Matt Colby - Reasons to Believe - Class 5 - Rapid Spread of Christianity

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

1. 0:00

   This weekend we’ve been looking at a lot of evidence to support some of the fundamental things that we believe. We’ve looked in the sciences and in mathematics for proof for the existence of God. We’ve looked in the Bible and in ancient history for proof that Jesus at a point in history really was resurrected from the dead.

2. 0:23

   We’ve looked at proof that the Bible that we have in front of us really is the inspired word of God, that it’s special and unique, and that it proves that to us.

3. 0:36

   Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Can anybody tell me who said that? Sherlock Holmes? That’s right, Sherlock Holmes. Of course he’s not real fictional character, so maybe the author who wrote the books, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And what he meant was, if you’re looking at a situation, you can’t explain it. And you come up with some theories as to as to how this might have happened.

4. 1:07

   If you can eliminate all of the theories but one, even if the one that’s left seems really improbable, if it’s the only option left, it must be the truth. And the title of this class this morning, and the last class in our series for this weekend, is the rapid spread of Christianity. So I want to start by defining what we mean by that. And maybe a good place to start is telling you what I don’t mean by this.

5. 1:35

   I wouldn’t want you to want you to come away from this class thinking that this is the point that we made. I wouldn’t want you to think that that we’re trying to say this morning that simply because Christianity is the largest religion in the world today, that it must be the one true religion. Because truth isn’t always on the side of numbers. And if you did think that if if that was a reason why you thought, well, the Christian faith must be the correct one because the most people in the world believe that, you’d actually run into a problem.

6. 2:08

   Here’s a chart. This was based on a census taken in 2009 of the entire world population broken up by religious belief or lack thereof. Because you’ll see agnosticism right on there, which is not a religious faith. And roughly 1/3 of the world’s population subscribe to some form of Christianity. So yes, it is the largest religion in the world.

7. 2:31

   But if that was the reason why you thought, well, it must be the truth, well then sooner or later you’d have a problem. If you were to narrow it down to just the two largest religions in the world, you’d have Christianity and Islam and another census taken three years later in 2012. Here were the numbers. So you can see both of those religions had grown in terms of worldwide population.

8. 2:56

   But if you look at Christianity, it only grew by .07% whereas Islam grew by .73%. So Islam was and continues to grow a lot quicker than Christianity. So if this trend continues a few decades down the road, it may be that Islam overtakes Christianity. And if your belief was this must be the truth because the most people believe it, you have a problem because, well, truth often is not on the side of the numbers when it comes to the number of people who believe or don’t believe a certain thing.

9. 3:36

   What we are interested in this morning is the growth of the Christian religion and its infancy right after the time of the Lord Jesus Christ and those first few 100 years of Christian history. The Christian religion was spreading through the world like wildfire by leaps and bounds, and it defied all odds because in this time, when it was spreading throughout the world, everything was stacked against it. If God was not on the side of this religion, if Jesus wasn’t truly resurrected from the dead, if the apostles weren’t really out there performing real miracles with the power of God, and people didn’t actually have the Holy Spirit gifts, then at the end of this class, the point is going to be that there is no explanation for how Christianity succeeded the way that it did. It should have died.

10. 4:31

    It shouldn’t have gotten very far at all. And yet nobody could stop it. Despite the best efforts of some of the most powerful people in the world for several 100 years, nobody could stop it. And we know that it spread quickly because of of evidence outside of the Bible. Even if we don’t want to accept the biblical record, ancient history, the verdict is unanimous that Christianity was spreading faster than anything anybody had ever seen before because of historians like Suetonius, a Roman historian, certainly not a Christian. It’s because of Suetonius that we know as much as we do about many of the Roman emperors.

11. 5:08

    Because of his work, The Lives of the 12 Caesars. And sometime around the year 49 AD he he published this, this document, this historical work that that historians now use today. And in this chapter on Claudius, the Emperor Claudius, he mentions this that since the Jews constantly made disturbances, disturbances at the instigation of Christus, which is their word for for Jesus or Christ, Claudius expelled all the Jews from Rome is because of the trouble that the Christians were making.

