“With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” (Luke 1:3-4)
Who really was Jesus?
Are you sure you know what he was like, how he lived, what he really taught? Researchers tell us that the way people view Jesus often has more to do with their personal background and experience than any other factor. If a person was raised in a white capitalist home, Jesus is seen as an enterprising entrepreneur that has come to bring you “Your Best Life Now.” If a person was raised in poverty, Jesus is seen as the valiant revolutionary who has come to topple Wall Street; and like a modern day Robin Hood, deliver the money of the rich into the hands of the poor. To the atheist, Jesus never really claimed to be God; it was his zealous power-hungry followers that wanted the world to see him as more than just a mere man. (I often wonder how some critics of Christianity could think his disciples wanted power when thousands of the first century Christians were martyred and made sport of in the Roman Coliseum for what they believed?)
This is why many religious cynics say Jesus looks more like the image you find staring back at you from the mirror than a man who actually walked the dusty Middle Eastern roads 2,000 years ago. As a result, some of our more learned historians and progressive theologians have declared that knowing the real Jesus is virtually an impossible task. In the early 1800s a man by the name of David Strauss began to doubt what we have traditionally been taught about Jesus by starting a major scholastic movement called “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” Strauss began his study by rejecting all supernatural events that involved Jesus and claimed they were nothing but fictional elaborations. He viewed the miraculous accounts of Jesus’ life in the gospels in “terms of myths which had arisen as a result of the community’s imagination as it retold stories and represented natural events as miracles.”
Over the years famous men like Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann joined in the search for trying to understand Jesus as he was. Bultmann was a tremendously influential professor of theology at Tübingen, Germany in the early 1900’s. He came to the conclusion that not much could really be known about the historical Jesus. For him, trying to find Jesus was a relatively pointless endeavor. In fact, if you want to know Jesus at all, he taught that you needed to have an existential encounter, a mystical spiritual moment, with the word of God.
Other brilliant liberal men followed in this scholarly deconstruction of Christ, with the latest being John Dominic Crossan, a former Roman Catholic priest and co-founder of the Jesus Seminar. Joining with other revisionist scholars Crossan concluded, “that many authors writing about the life of Jesus will “do autobiography and call it biography.” In other words, for the present day, God seeker, real “knowing” of Jesus is nothing more than religious make-believe.
If that is the case, then tell me, who are we singing to on Sunday?
Well, for many progressive pastors like Kent Dobson, the former minister of Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, they are not too sure what to believe anymore. According to The Grand Rapids Press, Kent, “told the congregants that he has never felt right serving in the role of pastor because he has always been ‘drawn to the edges of religion and faith and God.’ He has even stated a few times that he doesn’t know ‘what we mean by God any more?’”
But into this fog of modern scholarship, the ancient gospel writer Luke boldly and unapologetically declares, “I have decided to write an orderly account…so you may know the certainty of things.” He knew that Jesus existed, and he knew actual men and women who personally saw and heard the real Jesus walk and talk. As one very solid Christian historian, Craig Keener, writes, “Luke not only spent a lot of time with Paul in Judea, but he probably spent most of his interim in Caesarea, which afforded him the opportunity to become more ‘fully acquainted’ with reports about Christ’s actual life.” He goes on to say, that Luke had “impeccable credentials” for writing reliably about Jesus.
Not only that, but Keener goes on to say that the first-hand accounts of Jesus during Luke’s day were widespread: “…hence what Luke reports was already in wide circulation at the time of his writing, probably within the lifetime of some who had known Jesus’ public ministry.” That should both humble the modern scholar and give confidence to the Christian reader of Luke. Because as Keener says, “whatever their (ancient writers like Luke) human biases, they were in a better historical position to evaluate matters of their day than we are today.”
Luke declares that “what Jesus did was not done in a corner,” (Acts 26:26) and that “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.” (Acts 2:22). I think Luke has more reason to be believed than Strauss, Bultman or Crossan…don’t you?
I wonder what people will say about me 2,000 years from now? They can read letters from my wife, kids, parents and friends or they can do extensive research on what white, male Baptist preachers were like back in the 21st century America. I can hear a haughty professor from some Ivy League school of Divinity wearing a tweed jacket saying about me:
“Well, I have done some thorough research of Reverend Christopher Weeks and his day. I know for a fact that this man was both a Caucasian and a Baptist preacher. From those two aspects alone we can extrapolate what manner of man he was. Clearly we can say that he probably was an adherent of the small but vitriolic fundamentalist sect: a group that was categorized by separatism, highly antagonistic to the culture around them, constantly participated in the degradation of women, prone to preach hellfire and damnation and a man who was apt to “cling to his guns,” wore white shirts and ties and often went unhinged on his anti-alcoholic rants. We have concluded Reverend Weeks was a man who was out of touch with the community around him.”
Now if you would read my correspondence to those whom I love, they know that I am anything but a hard-core fundamentalist. Actually, I am a strange and complicated man. At times I don’t even understand myself! Ties make me break out in hives, I love and respect women (in truth my mom is the smartest person I know), I try to preach grace, and I barely know how to fire a squirt gun.
The point being, you don’t learn about a man by the culture he lived in, but you learn about a man by the people who knew and loved him. If you disagree, answer me one thing: Are you exactly like your brothers and sisters? Just because you were raised in the same home does not make you alike.
One Israeli scholar writes, “The early Christian accounts about Jesus are not as untrustworthy as scholars today often think. The first three Gospels not only present a reasonably faithful picture of Jesus as a Jew in his own time but portray him quite plausibly as a Jewish miracle-worker and preacher,” rather than some made up object of the church’s proclamation. C.S. Lewis quips, “The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin they already had.” They didn’t need some highly accredited scholar’s assurance to prove the historical accuracy of Christ.
I believe if we lose the scripture’s account of Jesus, we will lose Jesus himself. In order to worship a Jesus that isn’t makebelieve, let’s stick to what has been revealed to us through the Holy Scriptures. It is here we become certain!
