Almighty, gorgeous is our God, The full moon never failing, Get rid of their organs they get rid of their choirs So you have you have a tiny little reformed Baptist movement in this country of about two dozen dead musicless churches Because if you have any wavering in your confidence about the integrity of your translation of the Bible, it will suck the conviction right out of your heart. And that leads to some very interesting, heretical, and very important conclusions. Hello and welcome to another edition of Word Magazine. This is Jeff Riddle, pastor, church planter of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. And we are ready to go with another episode today. I got off track. Didn't get an episode recorded yesterday, so I'm trying to get caught up today, which is Wednesday, August 14, 2013. I took last week off because I was on vacation. Enjoyed being with my family, went to the Great Smokies and camped a few days. Got to go see the play Under These Hills, which I saw years ago when I was a child. Got to see as an adult a depiction of what happened with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians and how they were forcibly removed in the Trail of Tears. Then after we had been in the Smokies and got to do some hiking on the Appalachian Trail, got to go up to Clingman's Dome, which is the highest point in Tennessee. And I'd never in my life driven through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. We just drove through that. It's an amazing tourist trap type place. But anyways, we went up after being in the Smokies to Nashville for a few days. And it ended up being kind of interesting because we went last Friday to tour the Hermitage, which is Andrew Jackson's home. And so we were watching under these hills in Cherokee where Andrew Jackson is not loved very much by the Cherokee because he was responsible for the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears. And then going to Jackson's home in Nashville is kind of an interesting pilgrimage. And then we got back late on Saturday and getting started the week here. My brother is in from Mississippi visiting with us and so I missed the day yesterday. But anyway, trying to get caught back up today. This is going to be another review of the interview with Reza Aslan, the author of Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the fourth issue that I've done reviewing an interview with Reza Aslan that happened in early July on the Fresh Air radio program of NPR and we've looked at various things about Reza Aslan's book which has shot to a lot of the bestseller lists and has been widely discussed. Part of what I've said about his book is that really he doesn't produce anything new. The ideas that he puts forward in the book about Jesus essentially is a rehash of a lot of 19th century post-enlightenment skepticism about the historical validity of the Gospels, the historicity of the life of Jesus, and then there are a few twists that I think he puts on it because of his Muslim background, including his denial of some facts about the birth of Jesus, like Jesus being born in Bethlehem, his take on the crucifixion as being the result of Jesus being a zealot and not being a result of Jesus declaring himself to be equal with God. He ignores completely the emphasis on the Gospels upon Jesus being crucified because from the Jewish perspective, the perspective of the Jewish leaders, he was seen as a blasphemer because he made himself equal with God. So these are just some of the things we've covered with Reza Aslan's book. This is the end of the interview. There's a few more things that he's going to put forward. A lot of it again is a rehash of 19th century life of Jesus, Enlightenment-influenced scholarship, and he dredges up really a tired theory, and that is that Jesus didn't really found the Christian movement, that Christianity was an invention or fabrication of the apostles, and even post-apostolic, he would say, people who sort of created Christianity. A lot of times people who make this kind of argument see Paul as the real founder of Christianity, for example. He doesn't talk a lot directly about Paul, but as I understand it, quite a bit of actually the book Zealot deals with ascribing to Paul the status of being a founder of Christianity and sort of Jesus had this simple religion consistent with the Judaism of his times and then later Christians like Paul created Christianity. We'll respond to that hopefully a little bit later on. And then towards the end of the interview he talks about his return to Islam Again, he claims that he made a profession of faith as a teenager. Of course, we don't see that as genuine. We see that as having been a false profession. And then he returns to Islam and he has a very glowing view of Islam, although it appears that his view of Islam, if we believe what he says, is certainly outside of probably mainstream Islam. I know I was listening to the podcast of James White, Alpha and Omega Ministries, and he pointed out that he didn't see Raisa Aslam as being a conventional Muslim in any sense because, on one hand, James White, having not read the book, but I think he said he listened to it on a bike ride, says that Aslan both doesn't embrace the virginal conception of Jesus, which is affirmed in the Koran on one hand, and on the other hand, he gives too much credence to the crucifixion, which is denied in the Koran. And so James White doesn't see Reza Aslan as a conventional Muslim. I'm not sure. I have not read the book. In the interviews, it seems that he hedges his comments a lot. For example, his comments about the crucifixion of Jesus. He talks about people being killed and then crucified, which I, again, I refuted. I don't think that's a historical claim at all. So I think definitely his Islamic worldview is shaping his perceptions of Jesus, most particularly in the fact that he's embracing this hyper-skeptical, radical criticism, radical skepticism about the historicity of the Gospels, skepticism about the traditional understanding of the life of Jesus, etc. But anyways, we'll pick it up. This will be the last one of these that I will do. I did have somebody on Sunday at church ask me if I had I had notes for these presentations, and I don't. I'm pretty much just doing this off the cuff. I've got just a few notes scrabbled on a legal pad, so I don't really have any formal notes for this. I might possibly at some point get the book and actually read it and write a more formal review. maybe submit it to some of the journals that I do book reviews for, like American Theological Inquiry or the Puritan Reform Journal, or even for the Reform Baptist Trumpet, our little in-house quarterly journal that we do for the Reform Baptist Fellowship of Virginia. I might just post it on the blog. We'll see if time allows. I've got so many books right now in my queue. And so many things I'm reading for various ventures that I'm not sure I'm going to get around to it anytime soon. But at any