In Response to anti-Christian Claims

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Transcript:

My wife has told me before that I preach better when I’m irritated, which has nothing to do with that song. That’s a good song. But she’s told me I preach better when I’m irritated, which it’s been fortunate for me that the last several Sunday mornings I’ve come in and somebody’s either handed me a clipping out of the newspaper or there’s been one waiting on my desk.

And before we get into the message today, I wanted to address something that you may have seen in the newspaper. Brother Buford handed this to me. And the only reason I address this is because even though I don’t take the paper and so I haven’t seen the ongoing conversation, and this is from the Democratic Gazette, right?

Okay. I haven’t seen the ongoing conversation, but I can read between the lines and tell that it’s been going on for some time now, whatever started it. And you’ve probably all seen it, and some of you may have wondered, well, how do I address this?

And I know there are also people all over our part of the country that are reading this this morning and thinking, yeah, that guy’s right. It’s a very good letter that he’s written here, but also terribly wrong. And when I say good, I mean it sounds convincing.

Man’s written this here, and as I read this, I want you to know up front, I do not agree with a word he says in here other than when he signs his name at the end. And I want you to listen to this and think, how would you respond to this? It says, in my original letter, which I’ve not seen, in my original letter I didn’t even mention the demigod, Jesus.

There is little doubt, however, that claims made on his behalf are myths and rehashed tales of older gods and demigods rewritten after his death to impress the masses with inflated tales of his birth, life, death, and reanimation to fulfill certain prophecies. The four epistles were originally anonymous and only assigned those names to lend credence to the four contradictory tales of a man’s godhood. Other fanciful references to Jesus by ancient secular writers were written long after his death.

There are no factual or historical records of Jesus’ existence other than the Bible, no archaeological evidence, no contemporary written records, or any other proof that he was a demigod. Further, it is ridiculous to claim the Bible tales represent anything more than stories whose substance was changed through purposeful misrepresentation and his accidental misunderstandings, and accidental misunderstandings. His godliness wasn’t even settled until the Council of Nicaea in the 4th century, but religionists, that’s us, cling to the idea that the Bible is some kind of sacrosanct document transcribed by inspired men instead of what it really is, a collection of conflicting, even though heavily edited, stories written and rewritten by men with agendas and little education.

You can feel the word of your God is real. You can want your beliefs to be validated, but sadly for you, That does not make any religious claims factual. Lastly, atheism is not a religion. It is a philosophy of rational inquiry based on logic and reason. How would you answer that?

Could you answer that? It does deserve an answer. We’re called on to give an answer for the hope that lies within us.

But the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, we’re called on to give an answer. And I know this man, this particular man, probably would not listen to the answer. But these ideas influence everybody that reads them.

everybody who’s not familiar with the subject. And two of my great passions in ministry are discipleship and apologetics. Discipleship being teaching people, training people to follow Christ, and apologetics being training people to defend the gospel.

Now, I haven’t had time to sit out and write a full response to this, and I’m not because I’m not going to get into an argument in the newspaper. But I want to share a few things with you this morning before we get to the message. First of all, we don’t believe Jesus is a demigod.

That’s a Greek pagan term as far as I understand, which means he’s some sort of half-God, half-man. We don’t believe that Jesus Christ is half-God, half-man. We believe Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man.

We believe that Jesus Christ is God and was God-born in human flesh. The Bible tells us that in him the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily. And so for him to even refer to Jesus as a demigod, I knew right away the tone that this letter was going to take.

But he says there’s little doubt that the claims made on his behalf are myths and fairy tales and so forth. First of all, to say there’s little doubt is in and of itself a claim, one that he gives no evidence to back up. And just because the atheist says there’s no God doesn’t mean that’s not a claim to back up.

When they tell us that we need to provide evidence for the statement there is a God, equally there should be evidence presented for the statement that there is not a God. There’s an equal burden of proof on everybody who makes any kind of assertion, And all he does is say there’s little doubt to sort of sweep the argument aside. He says it’s based on myths and older tales.

And we’ve probably all heard the ideas that the story of Jesus Christ and his death and burial, or as he says, his reanimation, which we’ve called for 2,000 years the resurrection. I don’t know why the change in terminology. But the tales of the life and death and burial and resurrection are not based on the older mystery religions of the Persian Empire and the Roman Empire and the Greeks, ladies and gentlemen, because a lot of those mystery religions sprang up later.

Now, I don’t know if I’ve just got this time thing wrong, but usually things that come from other things come later than the thing they came from. So how did the story of Jesus get adapted from something that came later? That doesn’t make sense.

Also, the ideas that they point to and say, Jesus came from this that did come earlier, are completely different from anything with the gospel. Yes, Jesus Christ was born the Son of God, but it’s nothing like the Greek pagan stories where they split one God’s head open with an axe and another fully formed God jumped out. There is nothing like that in the Bible.

Or the idea that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead. There are stories of pagan gods coming back to life after dying, but it’s always a cycle of reincarnation that is completely foreign to the Bible. I have to question the credibility of anybody who refers to the four Gospels as the four epistles as well, if you didn’t catch that.