12. 5:41

    And this is as early as 49 AD when the apostles would have been alive, all the Jews were kicked out of Rome. This is an interesting one because there’s actually it actually coincides really nicely with the Bible passage. You can turn there with me if you want. It’s Acts chapter 18. You don’t need to because I’m only going to read 2 verses for you.

13. 6:02

    But have a look at this Acts chapter 18 verses one and two. After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth and he found a Jew named Aquila. A native of Pontus recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. Isn’t that interesting? It lines right up with what Suetonius had said. But Suetonius gives us the reason why. It’s because of all the disturbances caused by the Christians that the Jews were kicked out of Rome, and that’s why Aquila and Priscilla had to leave. That’s where they were living, but they were Jews and and had to leave Rome.

14. 6:44

    Now, a little bit later on, we had another Roman historian, Tacitus, reading it around 64 AD, so a little over a decade later. And the context of this report is, this is, this is during the life of the Emperor Nero. And if you know anything about the Roman Emperor Nero, you know he was completely crazy and that probably he burned down the city of Rome, and so he was looking for a scapegoat to blame that burning of the city of Rome. No, not the entire city burned down, but it was a massive fire, and this is what it’s talking about. Nero’s looking for a scapegoat for that fire in Rome, and it says consequently to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace Christus, or Christ, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate. And a most mischievous superstition. Thus checked for the moment again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Fantastist tells us that Christianity had spread outside of the region of Judea and had gone as far as the the center of the modern world to the city of Rome. And you get a sense too of how the Romans felt about the Christians at this time.

15. 8:15

    They hated them. And about 50 years after that, we have Pliny the Younger, a governor in Asia. And he’s got a problem. His problem is Christianity. It’s all over the place. He can’t stop it. He’s been trying to stop it. He’s been he’s been capturing the Christian leaders, as many as he can get his hands on and and trying to make them refute their beliefs.

16. 8:41

    And many of them won’t. And he doesn’t know what to do. So he sends a letter to the Roman emperor at the time asking for advice. And in that letter he wrote, I therefore postponed this investigation, and hasten to consult you, for the matter seemed to me to weren’t consulting you, especially because of the number involved.

17. 9:00

    For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes, are and will be endangered, For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities, but also to the villages and farms. But it seems possible to check and cure it. And he writes about Christianity like it’s a disease. It’s a contagion, he says.

18. 9:21

    I can’t stop the spread. It’s everywhere. And it’s not just in the major cities now it’s in the outlying rural countryside and the farms. I think we can still stop it, he says. But I’d like your advice. I’d like your help now. This is now 112 AD. Christianity has continued to spread and here’s a map of that same year. This map is showing based on archaeological discoveries and ancient manuscripts to date, how much we know about how far the Christian religion had spread by this time just a generation after the apostles.

19. 9:57

    And you can see the the major cities are listed by name. There you see Rome and Ephesus and Alexandria and Jerusalem and Antioch and Edessa. And then you see those, those purple squares, those are not major cities, but cities nonetheless, where Christianity also had communities. And then you can see especially in Asia, but but also in the in the Middle East around Jerusalem.

20. 10:20

    The yellow is areas where we see that Christianity had spread outside of the major cultural centers and into the surrounding countryside. It had spread and nobody could stop it. And a lot of people wanted to stop it. And you know what’s interesting? I wouldn’t normally quote Wikipedia to you as any kind of a reliable source. We know that anybody can contribute to Wikipedia. It has editors that that go through and and are constantly vetting the content.

21. 10:48

    But I thought it was interesting that whoever wrote the article on in Wikipedia on the history of Christianity, there was this section within it entitled Why did Christianity succeed? Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to read this. It’s too small, but I wanted to highlight this for you. Whoever wrote it, having looked at many historical sources, concluded there is no agreement on an explanation of how Christianity managed to spread so successfully prior to the Edict of Milan and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire.

22. 11:20

    And that’s true. Historians don’t have a good reason for how Christianity could have spread so successfully. Unless, of course, they’re Christian historians, because there’s really only one explanation for it, and I want to talk now about why that is. Why is it that Christianity really should not have succeeded? And there are a lot of reasons.