rate, let's plunge in back into the interview. Again, we're getting towards the end. And the host, Terry Gross, raised a question, and it is about whether or not Jesus intended to found the Christian movement. So let's pick up the interview here with Terry Gross's question. I can't answer this, but do you think Jesus ever intended to start a new religion and ever intended to break completely from Judaism? Actually I can answer this. I don't want to be hubristic. That's a classic quote. I don't want to be hubristic. Actually I can answer that. There's not a lot of humility or even false humility from Raisa Aslan. I believe he is quite overconfident in what he thinks he knows about the Gospels and about the historical Jesus, but let's listen to what he says. Yeah, Jesus did say that in Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mount. He did not come to do away with the law but to fulfill it. But that is just Jesus emphasizing the fact that his teaching, his ministry, was completely consistent with and in continuity with the previous revelation of God's self to his people, particularly in the Old Testament, and to the Old Testament Church, to Old Testament Israel, that his actions were consistent. It also addresses more particularly Jesus' view of the law, and especially the moral law of God, how that he did not come to do away with the Ten Commandments, but to affirm them and actually to teach their true intent. And so when Jesus says that he didn't come to do away with the law, but to fulfill it, That's not an argument against him as the founder of the Christian movement or Christianity. Let's listen to a little bit more of what Aslan is going to say in the follow-up to this. In fact, in those times in which he espouses on the law, when he talks about how the law says, thou shalt not commit adultery, but I say that if you look with lust upon a woman that you have committed adultery, In fact, he is creating a more extreme version of the law. The reference here, of course, is to the series of what are called antitheses. In Matthew 5, where Jesus says, you have heard it said, don't commit murder, the sixth commandment, but I say to you, don't become angry with your brother without just cause. where he says the commandment that he refers to here, the seventh commandment, don't commit adultery, you've heard it said, don't commit adultery, but I say to you, whoever looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery in his heart. That's not Jesus presenting an extreme view. Again, it's Jesus teaching about the wider principles and the wider implications of the Ten Commandments. And he's making the point that he did not come to do away with the previous revelation, but that his teaching is consistent with the previous revelation given by God. But it is also a heightening of it, and it is a clear and authoritative interpretation of it. Again, this has nothing to do with whether or not Jesus is the founder of Christianity. Obviously, he is the founder of Christianity, but the point is the Christian movement is consistent with God's previous revelation of himself and his previous dealings with Israel, the Old Testament Church. Let's listen to a little bit more. that the priests would allow for. I think the key to understanding Jesus of Nazareth is to recognize him for what he was, which was a Jew. His context was 1st century Palestine. The God that he worshipped was the God of the Hebrew Bible. He knew no other God. He knew no other means of Well, no one on the Christian side would deny that Jesus was a Jew. Yes, Paul will say that according to the flesh Jesus was a Jew. There's nothing new to that. We affirm his full humanity that in the fullness of time he was born of a woman. He was born under the law as Paul puts it in Galatians So that's in no way a contradiction with the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus. And yes, the God that Jesus knew, and the God that Jesus, we would say, is, is the God of the Old Testament, the jealous God of the Old Testament scriptures. Oops, now we got the charge of Jesus being illiterate once again. I know I previously addressed this, but I don't know why Reza Aslan wants to harp on this and wants to call Jesus illiterate. I did a blog post on my blog last week. My blog is jeffriddle.net. and I looked at this charge of Jesus being illiterate and I put a couple quotes from some other scholars. One that I gave a quote from was Rodney Stark. Stark is right now the Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at Baylor University and this past year, well 2011 I think it was, he came out with a book called The Triumph of Christianity how the Jesus Movement became the world's largest religion. This was a World Magazine Book of the Year, I think in 2011-2012. Actually, I'm in the midst of reading the book. It's actually sort of a more popular version of the book, The Rise of Early Christianity, which I actually used as a required textbook this summer in the New Testament class I was teaching in the local college here. But at any rate, there's one great section where Rodney Stark, who's a credentialed scholar, does a lot of work. He's a sociologist by training, like Reza Aslan, but has done a lot of work in sort of the sociological backgrounds for understanding the New Testament and comes up with a lot of conservative traditional findings. But anyways, on pages 99 and 100, this is what Rodney Stark says, quote, he says, finally comes the persistent claim that Jesus was illiterate. This snide assertion flies in the face of immense familiarity with Jewish scriptures displayed by Jesus throughout the Gospels and the near certainty that he was a well-trained rabbi. It also ignores statements such as in Luke 4, 16 and 17 And he went to the synagogue, as was his custom, on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read, and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written. In addition is the frequency with which Jesus prefaces in exchange with a rhetorical question, Have you not read? Granted, this evidence comes only from the Gospels, but this is true of everything, and the everything is properly in italics, this is true of everything we know about Jesus." And so, Stark's point is, If you say Jesus is illiterate, that flies in the face of everything we know about him from the Gospels, where he is presented as standing up and reading the Scriptures, he's presented as familiar with the Scriptures, he says to his opponents, have you not read? Jesus is presented in the Gospels as literate. And pray tell, where do we get information about Jesus that is closest to his time other than in the canonical Gospels? And so this charge that Jesus is illiterate is just so off-base. It's such a wildly skeptical claim for anyone to make. In addition to that, in the blog post that I did on this topic, I also turned to a textbook. It's actually the textbook I'm now using in the Introduction to the New Testament classes I'm teaching. I'll use it again this