The epistles were Paul’s letters. He says other fanciful references by ancient secular writers were written long after his death. First of all, we have accounts written that mention the existence of the historical person of Jesus Christ, not by believers, I’ve talked about this in Senior Saints, but by people who were not believers and said, yes, this man lived, he appeared to do miracles, he attracted a great following with his teachings, and then he died, all within less than 20 years of his death.

And by the way, if we want to call these fanciful writings, we have to throw out everything we know about ancient history, because nobody ever doubts what these guys write in the historical record unless it’s about Jesus Christ. So there are no factual historical records. You’ve got to throw out Josephus. You’ve got to throw out Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian.

You’ve got to throw out Pliny the Younger. You’ve got to throw out all of the historians who wrote about Jesus within 20 to 100 years after his death. He says there’s no archaeological evidence, but every time Spade is put to dirt in the Holy Land, especially in effort to try to disprove the Bible, it ends up corroborating the very details it seeks to disprove.

For hundreds of years, they said that the story of Pilate bringing Jesus in the book of John before the Gabbatha, or the pavement, where Pilate sat in judgment, that had to have been a myth because they could find no such place. In the 1800s, they found such a place right where the book of John said it would be. They said Jesus could never have ministered at the pool of Bethesda because they could never find an odd-looking pool in the middle of Jerusalem with five porches and five sides.

They found it buried under a church when they went digging. They said crucifixion wasn’t used very often. and if it was, certainly those men were not buried, they would be thrown to the dogs.

But they found the buried fossilized remains of a man from around the time of Jesus Christ. And no, it was not Jesus Christ. But they found the fossilized buried remains, maybe not fossilized, don’t quote me on that word. I don’t know that they were fossilized. But they found the preserved remains buried of a man from around the time of Christ who still had the Roman spike stuck into his heel bone and into the wood behind it.

If he’s saying that there’s no archaeological record for the existence of Jesus Christ in the sense that, yeah, we don’t have big monuments and we don’t have things that he used. He’s absolutely right. But I would ask him, how many historical figures are there that we don’t doubt their existence and all we have is a written record?

Not everybody built great palaces and built great walls. And quite frankly, I find the assertion that we should expect to find those kinds of things for a man who was just a humble carpenter from Nazareth intellectually insulting. The written record is more than enough.

He says the substance of God’s word has been changed. But we have manuscript evidence going back all the way to 125 AD, which I know was nearly a hundred years after Jesus Christ was crucified. But in the scope of ancient documents, it’s just a drop in the bucket as far as time is concerned between the time Jesus died and the time that copy appeared.

We have no other ancient manuscript with so early a copy. We have copies going back to within a lifetime or two based on even earlier copies. We have some 5,600 copies, a mountain of manuscript evidence that dwarfs any other ancient document in comparison.

And when they look at all of the copies of the New Testament, when they look at all the translations, when they look at all the quotations, 99. 9% of the time, when they’ve counted by character, by word, mathematicians and textual scholars, 99. 9% of the time they say the exact same thing.

And he’s going to sit here in his paper pulpit and tell us that the word of God has been changed. It’s a collection of conflicting stories. I’ve seen their lists of conflicts and contradictions, and if you have half a clue as to what you’re doing with the biblical text, there are no contradictions.

They can be easily resolved simply by understanding what the Bible is talking about. Sometimes by looking at the Greek and Hebrew, sometimes bringing in other texts to explain the ones that aren’t clear. He said his godliness wasn’t even settled.

First of all, even in Jesus’ day, they knew he was godly. I can assume he means deity. Again, I have to question his reputation as a Bible scholar when he’s using wrong words here.

His godliness wasn’t even settled. Folks, his deity was settled. People gave their lives who watched the man, who worked with him, who walked with him.

They believed what he said when he said, I am that I am. When he identified with the God of the Old Testament, they believed him and they went to their deaths. You can’t tell me for the 11 remaining disciples, 10 of whom were martyred in gruesome ways and one of whom spent his life on the run in exile.

You can’t tell me that his godhood, his deity wasn’t settled for them. It says the Bible wasn’t settled and his godhood wasn’t settled until the Council of Nicaea. When it was held in 325 AD, there was debate over the scriptures.

There was debate over their Christology, their view of Christ, but never was it in question whether he was God in human form. And never was it really in question what books should and should not be in the Bible. What they merely did was ratify what the churches already held to be the case.

Because they knew they could tell which books were inspired scripture and which ones were not. Rewritten by men with agendas and little education. Folks, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the scriptures have been substantially changed.

And he says atheism is not a religion. Folks, I submit to you it is a religion. I don’t know what was said that brought on that comment.

Atheism is absolutely a religion. It has its own ethical and moral views. It has its own views on the afterlife.

It has its own views on death. It has its own view on the origin of life. And it does have a deity.

The deity of atheism is self. Because atheism, even in philosophy, says there is no God. Think about this.

God being an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent being, they say there is no God. To know that, ladies and gentlemen, to know that there is no omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent being, you have to know everything about every place in the universe. And you’re making an omniscient and omnipresent claim that cannot be proven.

Atheism is a religion. It is the religion of self.