23. 11:45

    And the first one is this, that the Romans had a lot of respect for ancient things, for antiquity. And the Romans would conquer the known world. They had to develop a procedure for how they would handle a people when they conquered them. How much freedom are we going to give them? Are we going to let them continue to practice their, their native religion?

24. 12:09

    Are we going to let them govern themselves? And so they developed this process by which they would investigate and examine any any culture which they had conquered to determine how much freedom they would give them. And the primary test was this. Can the culture demonstrate that it goes back well into the history books?

25. 12:31

    Have they been doing these things for a long time? If they had, the Romans would have respect for their customs and traditions. If it was a relatively new culture, than the Romans would just assimilate them and and and basically try to convert them to their own practices and wouldn’t let them have the kind of freedoms that they would let.

26. 12:47

    For example, the Jewish people have. Because the Jewish people who they had also conquered the nation of Israel, or perhaps the most ancient of peoples at this time, they had been around for so long. And their practices, their worship practices and their cultural practices, they could demonstrate very easily because of their, their very strict record keeping that they’ve been doing these things for hundreds and hundreds of years.

27. 13:09

    So when the Romans conquered the Jews, they’ve of course had a lot of respect for their practices and let them continue to govern themselves, let them continue to work, worship as they pleased. One ancient or one modern historian of ancient history, Robert Louis Wilkin, in his book The Christians As the Romans Saw Them, he said the primary test of truth and religious matters was custom and tradition.

28. 13:34

    The practices of the ancients and the Romans had a saying in Latin. It was quad semper, quad ubeque, quad AB, omnibus, which means what has been held always, everywhere, by everybody. That was what was important to them. And this was true within Judaism as well. The the Jewish people and those of the Jewish faith, they, they were very proud of the fact that they could demonstrate that they had.

29. 13:59

    Their religion had not changed. For hundreds of years. They’ve been, they’ve been going about these practices. But now came this upstart religion of Christianity, and this was brand new. And you weren’t going to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes and try to convince them that it had been around for any longer than Jesus, because that was the beginning of Christianity, as at least as far as the Romans saw it. They crucified this man.

30. 14:22

    He was just here on this earth. Christianity was a brand new religion. It had no antiquity at all going for it, and so the Romans would have no respect for it. And while they’d have respect for the Jewish faith, they would eventually, of course, come down hard on the Jews as well and take away their worship services.

31. 14:41

    But when the Christians came on the scene, they had no time for it. And along with that was the fact that the man who the Romans, the Romans perceived it as, the the early Christians were actually worshipping Jesus. And Jesus was a man who had been crucified. Which to anybody else outside of Christianity at this time would have seemed ridiculous, because aside from the fact that crucifixion was was a horrible way to die, it was also designed to be humiliating. It was meant to make an example of the person who was crucified. It was reserved for the what were considered to be the very worst crimes, so that everybody would see the person who was crucified and it would never want to be in that position. So they would never, you know, never commit that crime. Another historian, Martin Hengel, wrote that crucifixion was an utterly offensive affair, obscene, and the the original sense of the word.

32. 15:42

    It was a status degradation ritual designed to humiliate in every way, including the symbolic pinioning, pinioning of the hands and legs, signifying a loss of power and loss of ability to control the body in various ways, including befouling oneself with excrement.

33. 16:03

    When somebody was crucified. The point was not to just to destroy their body, it was to destroy their reputation. And here was a man, essentially the founder of the Christian religion, and he had been crucified.

34. 16:21

    The very earliest depiction that we have of Jesus and of Christian worship dates back some time to the year 200 AD, but it wasn’t actually discovered until the year 1857. And an area of Rome that hadn’t been walled off, the building was called the Domus Galatania on Palatine Hill in Rome, and it was in a section underneath the buildings that had been walled off for centuries because it was used to support some of the structures above. And it’s actually an an work of graffiti. It looks like this.