fall. I used it this summer. And it's a book that's under the general editorship of a fellow named Gary M. Berg of Wheaton University in Chicago. The text is called The New Testament in Antiquity, published by Zondervan in 2009. And the title of the textbook is important, New Testament in Antiquity. The book focuses a lot on the first century backgrounds, both Greco-Roman and Jewish for the New Testament. And again, this is what Aslan has told us previously, he's more keen, he doesn't want to read the Gospels, he just wants to understand what first century Palestinian Judaism was like, and the Greco-Roman backgrounds, etc. Well, Gary M. Berg, a credentialed New Testament scholar and the co-authors of this textbook, have done exactly that. And this is what he says. This is the quotations I have, again, on the blog post. I'm going to read a couple of these from the book. It's from pages 128 and 129. He says this, quote, Jesus was probably educated in the local synagogue each morning from age five or six and each afternoon worked at his father's trade. So the point is that the custom among the Jews was for boys in particular to be educated in the local synagogue by reading the scriptures from the time they were five or six and then it was also customary for them to learn the trade. I made the note in the blog post that when Berg talks about Jesus learning his father's trade, that's not necessarily a denial of the virginal conception of Jesus, but it just simply acknowledges the fact that Joseph was the custodial parent or foster father of Jesus. Here's another quotation from the New Testament in antiquity. Berg says, like other boys in his village from the age of six to ten, Jesus became literate in Hebrew through the study of the Torah in the Nazareth synagogue, and he memorized vast quantities of scripture. From ages 10 to 12, he became acquainted with the oral laws under the direction of the synagogue teacher and custodian, the Chazan. At this point, he ended his schooling and began working full-time with his father. And then he adds, from the age of 13 until the beginning of his public ministry, about 30, Jesus worked in Nazareth and joined the village men at the synagogue for discussion and debate. These exclusively male gatherings sharpened understanding of the law and were as raucous as they were inspiring. Thus Jesus had almost 20 years experience debating in the local synagogue before teaching in the synagogues of Galilee. By the time he was an adult, he was a skilled craftsman, literate, knowledgeable in the traditions and history of his people, and adept at public discourse. Now that's the finding of someone who has studied, truly studied, the Jewish and the Greco-Roman backgrounds for what it would have been like for a male like Jesus who lived in the first century. I think it is wrong, and it is a display of hubris, to think that there was a high level of illiteracy among Palestinian Jews, particularly in Galilee, which was really on the edge of contact with Gentiles, the area north of Galilee was very Hellenized. In fact, that's reflected in the Gospels as Jesus will cross into Gentile areas as when he goes and heals the Gadarene demoniac. This is one more thing I didn't include on the blog post, a little extra here. as well in Berg's book, The New Testament Antiquity, on page 151, he has a little sidebar where the title of it is, Was Jesus Trilingual? One of the aspects of the textbook is, in addition to the text, there are these little information bars that give you little historical backgrounds for various things. And again, the title of it is, Was Jesus Trilingual? And he suggests that Jesus, in fact, most likely knew not only Aramaic and Hebrew, but very possibly might have known Greek and even Latin as well. So Jesus might have even been quadrilingual. The chances that Jesus was illiterate, or monolingual even, are remote if you know and understand properly, I think, the Jewish backgrounds. I don't know why Reza Aslan continues to make this specious charge against Jesus. The only reason I can think is that he wants to downplay the intellectual rigor and abilities of Jesus because he wants to downplay the traditional Christian understanding of what Jesus taught, who Jesus claimed to be, and how the first Christians understood him. He wants to say their teachings were very different from what Jesus of Nazareth said. We want to say that the teachings of the Apostles and the post-apostolic Christians was in fact consistent with what the historical Jesus said and taught and claimed about himself. Okay, that was a lot on the literacy of Jesus. Let's go a little bit further. from the backwoods of Galilee. He was not by any means a sophisticated or urbanized, educated person. I would say go back and read Gary Berg one more time. He talks about the fact that there was a lot of interaction with Hellenized Jews and with Hellenized Gentiles in Galilee in particular. And so I think he has a very skewed and improper, historically and sociologically improper view of what life was like in Galilee in particular. He wants to make it sound like it was extremely rustic and backwoods. And I think it was a lot more sophisticated than he gives it credit for. But let's listen to a little bit more. If you want to know what Jesus the man actually thought, what Jesus the man actually said, then you have to place every word that comes out of his mouth, every action that he performs, in a Jewish context. And that's exactly what we're doing, and I think that's what Reza Aslan has failed to do. I mean, just think about the Gospels themselves. Think about what Jesus taught, the Great Commandment, a genius interpretation of the sum of the Old Testament law. Think about the Golden Rule, which has no parallel in any teaching before Jesus. Even the interpretation that he gives prophetically of his own death, using allusions to Isaiah 53, seeing himself as a suffering servant. No one had said this before Jesus of Nazareth. Let's say you say Paul came up with that. Well, you're saying Paul then is a genius. But it didn't originate with Paul. It originates with Jesus of Nazareth. Do you think people who were the apostles and disciples just invented this and fabricated this? That seems to be the most far-fetched theory that one could come up with. Obviously the Christian movement originates with Jesus of Nazareth and he wasn't a country bumpkin. Obviously his views were very sophisticated. Paul can speak of him as the wisdom of God. And so it certainly obscures the reality, the historical reality, to say that Jesus was some sort of uneducated, illiterate peasant. Certainly he was more than that. Do you think he intended to be worshipped himself and therefore start a new religion? Okay, now we're going to come to the question Terry Gross is asking. Did Jesus expect to be worshipped? Did Jesus claim to be God? And let's listen to Reza Aslan's response. If you're asking whether Jesus expected to be seen as God made flesh, as the living