesting statement. And I want to make some comments about it. And again, the evidence I'm going to look at now is not controversial. This is, again, consensus view of scholars across the spectrum. Atheist scholars, Jewish scholars, Muslim scholars, and Christian scholars, conservative, liberal. Right across the spectrum, this evidence, this information is non-controversial, accepted by scholars across the board.

62. 25:09

    These verses, verses 3 to 8, are considered to be by all scholars inserted by Paul in this particular context, but not originating with Paul. Paul is recording here what is called in antiquity as a creed. We'll talk a little bit about creeds in a minute. Paul is inserting his whole chapters on the reality of the resurrection and the power of the resurrection.

63. 25:36

    And he starts off with this creed to sort of set the reality of what he's talking about and set the evidence and the authority of what he's talking about. And he says, I delivered unto you, first of all, that which I received. And we're going to come back to those statements in a minute.

64. 25:56

    But let's see what he's delivering unto the believers in Corinth. One, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. We touched on that a little bit with Isaiah 53 already, but you can explore that more in your own time. He died as a historical fact, but it is theologically linked to his role as predetermined by the foreknowledge of God for our sins.

65. 26:26

    He was buried. It's a fact. He rose again on the third day, again according to the scriptures. And then number four, he lists a number of eyewitnesses to this account. He was seen by Cephas, who of course is the apostle Peter. He was seen by another large group, about 500. It's like a Bible school full of people who all saw him at one time.

66. 26:53

    And the majority of those people are still alive. As this epistle written in probably the mid-50s of the first century, those eyewitnesses who saw him in that group appearance are still alive today. The majority of them. Some have died, as would be natural. After that, he was seen of James and then all the apostles.

67. 27:17

    And then Paul says, and last of all, this is a bit that Paul adds himself to this creed. After that, he was seen of me also as a later witness. Now, the scholars, as I said, across the board, this is not just scholars that believe in Jesus. You know, critical scholars believe this is a creed that has been inserted by the apostle Paul.

68. 27:43

    What's a creed? Well, creeds are from the Latin term that means I believe. So it's a list of beliefs and it was a teaching mechanism, particularly in an oral culture where there was not... Remember, they didn't have magazines or books or printing press or anything. So writing and owning or having access to written material was only for the very elite in society.

69. 28:07

    The average person didn't have documentation and books and scrolls and things like that. So a creed was used, a bit like the instructor, for those who remember that from Sunday school. You would recite and learn certain passages and certain statements that reflect the truth. And so this was a creed that had been passed down to Paul.

70. 28:33

    And then Paul was now passing that creed on to the people that he taught the truth to. So why did they use creeds? I won't go through these reasons for creeds, but they were a powerful mechanism in those oral cultures where written documents and things were not well accessed. And where people were largely illiterate in the Roman Empire, most people were illiterate anyway.

71. 28:56

    So memorising creeds was a way of passing on information. Not controversial. This is not controversial. This is accepted. This is quite accepted. So let's have a look at this passage and just look at the creedal nature of it. Why scholars say it's a creed. First, the technical term there, I delivered. So Paul is using this technical term, which is used to describe passing on a religious tradition.

72. 29:24

    And then he says, I also received. Again, that's receiving a religious tradition. I received it from somebody. And we'll talk about who that was. And I passed it on. And so Paul would have gone to a new city like Corinth. He would have preached. He used to go to the synagogue first to get attention from the Jews.

73. 29:44

    He would go to Mars Hill. We'd do whatever he took. But once he then had people interested, then he would have to use other mechanisms to educate them. As I said, they're largely illiterate. No access to books and Bibles and things. And so he would educate them with creeds. That's exactly how it was done.

74. 30:03

    We sort of, because we have access to Bibles everywhere today, we don't think of that too much. So this is a creed delivered and received. There's a repetition of the word that. It's got this that, that, that, that, that, which is where the scholars say this is like not Paul's normal flowing textual way of writing.

75. 30:23

    This is a creed. He says that Christ died for our sins and that he was buried and that he rose again and that he was seen by Cephas. After that, he was seen of 500. After that, he was seen of James and the Apostles. He's got that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that.