35. 16:56

    And you can see here is a depiction of a man worshipping somebody who’s being crucified. But it looks like a human with the head of a donkey. Because for some reason at this time in history, one of the slanders against Christians was that for some reason people, people had started the rumor that they worshipped donkeys. So here you have this man worshipping somebody who not only is being crucified, but also is has the head of a donkey.

36. 17:20

    And you see some writing here in the translation of that is Alexa Minas Worships God. You see, this was intended to humiliate this Christian Alexa Minas. I found it comforting that somewhere else nearby in a wall, somebody else wrote Alexa Minos is faithful, so he had some friends as well. It would seem this is one of the earliest depictions we have visually of Christian worship and of Jesus, although of course not a very accurate depiction and to slander the religion. It’s a depiction of somebody on a cross because that was ridiculous to everybody else.

37. 17:58

    That’s why the Apostle Paul would write in First Corinthians chapter one and verse 18, that the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness but unto us which are saved. It is the power of God. And that’s why the writer of Hebrews wrote this Hebrews chapter 12 and verse two. We look to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and to sit down at the right hand of the throne of God. Have you ever really focused on the shame in that verse? I never really had before, but it was there in the verse because of the shame that went along with crucifixion. And early Christians would be ridiculed for their belief because of this for following a man who had participated or had endured the shame of crucifixion. Now, over and above that, there was more shame associated with Jesus from both the Roman and a Jewish perspective, because the society that that people lived in at this time in the Roman Empire was very much unlike the society we live in today. We’re very much societies very much against any kind of prejudice or bias, but that was rampant in the world at this time.

38. 19:17

    In the modern world, prejudice and stereotyping were a way of life in the Roman Empire at this point in history. And Jesus was a Jew, and around the world Gentiles were converting to Christianity and their savior was a Jew. Here’s another quote from the Roman historian Tacitus, which gives us some insight into how the Romans thought about the Jews. He’s describing their history, where they came from. He says in order to secure the allegiance of his people in the future, Moses prescribed for them a novel religion, quite different from those of the rest of mankind. Among the Jews, all things are profane that we hold sacred. On the other hand, they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral.

39. 20:12

    Whatever their origin, these observances are sanctioned by their antiquity. Now that’s interesting, That goes back to the previous point, he says. Despite how revolting their practices are, at the very least they’ve got antiquity going for them, which is why we’ve let them continue, or had let them continue to worship as they chose. But he goes on to say, the other practices of the Jews are sinister and revolting, and have entrenched themselves by their very wickedness among themselves. Nothing is barred.

40. 20:38

    They have introduced the practice of circumcision to show that they are different from others. Proselytes to Jewry adopt the same practices, and the very first lesson they learn is to despise the gods, shed all feelings of patriotism, and consider parents, children and brothers as readily expendable. This is how the Romans felt about the Jews. This was the society in which Christianity was spreading, seemingly unchecked, despite the best efforts of the Romans to stop it.

41. 21:14

    But even from a Jewish perspective, the origins of Jesus were shameful because he came, they believed, from the region of Galilee, a land of ignorant farmers, of uneducated people in a Jewish society where education was everything. And that’s why you remember the disciple Nathanael. When he’s told we found the Messiah, he said, can there any good thing come out of Nazareth before he’d ever met Jesus?

42. 21:41

    He’s like, are you serious? He comes from the region of Galilee. Hard to believe. Even within Jewish society, the origins of Jesus were very shameful. There was a lot of shame associated just with Jesus himself from a human perspective at this time in history. Now, if you were writing the Acts of the Apostles, those accounts of what happened when the apostles went out into all the world to preach the gospel, and you’re writing all the stories of the miracles that happened and the people who were converted, but you were making it all up and it was all a farce, It was all fake, but you were trying to create a religion.

43. 22:21

    So you were you wanted to write something that people would believe what you were going to write was going to be distributed within modern society. So you’d want to make sure that it it could be fact checked and people wouldn’t be able to debunk it. The very last thing you would do is associate these miracles and stories with people who were well known.