embodiment, the incarnation of God, then the answer to that is absolutely no. Oh, wow. So this is just an outright denial of how the Gospels present Jesus, a complete denial of the historicity of the Gospels. I would want to ask him, what about the passages like the seven I Am sayings of the Gospel of John, where Jesus is saying things like In John 8-12, I am the light of the world, or in John 6-25, I think it is, I am the bread of life. Or when he says in John 11, I am the resurrection and the life. Or when he says in John 14-6, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me. And of course the I am in Greek, ego, I, me, echoes Exodus 3. where Moses is before the burning bush and asks God whom he should say has sent him and who has sent him. And the answer from the bush is, tell them I am that I am. And to a gentle rendering would be, ego I me. The I am. God is the great I am. And here's Jesus using that I am language. Of course, Reza Aslan would deny the historicity completely of the Gospel of John, but we don't need just the Gospel of John. In all the Gospels, Jesus is presented as understanding himself to be God made flesh. Think about in Mark's gospel, where he not only heals a paralytic, but also forgives his sins. And the Pharisees ask, who can forgive sins but God alone? And the implication is Jesus is God. And so, if you deny completely the historicity of the Gospels, the historicity of the very words of Jesus, then yes, you can deny that Jesus claimed to be God, but if you take seriously the historicity of the Gospels, then whether or not you agree with or affirm the claim that Jesus is God, you at least recognize that the historical Jesus believed himself to be God. He says to his disciples in John 14 6, when they ask him, show us the Father, he says, he who has seen me has seen the Father. Or he says in John 10 30, I and my Father are one. What other explicit claims could Jesus make to his deity than these, and what you have to do to deny that is to do what Raisa Aslan does, just deny that the Gospels have any historical validity and to believe that they were just fabricated or thought up by later generations. Let's listen to a little bit more. Well, is that true? No, we would say read through the Old Testament and you will see many places where there is an anticipation of incarnation. Think about the angel of the Lord. for example, who appears throughout the Old Testament Scriptures. Even as Israel is going out of the wilderness, they are led by a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night. There is some physical, visible representation of God in the midst of his people. Think about Daniel, the book of Daniel, the three Hebrew youths, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, when they're thrown into the burning fiery furnace. What does Nebuchadnezzar look in and see? He sees the three youths not being consumed, but then he sees a fourth one likened to the Son of God. There are many places in the Old Testament where there are anticipations of Emmanuel, God with us, God being present on the earth among men. And so it is not some sort of wild idea that is introduced by Jesus, by the Apostles. It's one that someone steeped in the Old Testament, like the first followers of Jesus, who were all Jews, completely understood and understood as being in continuity with their faith in the God of the Hebrew Bible. So I would dispute this claim completely. Let's listen to a little bit more. The notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for. And again, angel of the Lord, the fourth one in the flames with the Hebrew youths, the promise of Emmanuel. He makes it sound like this is something outlandish. It's in complete discontinuity, but obviously it is not. that Jesus could have conceived of himself, or that even his followers could have conceived of him as divine contradicts everything that has ever been written or said about Judaism. Well obviously yes, this is the whole point of Christianity. This is what we call the scandal of particularity. It is the belief that Jesus Christ is Lord, that Jesus is Kyrgios. that He is the God of the Old Testament, that when we see Jesus, we are seeing God. When we listen to Jesus, we are listening to the very voice of God. And yes, this is precisely the scandal of early Christianity. Not only that, but that Jesus was crucified. Paul says, we preach Christ and Him crucified. This is a scandal to the Jews, a stumbling block to the Jews. It's foolishness to the Greeks. Yes, Reza Aslan, you are crashing on exactly the point of the scandal of the Christian proclamation that Jesus is Lord. This is the earliest confession, Romans 10.9. If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised you from the dead, you will be saved. So he's rightly stumbling. What we're seeing is a man stumbling upon the scandal of the Christian proclamation. The difference is believers listen to this and we humble ourselves under it and we repent and we believe the gospel. What is foolishness to the unregenerate is the wisdom of God to those who are being saved. So let's continue. To sum up, I think what you're saying in your book is that Christianity as we know it is revisionism of what Jesus stood for in his time and what he preached in his time. This is Terry Gross, of course, just following right in the track, seeing Christianity, traditional Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, as revisionism. Again, this is an old theory. It goes back to the Enlightenment. There was the simple religion of Jesus, maybe like Albert Schweitzer saying of him as an apocalyptic prophet, and then we had dogmatic Christianity which distorts the simple religion of Jesus, the illiterate peasant. Again, on what basis? This is completely skeptical. It's a complete hypothetical. There's no reason to believe that there is a discontinuity between what Jesus of Nazareth taught and what the followers of Jesus taught. Let's listen to Reza Aslan's response. I think to truly understand how Christianity arose, how it was that this peasant and day laborer from the low hills of Galilee who took on the greatest empire the world had ever known and lost. This is sounding very much like Schweitzer. He took on the empire and lost. Jesus is a failed prophet. And again, he's trying to emphasize so much the lowly beginning. I want to say on that, yes, the Gospels do present Jesus as coming in lowliness. That's the whole point of the Incarnation. He's not born in Rome in the palaces of power. He's not born in Athens as a great philosopher in the marketplace, but yes, he is born in lowliness. This emphasizes what is significant about the Incarnation, that he left all the riches of glory to humble himself and appear as a servant, as a man in Galilee, but that's not to say that Jesus was illiterate or that he wasn't intellectually sophisticated. Obviously, he was. Let's listen to a little bit more. He denies the fact that the crucifixion, again he's saying that Jesus' crucifixion