76. 30:34

    So that's a, the structure is creedal, if that makes sense. And it's not a normal flowing passage. It, if you look at the context in 1 Corinthians 15, it drops out of his flow and then he, then he inserts it in the flow and then he goes back to his own, to his own wording again.

77. 30:53

    And you can see how that works. So you've got the words before is in Paul's own voice. He's talking about how he preached the gospel to the people in Corinth in his own voice. Then he moves out of his own voice into this sort of more structured and formal way as he lists these points.

78. 31:10

    And then later on, he gives his personal connection to the facts on this creed, that he too was a witness that came later on in the story. So this is, again, not controversial. This is, this is very much accepted across the board that this was, Paul had inserted this, this creed here. And it's the, the scholarly consensus amongst New Testament scholars.

79. 31:33

    It's also interesting to see that the, the format of this creed, and I'm only going to give you two examples, but this format is followed in a lot of the presentations of the gospel and particularly the resurrection account across the New Testament. It follows this creed. So 1 Corinthians 15 says Christ died for our sins.

80. 31:51

    He was buried. He was raised from the third day. And then he appeared to witnesses. So, so keep that fourfold structure of the creed in mind. Acts 13 and Mark 15 are examples that follow this. So they found he was killed, which corresponds to him dying. He was laid in a tomb, which corresponds to him being buried.

81. 32:09

    God raised him from the dead. And then he appears to witnesses. So that, that same structure follows true. Mark 15, another account of the, of the resurrection starts with this and follows a similar format. He breathes his last or he dies. He's laid in a tomb. He's raised. And then he appears to his followers again.

82. 32:29

    So, so this is a standard way of presenting the resurrection of Jesus because it all hinges on the resurrection, doesn't it? It is, it is the, the fact of history that changes everything. If there was no resurrection, Jesus would have just disappeared into history like, like everybody else. And so when the apostles presented the story of Jesus and the reality of Jesus and the consequence and, and the outcome of what happened to Jesus and the personal implications for us, this is how they presented it, which is quite profound.

83. 33:01

    So this creed, this is where it gets interesting. This creed is called a pre-Pauline creed. What do you think is pre-Pauline? Is it talking about Pauline Stone? No. Sorry, Pauline. I had to pick on you. It's pre-Pauline because it predates, it predates the conversion of Paul to Christ. That's why it's so profound.

84. 33:30

    Remember, we're trying to say how reliable are these accounts? How much gap is there? How much time is there before the gospel records are written? And look, in all honesty, there's a lot of controversy about the dates of the gospels and they range from, you know, written in the fifties right through to the nineties.

85. 33:47

    There's, there's, there's dates about when the gospel records were written and that's a, that's an area of controversy. So we're saying, well, how close to the actual event do we have? Well, these, these creeds and the creed here in first Corinthians 15 is pre-Pauline. This creed was in circulation before Paul was even converted.

86. 34:06

    Now we're going to quickly, quickly turn to the book of Galatians with you, Galatians one. I want to make a few comments. I've tried, not that I really care about what scholars say. That's not, I care about what God says. I'm not that, I'm not really focused on what scholars might say about things, but I'm using, I'm trying to use the minimal facts type of argument in a sense to say, what is agreed upon?

87. 34:28

    What is non-controversial? What can we know? And that is agreed upon across the board. And Galatians as a book is, is extremely accepted right across the spectrum of scholarship as a genuine book written by Paul, written when it claims to be written probably in the, in the fifties and preserved intentionally. That's not controversial either.

88. 34:54

    And that's accepted by all scholars across the board. Not all Paul's letters are accepted by critical scholars in that way. But Galatians is one of the seven that, that are absolutely intact. And this is what you don't hear on the ABC. This is what you don't hear in our culture, in our education system, that these books of the Bible are absolutely verified and accepted in history.

89. 35:18

    So all scholars accept this was written by Paul, genuine letter written by Paul, written when it claims to be written, and it was being transmitted. We have pretty good ancient texts. For those who are interested in texts, this P46, if you're interested in these ancient parchments, has got big slabs of Galatians in it.