44. 22:42

    With famous people you’d want to associate the especially the miraculous parts with nameless or obscure people who nobody knew that nobody could go to Fact Check. And that’s the exact opposite of what happens. And the Acts of the Apostles. Remember Herod Agrippa the 2nd? Remember when Paul was was imprisoned and he waited for an audience and he got an audience with Heritage Grip of the 2nd?

45. 23:08

    And this is what it says. I’ll read it for you. You can turn there if you like, in Acts chapter 26 verses 24 to 28, as Paul thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice. Paul, thou art beside thyself. Much learning does make thee mad. But he said, I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak forth the words of truth and soberness.

46. 23:33

    For the king knoweth of these things before whom also I speak freely. For I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him, for this thing was not done in a corner. King Agrippa, believeth thou the prophets? I know that thou believest. And then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. Now that last part in the past, you know, I found it convincing that maybe Agrippa was almost converted. But I think a better translation of that last part is Agrippa said, You really think you’re going to convert me to be a Christian?

47. 24:05

    But earlier And verse 26, Paul says, I know that you know about all of these things, these miracles and the resurrection of Jesus, because none of this happened in a corner in our second class, which was the first class yesterday, we talked about the empty tomb and the proof for the resurrection of Jesus. And Christianity is unique among all of the religions in the world, and that it claims something that seems impossible, something outside of our frame of reference that we’ve never seen before, that at a point in history a man was raised from the dead.

48. 24:38

    And it hangs it out there for us to check and see if that really is true, to look at the facts. It doesn’t couch it in obscurity so that we can never verify. It gives us the historical records to look into for ourselves. And that’s why Paul is able to say to Agrippa, none of these things were done in secret. Everybody knows, and Agrippa doesn’t say to him, no, that’s not true.

49. 25:04

    He doesn’t refute that because he can’t refute that. Consider that the the writings this, this record, the Acts of the Apostles which Luke wrote would have been distributed. In the same time people could have checked with somebody like Herod of Gripper the 2nd to see if this is the way that it went down, or many of the other people that were there.

50. 25:21

    He was a very famous, prominent figure, let alone people like Pontius Pilate or Annus and Caiaphas, the high priests or Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, those secret followers of Jesus who were among the leading Sanhedrin council of the Jews. If this was all fake, you would associate it with nameless, obscure people, not the leaders of your time. But that’s what we see in the Acts of the Apostles. And if you were to convert to Christianity in this time, and thousands of people around the world were doing it from all stations of life, of different ethnic backgrounds, Jews and Gentiles all over the world, rich and poor, slaves and free, then you were signing up for something very difficult because the Jews would dislike you, the Romans would dislike you, your family would disown you, and everybody else that wasn’t a Christian would avoid you and ridicule you. Hebrews chapter 10, verses 32 and 33 called remembrance the former days in which ye after ye were illuminated. Ye endured a great fight of afflictions, partly whilst ye were made a gazing stock, both by reproaches and afflictions, and partly while she became companions of them that were so used.

51. 26:44

    The writer of the Hebrews reminds them of how difficult it was when they became a Christian, ridiculed by everybody else losing their station if they had a station in society. And in First Peter, chapter 3, verse 16, Peter says that you have a good conscience, that whereas they speak evil of you as of evil doers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.

52. 27:11

    It wasn’t an easy thing to become a Christian at this time. You were making a difficult decision to walk away sometimes from your family, from your job, from everything that that gave you safety and security. Why? Why would you do it if the miracles weren’t really happening, If Jesus wasn’t really resurrected from the dead, then what could convince you to do this?

53. 27:36

    But around the world, thousands of people were doing it. The historian Bruce Molina wrote that given the sharp social stratification, prevalence, and antiquity, persons engaging in inappropriate social relations risked being cut off from networks on which their positions depended. In traditional societies, this was taken with deadly seriousness. Alienation from family or clan could literally be a matter of life and death, especially for the elite, who would risk everything by the wrong kind of association with the wrong kind of people.

54. 28:13

    This was the nature of society at this time. If you had wealth, if you had a name for yourself, you had to be very careful about how you preserved that name and one slip up and you could lose it all. Your life may even be at stake. Families would sometimes assassinate their own members if they were elite, wealthy families and they thought that somebody in their family was endangering the the livelihood of the family. But around the world, wealthy people, famous people, were converting to Christianity, and Jesus had predicted that this would happen.