was because of political zealotry, but he doesn't deal at all with really what the Gospels emphasize, his trial before the Jewish authorities and the charge against him was blasphemy because he made himself equal with God and Aslan does not deal with the historicity of that part of the Gospels. in the span of two decades, all of a sudden became called by his disciples as God to understand that remarkable, unprecedented transformation. Now you're assuming it's a transformation instead of being properly in continuity with what Jesus claimed about himself. Did these disciples, after Jesus of Nazareth is crucified, if he were only a political zealot who didn't teach, make any claims about himself. Why? What would lead Jewish men to then claim that Jesus is God? That's part of the scandal of it. Here are men like Peter and like Paul who were zealous, pious Jews and all of a sudden from their interactions with Jesus they are claiming that Jesus is Lord. Why is that? How could they possibly have made such a claim? If you're saying they fabricated and made it up, why is that more tenable for understanding Christianity than just saying that this is what Jesus claimed about himself and taught about himself? Again, this claim that he's making is no more historically tenable or plausible than simply holding to what the Gospels say and what traditional Christianity has understood that the Gospels say about Jesus. You have to understand this one rather uncomfortable fact, which is that almost every word ever written about Jesus was written by people who didn't actually know Jesus. Whoa, this is a huge and fallacious claim that Reza Asim has made. Every word, nearly every word written about Jesus was written by people who didn't actually know him. Well, of course, we would say this is completely wrong. Look at the four Gospels. Of the four Gospels, Matthew is written by Matthew, who was one of the disciples, one of the twelve. John is written by the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee, who was one of the twelve. John is also given attributed authorship of the Johannine epistles, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. and also the book of Revelation, and John famously begins 1 John by mentioning that he is speaking about the word which he has handled, which he has touched, And then the other gospels, Mark, we have some good evidence from the Church Fathers that say that Mark wrote his gospel while at the feet of Peter, the Apostle Peter, and so he wrote down the memoirs of Peter, so Peter is an eyewitness of the ministry of Jesus. Then we have Luke's gospel, And if you read Luke 1, 1-4, he tells us that he consulted with various sources and with the eyewitnesses of the life and ministry of Jesus. And Luke was also a companion of Paul, who knew the risen Jesus. Then when we look at the rest of the writings in the New Testament, he's going to try to dodge this reality. But if we look at the other writings, we've got the book of James, which tradition attributes to one of the half-brothers of Jesus, and also the book of Jude, which is attributed to a half-brother of Jesus. The family members of Jesus were among the early disciples. Mary, James, Jude, And so, yes, people who were eyewitnesses to the life and ministry and teachings of Jesus were the ones who recorded the things that are in the Gospels or they preserved the oral traditions and written traditions that were then incorporated into the Gospels. it is really a radical and a radically skeptical claim to say that what we have in the New Testament came from people who didn't really know anything about the historical Jesus. Along these lines I would suggest a book written by a fellow named Richard Baucom who is a credentialed New Testament scholar in the United Kingdom. He taught for many years at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and in 2008 he published a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses and on a purely historical typically rigorous academic scholarly level he makes the argument that the traditions in the Gospels came from eyewitnesses to the life and ministry of Jesus and I think that Raisa Aslan should pick up Richard Baucom's book and read it and perhaps it would make him temper these really wild claims that he makes about the Gospels. Let's listen to a little bit more. So the Gospels are just complete fabrications. There's not a shred of anything that comes from eyewitness testimony. You wonder if he's read the Gospels. What about the many details? In Mark's Gospel, when it talks about the feeding of the 5,000, Mark records that the grass was green. At the end of Mark's Gospel, it talks about the young man who fled when Jesus was arrested and the soldiers who were arresting Jesus grabbed onto his cloak and he ran away naked. vivid details that must have been composed by someone who was an eyewitness. What about the uniformity of the witness to the teachings of Jesus? Let's say the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. Many of these ideas then picked up by Paul in Romans, at the end of Romans in Romans 12, the ethical exhortations. similar teachings picked up on by James in his book. So clearly there were witnesses to the life and ministry of the teachings of Jesus and those are faithfully recorded in the New Testament. This is a wild and a wildly skeptical claim that Aslan is making here. certainly his family played an important role in the Christian community. He realizes that the family of Jesus is a huge obstacle to his argument that nothing in the New Testament is written by people or very little by people who knew Jesus and so he's going to try to skirt around this obstacle in the community after Jesus' death, but they were sort of limited by the fact that they How does that limit their witness to the life of Jesus? Particularly when they wrote books like James and Jude that are incorporated into the New Testament canon and that these works are proliferated and read in Christian churches all throughout the ancient world. It doesn't matter if they remained in Judea or in Jerusalem. What matters is whether their authority and whether their eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus were accepted as authoritative within the early church, and whether or not those accounts were seen as being consistent with the Orthodox construal of the life of Jesus. But again, he recognizes this is a big obstacle to his theory. and the early Christian Church in Jerusalem with it. The Apostles certainly spread around the known world at the time preaching the message of Jesus, but you have to understand that the Apostles were farmers and fishermen. These were the literates. Well, he's going to make the same argument about the Apostles that he made about Jesus. And again, all the arguments I made previously about the literacy of Jesus can be applied to Peter. Peter was a businessman, he was a fisherman, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, apparently had a thriving