90. 35:35

    So we are really confident that the transmission of Galatians is quite, is quite accurate and quite profound. So let's go to Galatians one. Paul is expressing here, he's under criticism and he's, and he's been resisted by certain people in Galatia. And he's responding to that criticism. And one of the criticisms that he has is that he's not a real apostle, he's just a Johnny come lately.

91. 36:03

    And he makes an argument against that. And he says, I actually received the gospel direct from Jesus. And he sort of shows in that, it wasn't that he's a Johnny come lately, and he's just tagging on the end of what the other eyewitnesses have said. He directly interacted with Jesus. So after his conversion, if you have a look at verse 11, the gospel, so the gospel, the doctrinal gospel, the facts of the gospel, he says, I didn't get that from anyone else.

92. 36:34

    I got that direct from the Lord. So it was not according to man, verse 11, neither did I receive it from man. But I was taught it through revelation from Jesus himself in a place that the scriptures called Arabia. Arabia may well be, and I don't have absolute proof, but probably Sinai. That would make sense to me if that was the case.

93. 36:57

    So he goes, I receive it direct from God in a vision, the gospel message, the gospel, the atonement, justification by faith, all these beautiful concepts. I got them direct from God, direct from Christ rather, by vision, by direct, sorry, direct revelation. Verse 16, he says, I didn't even confer with flesh and blood about these doctrinal things.

94. 37:21

    I was not taught them by humans. I got them direct from God. He said, I didn't even go up to Jerusalem after my, after Damascus. He said, I went to Arabia and then later on back to Damascus. So that, that is the gospel. Okay, the core, that is the gospel. In fact, the, the doctrines of the gospel, Paul got direct from Christ.

95. 37:40

    However, however, go to verse 18. After three years, I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and I spent two weeks with him, 15 days. It's like a pretty good Bible school, isn't it? Two week Bible school with Peter. That'd be awesome. And the only other apostle I interacted with, apart from Peter himself, sort of like the, the leader of the, of the, of the Jesus followers movement.

96. 38:09

    I met James, the Lord's brother. So there's two pillars in the community he spends time with. Now, he says there, he says, I, he says, I went to Jerusalem to see Peter. You're, you're, if you're using the, the, the, the King James, the New King James, we have the word C, S double E to see Peter.

97. 38:32

    And you'll think, is that the word C, like optus, the, the optical word of just seeing Peter? I went to see Peter. It's not. It's a really special word that NET's got to get information from Peter. It's a word historio. What do you think, what word do you think we get today from historio?

98. 38:51

    Anyone? History. Exactly. It's, that's where we get the word history from. So he wasn't there to see Peter, just to go, how are you, Peter? And have a yak. He's there to get data from Peter. Not about the gospel. He says, I knew the, I knew the gospel from, I got it from Jesus.

99. 39:07

    I want to know the history. I want to know all the details. I want to know who saw him, how he was, how he appeared to people, what happened. So he's getting the, the, the inquiring with Peter and getting all the, all the information from Peter. In Galatians 2, 14 years later, he has another meeting.

100. 39:26

     And this meeting, he makes it very clear. He, he meets here in the second meeting. He says in verse one, after 14 years, I went up again to Jerusalem. So it's a long, long time down the track. He meets. And it says in verse six, no human at that meeting added anything to my knowledge at that point.

101. 39:48

     Because he's making it, he's showing that he's a genuine apostle in his own right. He says, but on the contrary, verse seven, I actually showed them how God was now directing me to go to the Gentiles. And so they gave me the right hand of fellowship. But it's interesting to see in verse nine, who was at that meeting?

102. 40:06

     He said, there was three at that meeting. He said, I met with James, Cephas and John. Now that'd be an awesome meeting, wouldn't it? That'd be a pretty good meeting to go to. Between the four of them, including Paul, they wrote 21 books out of the 27 books in the New Testament. So that's a, that's a nice little meeting of minds right there.

103. 40:27

     But we do have to move on. I'd love to talk more about that. But Paul has got the hysteria, the historical data and the facts from, from his first meeting three years after. So let's try and put all that together in a bit of a timeline. The scholars date Christ's death around AD 30.