55. 28:47

    In Matthew chapter 19, verse 29, he said everyone that has forsaken houses or brethren or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my name’s sake shall receive an hundredfold and shall inherit everlasting life. I’d suggest to you that today we know nothing about sacrifice compared to these earliest Christians.

56. 29:09

    To become a Christian, they often had to walk away from all of these things, and Jesus had predicted that it would be this way and they were choosing to do it anyway.

57. 29:23

    Now you may wonder at this point if, if this is the case, what is if? If somebody’s a critic, if somebody’s cynical about this and their historian, how would they come back against this, this argument about the rapid spread of Christianity in a world where it should not have succeeded? There’s no real good rational explanation of how it should have succeeded if the miracles weren’t really happening, if Jesus wasn’t really resurrected from the dead. And there’s one response that we get time and time again to this, to this particular train of thought. And it’s this that, yes, it seems remarkable, The the rate at which Christianity grew at this time, the explosion of the Christian religion in the 1st and the 2nd centuries. It seems remarkable, but it’s not unprecedented. We’ve seen even faster growth of other religions, and the two religions that are usually cited are Mormonism and Islam. So I want to take a second to talk about those religions with you and how they’re different from Christianity. And in fact, it’s a very different story with those two religions than it is with Christianity itself. Of course, Mormonism is is a branch of Christianity. They, they believe in the Bible and then Jesus, because it’s a little bit of a strange one.

58. 30:43

    And they had their own book, the Book of Mormon. Mormonism was started by a man named Joseph Smith, and he claimed to have continually received revelations from God. And these revelations would, for Mormons, expand upon the message of the Bible. Only he saw them. They came only in his mind visions just to Joseph Smith.

59. 31:09

    And much of the Book of Mormonism came from the sayings of Joseph Smith. Based on the supposed revelations that he had, there was no way to put that out there for anybody to verify. You either trusted Joseph Smith or you didn’t. So you’d have to ask the question, did Joseph Smith have anything to gain if he were to make these things up? And you look at the facts, Joseph Smith founded a community and became its leader.

60. 31:36

    It’s a rags to riches story. He was able to successfully practice polygamy and a society where that wasn’t really accepted, but he made it accepted in his community and he had himself appointed the prophet, priest, and king of the millennial monarchy. He gave himself that title. He became extremely wealthy, and a little known fact is that at one point he even ran for president of the United States.

61. 32:05

    And he asked the question, did he have anything to gain by making up a religion? And the answer is he absolutely did. And he asked the question, Could you verify any of the things that he said? And the answer is no. It could easily have all come from the mind of Joseph Smith. And so, despite the fact that Mormonism grew by leaps and bounds, it was not at a time in history where Mormons were persecuted the way the original Christians were, and it was not a religion that exposed itself to to fact checking the way that Christianity did.

62. 32:36

    And so, no, the story is not the same at all. Now let’s talk about Islam, which started with Muhammad, known as the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad was born into a polytheistic society. They believed in many gods, and he was born into a a prominent plan in the city of Mecca, but his family had been in decline for several generations now.

63. 32:58

    They used to be wealthy and and powerful, and they’d lost most of their most of their prestige and wealth. And so he set about to change things for himself. And he claimed, sort of like Joseph Smith, to also receive revelations from God, during which he said the Angel Gabriel came and spoke to him. And it’s upon those revelations that the the holy book for the Muslims, the Quran, is based, he would often break into what we would call today an epileptic fit or seizure, falling on the ground and shaking and foaming at the mouth. And when he would come out of it, he’d say, God has been speaking to me.

64. 33:41

    And there’d be a scribe nearby to record the things that he would now say that he had just seen. But just like Joseph Smith, you had to trust Muhammad that he really had seen a vision because nobody else had seen it.