business. They had employees. They were in the business with their father. They would have had interactions with Gentiles. They would have had to sell the fish that they caught in various markets. It's simply ridiculous to think that the Apostles were like cavemen. rather than being sophisticated men of their times, and particularly their Jewish background, they would have been in the synagogue, they would have been educated in the synagogue, they would have been able to read and to write, they certainly would have been able to read the scriptures, and of course to take his view is to deny completely all the claims of the purported authorship of the Gospels that Matthew wrote, the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector, which meant he would have had to been able to write, obviously. John, that he wrote the Gospel of John, the Epistles, the Revelation. Peter, that he wrote 1 Peter and 2 Peter, even though we could also say that some people believe that 1 Peter was written with the help of an amanuensis, a scribe, or secretary, perhaps Silvanus. But the point is it is a wild claim and historically extremely questionable claim that the Apostles were not literate men. They might not have had formal Greco-Roman education. This is alluded to in the Book of Acts. They were agramatus. They were not studied men. but to say that they were illiterate is wide of the mark. And yet they did espouse high-minded Christology and what he doesn't like is the fact that these simple men were able to articulate high views of Jesus. Where did that come from? Well, it came from Jesus himself and he certainly sells the Apostles far short, as he does Jesus, on their intellectual ability and their spiritual ability. Jesus chose these men because they were spiritual men and they were intellectual men and they certainly had the capacity to understand Jesus and his claims and his teachings. And they did with much difficulty. In fact, much of the Gospels were about how they struggled to understand Jesus and often misunderstood him. But the cross and the resurrection was the turning point. And after the cross and the resurrection, their eyes were opened more fully. As the apostles on the road to Emmaus say in Luke 24, did not our hearts burn within us? as he opened the scriptures to us. And so they had a transformative experience that changed these men. And this leads to them going out and turning, as it says, and acts the world upside down with their preaching. If these men were illiterate and Jesus had not really claimed to be the Son of God and had not really died on the cross and been raised, what motivates these men to go out and to turn the world upside down? This is just very tedious. If he's claiming all the Apostles were illiterates, then again he's denying the authorship of every book within the New Testament and it's just simply a ridiculous claim to make. Again, this is an old theory. I already mentioned it earlier. He's going to make the claim that Paul a Hellenized Jew, was the real founder of Christianity. Along these lines, I would recommend a book. I did a review of this book in the last issue of the Reformed Baptist Trumpet. The book is one by David Winnum, W-E-N-H-A-M. David Winnum taught for many years at Oxford University And the little book that he has written came out in 2010 from Lion Press in the UK. It's titled, Did Saint Paul Get Jesus Right? the gospel according to Paul. And in this little book, which I'm using as a supplementary textbook this fall for my New Testament class, he examines the charge made that Paul was the real founder of Christianity. He refutes it. He talks about how Paul and his writings reflect his understanding of what Jesus taught and how that Paul's theology is consistent with Jesus' theology. Paul was not an innovator. As a new convert to Christianity, he was humbled under the claims that Jesus had made for himself. If he had come up with some kind of wild ideas about Jesus, this would have been corrected by the eyewitnesses, the first disciples who were eyewitnesses to the life ministry teaching of Jesus. And so I'd recommend highly as a counterpoint to Reza Aslan, David Winham's little book. It's a short book. It's actually a popularizing of some more technical scholarly work that David Wynnum has done in this field. One of his areas of expertise is the relationship between Jesus and Paul. And this book is only about 110 pages long, very easy to read, could be read in a day, an evening. I would encourage you to read that book for a good antidote to the type of radical skepticism that Raisa Astlin reflects here. Let's listen to a little bit more. By the way, their primary language was Greek. They wrote in Greek, they spoke in Greek, they thought in Greek. Yes, and we see this as part of the providence of God. There was a time, again Paul says it in Galatians, in the fullness of time Jesus was born Certainly, it was an amazing time. It was the Pax Romana. One could travel from Palestine to Italy to Greece to Spain. One could travel freely on the Mediterranean. Greek was the lingua franca. Someone like Paul who could speak Greek but also knew the Hebrew scriptures and spoke Aramaic. He could travel. He could visit the Diaspora synagogues. He could speak to Jews. He could speak to God-fearers. He could speak to Gentiles. Indeed, we don't doubt that the usefulness of the Apostle Paul and of other Hellenized Christians, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, in the spreading of the gospel. But it's a huge leap to say that they fabricated the Christian message and they taught something that was inconsistent with what Jesus of Nazareth taught. That's where Reza Aslan makes an unhistorical leap. Let's listen to some of his concluding words on this. Yes, Caesar Augustus claimed to be divine, but the claim that Christians made about Jesus was nothing like anything you find in any polytheistic Greco-Roman religion. Christianity is monotheism. It is consistent with the religion of the people of Israel. It is the belief in the unity of God, the oneness of God. It is not establishing multiple temples and sacrifices. It's completely inconsistent with Greco-Roman religion. What he's trying to say is that the Hellenized Jews presented the view of Jesus as God as a Hellenistic concept. No. They spoke Greek, but their views about Jesus were not rooted in Greco-Roman religion. They were rooted in the revelation of God consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures. And this new thing that God had done in the fullness of time in the Word becoming flesh So, again, he's trying to make an argument that Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, is a Hellenistic sort of invention. But let's listen to a bit more. And what we really see in these 20 years after Jesus' death, 20-25 years after Jesus' death, is this process whereby this Jewish religion, based on a Jewish revolutionary, becomes transformed into a Roman religion. What he never explains, this