104. 40:48

     That is a fact of history. Paul's conversion happens around three years later. That's accepted again across the board by scholars. And that is a fact of history that this man saw, he changed his name to Paul and upended his entire life and became a follower of Jesus after having persecuted the followers. That's a fact.

105. 41:08

     That's accepted as a fact. Then we have these pre-Pauline creeds. I showed you one of them in first Corinthians 15. There are others as well. We haven't got time to look at, but these are creeds that get inserted into the new Testament. These creeds had to have been formulated very early because they're in circulation within three before the conversion of Paul, before Paul is even converted.

106. 41:32

     That's only three years. So some scholars say months. And these are not Christian scholars, by the way, not Christian scholars at all. They say, if you look at the logic and the evidence here, these creeds are in circulation within months of the resurrection. The early apostles are teaching these creeds to people straight away.

107. 41:51

     So they're in circulation before Paul's conversion. So this is real history. This is not controversial. It's not even, it's not, there's no, no one, no one goes against this at all. This is, this is absolute bedrock history that we have these creeds. Some of them recorded for us in the new Testament. They're pre-Pauline creeds that existed before Paul was even converted.

108. 42:15

     Then we've got Paul's first visit, the three-year visit that we saw with, with, with, with Peter and James, the first where he gets the facts, the, the historical facts about what happened. And he gets those facts about 35, 36 AD. That's why the scholars say these creeds were well and truly in circulation and accepted as, in a sense, authoritatively, authoritative before that three-year period.

109. 42:39

     Then in the book of Galatians, Paul refers to this meeting. And then in the first Corinthians, which was written in the mid century, he then quotes this pre-Pauline creed that takes us back to within months of the crucifixion of Christ. As I said, this is attested by, you probably can't read the references there, but these are scholars in this area who are not believers necessarily who are testified of that.

110. 43:03

     So I just want to show the evidence is extremely, extremely strong that the eyewitness testimony that we have is extremely close to the event itself, which makes it hyper reliable. This is really reliable information. Another indicator of reliability is something called the embarrassment factor. And this carries a lot of weight when you, when you analyze historical sources, because a lot of historical sources are written for publicity reasons.

111. 43:32

     They might be written for propaganda reasons. They might be groveling to the king. And so they create people in a good light because they're groveling to different historical figures. When you get embarrassment factors, which means the writer is seen in a bad light, that carries a lot of weight in assessing their reliability.

112. 43:51

     The New Testament is full of embarrassment factors. I'll quickly run through a few with you. The apostles are often presented in the gospels as dim-witted and not getting what Jesus is saying, failing to understand. Like it shows them, they're the leaders of the early Christian community and they present themselves in the gospel records as like, not that bright in some instances.

113. 44:15

     And you would know those stories, of course. They also seem to be uncaring. They fall asleep when Jesus needs them the most. These are embarrassing things. If this is a human document, they wouldn't have put those embarrassing things in there. They would have said, I was really tight with Jesus and I was there when he needed me.

114. 44:30

     It would be a totally different way of recording things. They're rebuked by Jesus. They get told off by Jesus. They're arguing about who's going to be the greatest and Jesus rebukes them. They show themselves to be cowards and they run for their life in the story. They doubt that the Lord has even been resurrected from the dead.

115. 44:48

     So these embarrassment factors add a lot of credibility to the story. But there's a big one, a huge one that is hard for scholars to get past. The fact that females, that women were the first witnesses to the resurrection. If you're putting together a story and you're trying to convince the world of a story in this first century, you would never have used women.

116. 45:12

     Anyway, I'm not going to say it. It's too late in the week for jokes. I've got to get a bit serious here. Now, I'll just quickly give you some references. Here's one from Josephus. He says, you would never even, a court in the first century would not even accept a woman's testimony. So why would you concoct a story and use a female as the key witness to the event?