65. 33:56

    And through military prowess and political prowess, he conquered and united all the nomadic tribes. His home city, Mecca, rejected him because they were polytheistic and and he was preaching A monotheistic religion. There’s only one God, and that way it’s very similar to Christianity. So he went to another city, Medina, where he convinced them by by his charisma, with his charisma that he truly was a prophet of God. And he won over the city and he took control of the military of that city and went out and conquered 1 by 1 all of the small nomadic tribes.

66. 34:35

    And every tribe that he conquered, he forced them to convert to his religion and brought them in to the fold so that their army was now his army until he had a massive army. And then that army knocked on the doors of his home city, Mecca. And he conquered his home city and took it. He conquered everybody in the region, and everybody that he conquered he forced to convert to Islam. But interestingly, his track record was not perfect. He was clearly a gifted military general, but he was defeated several times and during his conquest the revelations that he would receive from God seemed to nicely coincide with his personal or his military agenda.

67. 35:19

    If he wanted to attack a certain tribe, then he’d have a revelation that God says it’s time to attack that tribe. And at one point desperately hoping for the accommodation of his home family who had kind of kicked him out because of of his new beliefs, either from fear of hope or or from fear or from hope of succeeding more readily with his family.

68. 35:41

    He actually, even though to this point he’d been preaching monotheism that there is one God. He changed his tune. He said he’d he’d realized that they’re actually that God has three daughters, 3 goddesses that just happened to have the same names of those that were already worshipped by the people in Mecca. Later on, after he conquered everybody, he retracted that statement, said that one was a deception.

69. 36:05

    The devil deceived me on that one. Let’s take that one out of the record books. There there’s only one God, But at a time it was convenient to to tell the people that no, there’s actually more. This is a little bit more similar to what you already know, and you have to ask the question, did did Muhammad have any incentive to make up the things that he did?

70. 36:24

    And the answer is absolutely he did. This is another rags to riches story. He went from a family in decline to the leader of a powerful nation. He gained wealth and prestige and power, and he had every reason to do it because he found himself at the bottom of the barrel and he climbed his way out. And everything that he said, you’d have to just trust him because there were no facts to hang out there to test if it really was true.

71. 36:52

    Nothing like the resurrection of Jesus. It’s either true or it isn’t, and we can look at the facts to see if we think it is. And now we look at the apostles. Did the apostles make it up? Because if you, if you don’t believe in the message of the Bible and in the events that are recorded in the gospels and and in the Acts of the Apostles, then you’d have to believe that at the very least the apostles were making up the miracles and they were making up the story about the resurrection of Jesus. And so you’d have to ask the question, why would they do that if they had followed this man?

72. 37:31

    Right. But right up until the point where he was crucified and that was it. And he never came back. Why would they make up the story that he’d come back, that he was resurrected? Why would they make up the miracles? What did they have to gain? Did they gain wealth? And the answer is no. Did they gain power?

73. 37:49

    Maybe you could argue they gained power because they they now became the leaders of a new community. But almost to a man, every single one of these apostles would die for what they believed. Some of them would die horribly. And you have to ask the question, does it make sense that every single one of them would go out and die for what they believed if what they believed they knew was a lie and it just doesn’t make sense?

74. 38:18

    And there has come down to us no evidence that suggests that the tomb of Jesus was not empty or that these miracles didn’t really happen. And there were people all over the world witnessing them. There were communities growing throughout the Gentile world, not just within the Jewish community, and nobody could stop it.

75. 38:39

    And the Jews wanted to stop it and the Romans wanted to stop it and they could not. So I’d like you to turn with me to Acts Chapter 5. And I I love this particular story. In Acts chapter 5, when Peter and some of the other apostles are arrested by the Jewish leaders and the Sanhedrin Council is talking about killing them, what are we going to do about these people?

76. 39:15

    They won’t listen to us. We’ve told them to stop teaching that this guy has been raised from the dead and they won’t. What should we do? And many of them are whispering that let’s kill them, let’s just kill them, be done with it like we did with Jesus. And I’m going to start reading at verse 33 of Acts chapter 5. When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in honor by all the people, stood up and gave orders to put the men outside for a little while. And he said, men of Israel, take care what you were about to do with these men.