is his theory, he never gives us any evidence, maybe he does in his book, any evidence for why Jews like Paul or Peter would have fabricated or invented the views that they had about Jesus. Why when Jesus is crucified doesn't the Christian movement end as a failure? There were many who made messianic claims. There were many messianic pretenders. Gamaliel in Acts 5 mentions a couple of these. Thutis and Judas the Galilean. But it's the Christian movement that even after the cross of Jesus, after he's crucified, dies an ignoble death on the cross, they say he has been raised, his life has been vindicated, the claims that he made about himself are true. Did they just, again, he wants us to say they just invented this on a whim? Why? Herman Samuel Ramirez, who's kind of the father of this skeptical view of Jesus, claimed that the apostles had sort of, they were greedy, they wanted to make money and they wanted to live a life without having to do hard labor. That's why they invented the sort of myth of the resurrection of Jesus and retooled his actual teaching. Again, what Reza Aslan is saying is nothing new, but he's giving us no historical evidence for why we should believe his hypothesis over against the much more historically plausible view that is presented in the New Testament itself. Let's listen to a bit more. Well, he's trying to drive a wedge between the Jewish views of Christ and his hypothetical Greco-Roman demigodic views of Jesus. And what I'm saying is that there's nothing in the New Testament presentation of Jesus that is consistent with a pagan view of the demigods. Jesus is not Hercules. It's a completely inconsistent view that Christians have of Jesus with any Greco-Roman construal of demigods. But we'll go on here to some of his closing comments which are going to relate to his return to Islam. I'm just going to listen to just a little bit more of this and then we'll close up. When we started our conversation we were talking about how you became a devoted evangelical Christian at the age of 15. After moving to America at the age of seven from Iran, where your family fled the revolution after the Ayatollah took over, your family was Muslim, although your father just kind of really turned against Islam, became an atheist. Your mother remained Muslim, but after you became a Christian, she eventually became a Christian. you became a scholar of Christianity but lost your religion. You really are deeply interested in the historical Jesus but don't have the kind of religious faith. So she's asking him about his own pilgrimage and again he claimed to have been converted while attending a young life Christian camp and then actually through his influence his mother apparently made a profession of faith in Christ His father remained a sort of a secular Muslim, but then, according to his story, he went off to college, was exposed to historical critical methodology, most particularly about the life of Jesus, and then he abandoned Christianity, and I think he abandoned religion, so-called, for some time before returning to his Muslim roots. Let's listen to how he explains things. However, at some point you did return to Islam. So what was that point? We've been spending this interview talking about Christianity and about your comprehension of the historical Jesus. At what point did you return to Islam and why? Well ironically it happened while I was in college. I went to a Jesuit Catholic University called Santa Clara University. Wonderful, incredible learning institution with a really I always tell young students who are going off to college, if you can avoid taking a typical religion course in a secular university, you're probably better off. If you can get a believing professor, great, but unless you are really deeply grounded in your faith, and you understand philosophy and you understand the history of the study of religion and what the Enlightenment has done to the study of religion, then in general I would say avoid taking religion classes. But anyways, he goes to Santa Clara, this Jesuit Catholic school, and begins to take religion courses, including ones on the New Testament and the life of Jesus. Let's listen to what he says. And it was, you know, speaking to the Jesuits that I became very close to, talking about the New Testament, the doubts that I had about Jesus and the things that I was learning about the historical Jesus. My advisor at the time, who was a Catholic priest, just sort of offhandedly said, you know, What happened? Why did you abandon Islam? Why did you abandon the faith and culture of your forefathers? This is pretty amazing, isn't it? So it's a Jesuit Catholic priest who doesn't entice this young man to consider Roman Catholicism, but he encourages him instead to go back to his roots in Islam. And again, I have a hard time understanding a lot of times the Catholic view on people from other religions. They seem on one hand to be very exclusivistic and claim that their church is the only true church and particularly we Protestants aren't real Christians because we're not part of the mother church. But then on the other hand, if you listen to Roman Catholic theologians and the most recent Pope has made stirs in this area, they seem to proclaim some nebulous form of universalism that as long as you're basically a good person, whatever your religion, then you don't have anything to worry about. And the most recent pope has said that even atheists can be saved as long as they're good people. Here, oddly enough, this Jesuit teacher wants to encourage Reza Aslan to become a Muslim rather than remain what he was at the time, supposedly a professed evangelical Christian. It just seems like a very odd perspective from someone who would claim to be a Catholic priest. I don't understand it, but anyway, this is the result for Erasa Aslan. Let's listen to some more of what he says. And aren't you interested in learning more about that, especially now that you seem to be kind of spiritually unmoored by the academic work that you're doing? And it's funny, I've never really thought about that issue. I was never really all that serious of a Muslim. It was just kind of something that I grew up with and something that, as you say, was removed from my household after we moved to the United States. And so, at the encouragement of these Catholic priests, no less... Again, very odd that these Catholic priests were encouraging him to go back to Islam. rather than to consider the truthfulness of Christianity. It sounds like maybe they don't understand the truthfulness of Christianity, but that's another story. I began to go back and study Islam, study Islamic culture, Islamic theology, and something remarkable happened. What I discovered in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and what I read in the Quran, and particularly the great works of the So now he's going to talk about how he embraces Islam. In many ways, Reza Aslan sounds very much like a new convert to a religion. He has, I