117. 45:35

     And the rabbis had really misogynistic views of females. And there was a rabbinical prayer that says, I thank you, God, that I'm not a Gentile or a female. It's like, that's pretty severe, isn't it? So this is the way, this is the ancient world, isn't it? That's changed. And that's how people viewed things.

118. 45:53

     It's a massive embarrassment factor, a really massive embarrassment factor. The last one I just want to present is that the eyewitnesses died for their testimony. Now, you might respond and push back and go, well, lots of people die for a lie. You know, Islamic suicide bombers believe they're going to go to heaven, et cetera, and they blow themselves up.

119. 46:16

     They're willing to die. There's a big difference, a massive difference in logic here. Those suicide bombers are deluded. They believe what they've been told. They believe that their leaders have told them this story and they believe it. They're deluded. If the apostles had made up this story, they weren't deluded, were they? If they made up this story, if it's not reliable, why would you die and in some cases were tortured and died a terrible death?

120. 46:47

     Why would you die for something you knew was a lie? It's different than the suicide bomber. It's a different logic, if that makes sense. Sorry to rush this, but I'm running out of time. But does that make sense? These people died for a lie that they knew was a lie. They made the lie up if it is a lie.

121. 47:03

     Hopefully that makes sense. We have some pretty reasonable historical information about some of the apostles, how they died and how they were tortured for what they believed. And the others are more church, like myths or tradition. We don't know for sure, but some of them are quite historically accurate. So let's finish up with this IBE concept, this inference to the best explanation.

122. 47:32

     When we look at the best explanation to a historical claim, we ask four questions. One is what explanation has the best scope? That means what explanation captures all the relevant facts? So we've identified a lot of the facts. What explanation captures all those facts and puts them together in a coherent way? What explanation has the most explanatory power?

123. 47:54

     Which means what's the most probable? Which explanation is most probable? What has the most plausibility? Which means it's reasonable and persuasive. And what is less contrived? It hasn't got, you know, spacemen coming into the story or things like that. So it doesn't have these external things thrown in to the story to make it work.

124. 48:14

     So when we apply that to Jesus, I'm going to quickly finish, to the resurrection. There are probably three main alternatives, what we call naturalistic alternatives, that atheists would put forward. Some of these are a little bit sort of not as well held anymore, but I'll put them up there anyway just for your interest.

125. 48:35

     And I'll show you which one is the one that atheist scholars believe to be true today. So one is called the conspiracy theory. That's the apostles simply went to the grave, either paid off the guards, if that was the story, and they stole the body and then they made the whole thing up.

126. 48:53

     What sort of explanatory scope does this story have? Well, it's sort of good in, it does explain some of the facts, does explain why there's an empty tomb, because they just went and stole the body. So it does explain that. It does explain the appearances to the apostles, because they're just lies, they just made it up so it didn't happen.

127. 49:12

     And it does have some explanatory power. It does, though, fail on a number of other pieces of data that do not gel with this theory. Why would you have women as your chief witnesses, as the first people to see Jesus alive? And it's also very simplistic to, and how does it explain the multiple appearances to different people at different times?

128. 49:35

     It doesn't really explain that. How does it explain the commitment of the apostles who would take this story to the world? It's very complex. So that's why it doesn't pass the plausibility test. Conspiracies are very complex things. If you've got one apostle who gets upset with one of the others for getting more attention than him, all it takes is one of them to say, hey, we made this all up, and write a document to say that.

129. 49:59

     And the whole thing's over. Okay, it's blown. So it isn't plausible in that sense. And the idea of a resurrected Jesus, which I haven't got into much this week, it was not in the expectation of anyone. No one expected anyone to be resurrected during the history of the world. Everyone believes a resurrection at the end of the world, not during the world.

130. 50:17

     And it's a bit contrived to imagine that fishermen have come up with this incredible story that not only is quite convincing in its own right, but ties in intimately with the Old Testament prophecies and the Old Testament types. How smart are these fishermen to have done that in a couple of days, to put all this together?

131. 50:35

     It just doesn't seem right. Another theory, and it used to be called the swoon theory, for those who are a bit older who might remember that, is the apparent death theory. Jesus didn't really die on the cross. He just went into a coma, and then they recovered and got him back to life again.