77. 39:55

    For before these days Theodus rose up claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about 400, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed, and came to nothing after him Judas the Galilee, and rose up in the days of the census, and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone.

78. 40:22

    For if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail. But if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God. So they took his advice, he said. We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen rebel leaders rise up with the following and wage war against the Romans, and the Romans every single time have come down and crushed them. We know the position in which we’re in. We know that we cannot hope to overcome the Roman Empire. We can only hope to appease them and stay on their good side. And so they’re in an impossible situation. What these men are teaching will not succeed. Look at the society in which we live. They can’t succeed.

79. 41:10

    This won’t get far. It doesn’t have legs. Just wait. You don’t need to murder them. They’ll take care of themselves. If they keep preaching this way, they won’t last long unless God is on their side. And if God is on their side, then nobody’s going to be able to stop them. And the words of Gamaliel echo throughout 2000 years of history to us because nobody was able to stop them. A common sense interpretation of the situation said this will not go far, it won’t succeed, And it did, and it did in an incredible way that proves to us that God was behind it all. That could be the only explanation, because once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

80. 42:05

    And the truth must be that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, that the apostles really were performing miracles. Because that’s the only way that these early Christians around the world, thousands of them, would be willing to walk away from everything that they knew for something that was brand new that they’d only just heard. And it’s the only explanation that makes sense. As improbable as many people might think, it’s the only explanation left.

81. 42:32

    And in our first class yesterday about the empty tomb, we talked about a man named Albert Henry Ross. And Albert Henry Ross lived at the beginning of the 20th century, and he was a journalist with some legal training, and he had grown up going to a Christian Church. But as an adult, he’d stopped doing that.

82. 42:56

    He was a skeptic, and he set out to write a book that was going to be a critique of the gospel accounts. He was going to tear it apart. And by the time he wrote his book, he had looked at all of the evidence he could find ancient history from the time about the way Jewish society worked and functions. And he compared the gospel accounts to each other to look for inaccuracies.

83. 43:23

    And he had changed his mind. He wrote a book called Who Moved the Stone? Which was the opposite of the book he intended to write. It’s become a powerful Christian apologetic work, published in 1930. He wrote under the pen name Frank Morrison. And towards the end of that book, which we quoted in that class yesterday, and we quote a different part here today, here’s what he had to write, talking about the apostles themselves going out into the world to preach the gospel message. He says the terrors and the persecutions these men ultimately had to face and did face unflinchingly, do not admit of 1/2 hearted adhesion secretly honeycombed with doubt. The belief has to be unconditional and of Adamantine’s strength to satisfy the conditions. Sooner or later too, if the belief was to spread, it had to bite its way into the corporate consciousness by convincing argument and attempted proof.

84. 44:21

    Now the peculiar thing about this phenomenon is that not only did it spread to every single member of the party of Jesus of whom we have any trace, but they brought it to Jerusalem and carried it with inconceivable audacity into the most keenly intellectual center of Judea against the ablest dialecticians of the day, and in the face of every impediment of brilliant and highly organized Camaria could devise, And they won.

85. 44:50

    Within 20 years the claim of these Galilean peasants had disrupted the Jewish church and impressed itself upon every town on the eastern literal of the Mediterranean from Caesarea to Troas. In less than 50 years, it had begun to threaten the peace of the Roman Empire.

86. 45:07

    When we have said everything that can be said about the willingness of certain types of people to believe what they want to believe, to be carried away by their emotions, and to assert as fact what has originally reached them as hearsay, we stand confronted with the greatest mystery of all. Why did it win? And there can be only one answer that God truly was behind it. As Gamaliel had said, if God is behind this, then nobody will be able to stop it.

87. 45:41

    And so we believe that Christianity and its early original pure form is the one true religion and that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is the one true God. And as we’ve said on multiple occasions throughout this series, if that is true, then that means that everything written in this book is so important that it would be worth dedicating our lives to learning it and applying it to everything that we do. So that we can be in that Kingdom that is promised here. That we can be resurrected just like Jesus did, or just like Jesus was, and given immortality and that Kingdom that God has promised to us.