think, a very idealistic view of Islam. He claims, here he's going to go on to claim, he's identified himself with the Sufi branch of Islam, which is the mystic part of Islam. Certainly, as I noted earlier, James White has pointed out, he doesn't seem to have a traditional view of Islam. particularly the Islamic view, the Quranic view of Jesus. But, you know, he seems to have this idealized view of Islam. I wonder, he doesn't address, if he's from Iran, then most likely he would have been from the Shia tradition of Islam and not the Sunni tradition. As we know, there's so much animosity between these two branches of Islam. I wonder what he would have to say about the deep divisions. Is he a Sunni Muslim? Is he a Shiite Muslim? He doesn't address this. Instead, he sort of wants to rise above it and say, no, he's more of a mystic. And a lot of people do this with Christianity as well. They want to identify with mystics and not really get bogged down with doctrine. But he seems to be ignoring the difficulties of some of the Islamic doctrinal claims. For example, I wonder if Reza Aslan could write a book about the life of Muhammad along the same lines as what he's written about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Would he dare to dispute the historicity of the claims of the Koran? And then I would want to ask him, well, can you go to an Islamic country and say the sort of things that you've said about Mohammed and about the Koran, can you apply this radical skepticism to the founder of your religion and to the holy book of your religion as you have applied safely in a Western nation influenced by Christianity where there's freedom of religion and where there's freedom of thought and of course you can't do that in an Islamic context and he has a very idealistic, new convert sort of view of Islam. Let's listen to just a little bit more. "...was what I already believed. It was as though I was being told something I already knew..." "...well, partly it had to do with the way that Muslims and Islam thinks about God. The problem that I always had with Christianity, and what ultimately pushed me away from it, was the notion of the Trinity. I think he's absolutely right. He did not understand the Trinity. He certainly does not understand Jesus Christ. Of course, what he fails to see is he wants to claim that Islam proclaims the unity of God. Well, he doesn't understand that Christianity is a monotheistic religion. We believe in the oneness of God. We can say the Shema of Deuteronomy, here O Israel, the Lord our God is one. The Trinity is not a belief in three gods. It is not tri-theism. The Koran misunderstands the Trinity. That's obvious. The Koran seems to imply that Christians believe that the Trinity is God the Father, Jesus, and Mary in places. The Koran does not understand the monotheistic perspective of Christianity, but it affirms the Trinity, that God is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, but it's one God. God is one. and he wants to claim that Islam has the corner on the unity or monotheistic view of God. Let's listen to just a little bit more. Agreed, he trips up on the humanity of Jesus and the divinity of Jesus, fully God, fully man, But this is what the scriptures teach. This is how the Gospels present Jesus and how the early Christians presented him. And yes, he's stumbling upon the basic claims of Christianity and obviously he's not a Christian. He cannot embrace these things. You must embrace this doctrine of the full humanity, the full divinity of Jesus to be a Christian. It never made sense to me that God that I sort of It doesn't make sense to people who aren't Christians, who are unregenerate. God has to change your heart and then renew your mind to understand these truths. And yes, we call that salvation by grace through faith. And yes, he doesn't get it. I agree. Deeply and intimately felt in my heart was a being of It's interesting here, he wants to rely back on his experience. So again, he wants to claim to be a Sufi. It's about what feels right, and this has a very postmodern sense to it. He wants to deny all the historicity of the Gospels, and he wants us to go on what he feels. He feels like Islam is right. Martin Luther, of course, famously said, feelings come and feelings go and feelings are deceiving. My want is the Word of God. None else is worth believing. And so Christianity is not a matter of your feelings. It's a matter of the witness of the Gospels and the objective truth claims, the propositional truth claims about Jesus. And he is denying those, which we would expect from someone who is not a Christian. But some of the things he goes on to say about Islam, I think, would also make Orthodox Muslims also cringe. And this will be, I think, the last part we'll listen to. My unity was a being that sort of encompassed all of creation, in a sense. And that's how Islam talked about God. You know, in Islam, particularly the Sufi tradition, which is the tradition that I most adhere to, there is this notion that God is all of creation. In other words, that His very substance is existence. Again, I think this part would make Orthodox Muslims cringe because it seems like what he's presenting is really pantheism, that God is all, God is everything, God is creation, and I think that would make unorthodox Muslim cringe because I believe they would teach that God or Allah is distinct from the creation and not equal with the creation. Certainly the view of Jews and Christians is that God is not in everything. It's a rejection of pantheism and panentheism. No, God is transcendent. He is other. We would say God is one in three persons. So anyways, this is going to complete my review of Reza Aslan. In some ways, I don't know if it was worthwhile to spend these four sessions on it, but I've done it now. Again, maybe later on, if I have time, I'll read the book. and do a written review. I'm trying to think of what I might do for future episodes of Word Magazine. I really would like to get back to some text criticism, views on the text of scripture. I don't know. I'm going to get some prayer and some thought. And Lord willing, I'll be back next Tuesday with another edition of Word Magazine. Until then, take care and may God richly bless you. Your deeds, Lord, make me glad of joy in what You've done. How great Your doings, Lord, how dear Your thoughts to each one. Fools won't be shown. The foolish can't accept this truth to him unknown. Those tenders grow like leaves, Filled with words blossoming, They're doomed to be destroyed, You, Lord, exalted say. For your foes, O! See how your foes, they evil men, are scattered, O! You praise my house, my home, pour fresh oil on my head. You make me see the spice and hear what fathers said. Thy pride in calm, the righteous rose like cedars upon Lebanon. Prospected by the Lord, shall in God's court be seen. When old hills still bear fruit and flourish fresh and green, And loud proclaim, How upright is the Lord, my rock, no wrong in them.