132. 50:52

     It explains the empty tomb, because he's not really dead, but it doesn't really explain much else. How did he get out of a sealed tomb? How did he get past the Roman guards? It's not very convincing there. The Romans don't usually make mistakes when they kill people. Rome was pretty good at a lot of things, and one of them was how to kill people.

133. 51:09

     And they would not have left him half dead or whatever. Josephus has examples of people taken from a cross, where he saw friends that were on a cross, and he was able to convince the commander to get them down. They didn't survive. After you've been nailed up to a cross, you don't survive.

134. 51:24

     And again, it's got this conspiracy element to it, which could have been blown very easily, very early in the piece. The last one here is what's called the hallucination theory, or emotional experience is another way it's put. This, brothers and sisters and young people, this is it. This is what the intelligent, smart, educated, accredited, non-believing historians and scholars believe is the answer.

135. 51:55

     Now, this is it. There's nothing better than this. You've seen the facts. You've seen the evidence, the eyewitness evidence. This is the alternative, the naturalistic alternative, that all these people, the apostles, the 500 at one time, Cephas, the 12, Thomas, they all had a hallucination. And they use this evidence that, you know, one in eight Americans claim to have seen their grandmother or grandpa after they've died or something like that.

136. 52:22

     This is the, this is what, this is the, because they're so committed to naturalism and to denial of miracles, this is the best, this is the best explanation of all those historical facts. Does it explain the empty tomb? No. There'd still be a body in the empty tomb. It would be very easy to end this theory if people started saying, ah, he's alive.

137. 52:44

     They'd go, well, actually, no, there's a body in there. So it's not very strong as far as evidence goes. Again, it doesn't explain these other embarrassment factors. Why do we have women put into the role of key witnesses here, which would be counter-cultural? And the Romans could have put an end to it very quickly and just produced the body, couldn't they, and just stopped, closed the whole thing down.

138. 53:07

     Hallucination doesn't explain the diversity of appearances in different locations, different places. And there's no evidence that the apostles were particularly going through a traumatic sort of psychological state of mind as a whole, as a group. That doesn't make sense. Would every apostle have been susceptible to hallucination? Would every single one have the same personality type that maybe is more susceptible?

139. 53:31

     How come Jesus eats food? How come they touch him and interact with him? This hallucination theory doesn't really hold water. But it's the best. It is the best. It's held by really intelligent people who know the historical facts really well because it's the only explanation that they have. So I'm going to finish up now.

140. 53:50

     I'm putting my cards on the table, if you're wondering why that's there. Putting my cards on the table. And I'm going to read this because I don't trust myself. I really, I don't want to sound arrogant. I don't want to sound triumphant. I'm just stating the absolute facts here, brothers and sisters and young people.

141. 54:10

     The most honest and rational explanation of these facts is that Jesus Christ was resurrected. How else do you explain the spread of Christianity? The influence it's had on the world. The fulfillment of prophecy. The eyewitness reports. The closeness of the eyewitness testimony to the event. How else do you explain it? There's no other real rational explanation.

142. 54:38

     And I just want to, I'm going to read out some responses and just, and I take no joy in saying this because some of my family, some of my loved ones have taken this approach. So I read these out with humility and meekness and respect. You might claim ignorance. So ignorance means I don't really know about the facts and I couldn't really care less about them and I'm just not interested in following up or reading them.

143. 55:09

     I don't know them. I'm just ignorant to all this. Or you will die in your sins. That's a biblical term. That means you'll die like the animals and you'll stay dead forever. And you've made that choice. And that is your, your decision. You may reject the resurrection on philosophical grounds. You might say you're a materialist.

144. 55:32

     You cannot accept miracles. You can't accept that God would intervene or there is a God that would intervene. You go with the hallucination theory, despite its lack of coherence, because it's the only viable one that makes that, that fits your, your philosophy. You too will die in your sins and you will die forever.

145. 55:56

     And you've made that decision. You might have just accepted the status quo. You have absorbed the worldview of our society, the worldview that's brought into your mind by the media, by our education system, by our entertainers and our movies, etc. Your favourite sports stars don't, you know, acknowledge Jesus, your favourite actors and musicians.

146. 56:21

     And so you have absorbed that zeitgeist, that worldview, and you are not interested. You've just rejected it. Your uni lecturer doesn't seem to believe in Jesus. The people you see as intelligent in our world, the people producing documentaries on television. So you've just accepted that worldview. Sadly, you will also die in your sins.

147. 56:43

     You have rejected the evidence that God's presented, and the consequences of that are eternal and sadly very, very real. Let's just finish up with what those who accept and believe the testimony God has left on record can take from the resurrection. One of these outcomes is something called assurance. And Acts 17 is the greatest, arguably one of the greatest preaching campaigns of all time, recorded in Acts 17 by the Apostle Paul in Athens.

148. 57:19

     He goes through, talks about this unknown God. He says, this unknown God you don't even know created the world, the heaven and the earth and mankind, and he's got a purpose with this earth. He's going to bring this purpose to an appointed day. And he gets to the last verse, and he says, all the things that I've talked about and told you, you've never heard of before because they're Gentiles, they're Greek philosophers, etc.

149. 57:43

     Here's the evidence. He says, the last verse of this speech, God has given assurance of this. Everything I've talked about, he's given assurance to all by raising this man, Jesus, from the dead. So the resurrection is your assurance. It's your guarantee that God has intervened in world history. He intervened in, undeniably intervened in the creation of our universe.

150. 58:11

     We call that a singularity. It's where physics and science cannot explain why there's a universe with its finely tuned properties in existence. Here is the second creation, the resurrection from the dead, that science cannot explain, physics cannot explain. It's the intervention of God, another singularity that's occurred in time and space in history where the divine has, in a very profound way, intervened in the world.

151. 58:40

     And we can take assurance from this, brothers and sisters, we can be assured that God has a purpose. We can be assured that God created the world. We can be assured he has a plan in creating humans like you and I. And we can be assured that he has a plan for us as individuals.

152. 58:57

     And we can be assured that we will be resurrected from the dead and that our loved ones will also be resurrected. So let's just finish up. 1 Corinthians 15 goes on to say, you can approach the resurrection in two ways. If Christ is not risen, he says, your faith is futile. It's empty.

153. 59:18

     It's a waste of time. If Christ didn't rise from the dead and you are still in your sins and all your loved ones and those who have fallen asleep in Christ, they've perished. Like the perishable items on a food aisle, which just perishes after the used, but it's finished forever and has no life.

154. 59:39

     And he says, if that's the reality, if there's no resurrection, if Christ did not rise, you and I, of all men, just, we've really wasted our lives, haven't we? Coming to Bible school, reading the Bible. It's like it's a joke. The joke's on us, really, really, if Christ didn't rise from the dead.

155. 59:54

     And he contrasts that in verse 20. He says, but, but now the reality is Christ has risen. And he calls him the first fruits. And it says, even so, all in Christ, that's you and I, we are in Christ through faith and accepting the call of God. We are in Christ. All in Christ shall be made alive.

156. 1:00:18

     So the resurrection of Jesus isn't just theory and intellectual and sort of a mental thing. It's personal. We are recipients of the benefits of that resurrection because all in Christ will be made alive. And that new creation that happened at that day when Jesus came out of that tomb, that new creation, we are part of that new creation.

157. 1:00:42

     If any man is in Christ, he is new creation. We're part of that new creation. And so we saw this runway, this 2000 year runway. It has two ends to it. The first coming, the second coming. And 1 Corinthians 15 describes the resurrection of Christ as the first fruits. He is the first fruits raised, not just resurrected.

158. 1:01:01

     Others have been resurrected, but resurrected to eternal life. He is the first sheaf that has been resurrected. And he says, here's the order. Christ, the first fruits. Afterwards, the whole harvest at his coming. So brothers and sisters, we can have absolute assurance and absolute confidence that we will be part of that harvest that is soon to take place because of the work of God through Christ at the first fruits, at the original resurrection and the new creation.

159. 1:01:31

     Thank you. Thank you.