Yes, the Historical Jesus is real. What’s the Big Deal?

        None except the unschooled can deny that Jesus is a historical figure (“To be or not to be” (Shakespeare, Hamlet) How real was Jesus? – hangonthbestisyettocome.com (hangonthebestisyettocome.com).  There were many witnesses to the living Jesus among all classes of humanity, the uneducated, the poor, the rich, the intellectual and the royalty.  Unable to deny these accurate facts of history, some people ask, so what’s the big deal about Jesus being real? Wasn’t Julius Caesar real too? And what about Abraham, wasn’t he real too?  Why do Christians and many others make such a big ado about Jesus?

        We Christians make a big deal about the historical Jesus for several reasons.  Let us look at just three of these reasons and their implications.

        Number one, while none can deny the historical Jesus, Jesus himself claimed that while his mother was a human being, his father was not human, but was God (John 8:23). While some may think this assertion is fantastical or preposterous, it is not a wild claim nor an original one.  Many nations of ANE (Ancient Near East) seem to have this as standard fare for their kings who became ‘god-kings.’[i]  Apart from the prophecies which clearly state the pre-existence of Jesus, the Jewish leader refused to accept that Jesus was the son of God or that He was God incarnate (Mat. 27:43; John 10:33).  Today the tomb of Jesus is empty. The historical figures of the Disciples, and the apostle Paul, the author of most of the New Testament books, testified that there were over five hundred individuals who saw the risen Jesus (1 Cor. 15:6). These are prima facie witnesses and would be accredited by any reasonable court of law. Thus far, biblical evidence or facts when read and investigated sufficiently have shown to be very reliable in the annals of history. Why not, as well, historical circumstances surrounding the birth and life of Jesus?

        If, therefore, Jesus declared himself to be the son of God or God incarnate (1 Tim. 3:16), then based on the veracity of the Bible, it behoves humans to pay strict attention to what he taught them about God, sin, judgement, and the return of Jesus to this earth to settle scores with mankind and to remove sin and determined sinners from the earth. In Revelation 22:12 Jesus said, “And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his works shall be.” If there is indeed a judgement taking place or is to come, then what are the criteria for this judgement?  How can we be on the winning side of this tribunal?  To my way of thinking, this sounds like a life-and-death matter, a very serious matter worthy of the highest, critical decision. 

        When we look at the destruction of the earth by the flood of which global evidence is prolific and convincing ((160) Noah’s Flood and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (from Pangea to Today) – YouTube), we ought to sit up and not make a hasty conclusion against Jesus, our future and destiny hangs on that one decision a person will make concerning Jesus as his God and Redeemer. Jesus says, believe in me and you will not die. John 11:26

        Number two, Jesus claims that He came to pardon our sins and restore us to the image of God and restore our citizenship of the Cosmos.  If Jesus is God, and over five hundred individuals were witnesses to His resurrection after being dead for three days, then the opportunity to have our sins removed and be restored to the divine image should not be deferred. What is sin? Concerning sin the Bible says, Whosoever commits sin also transgresses the law: for sin is the transgression of the law. 1 John 3:4. The law we understand to be God’s Ten Commandments, the Royal law as James puts it in his epistle called by the same name, and also called the law of liberty (James 2:8-13). Sin, then, is living in rebellion, lawlessness, against God.  This rebellion and rejection of God will be forever removed from those who accept Jesus’ pardon.  The more we behold Christ the more we become like Him through the Spirit of God. This is a spiritual law and spiritual laws are just as certain as physical laws. By beholding one is changed, 2 Cor.3:18, what you sow you reap.

        So the ‘big deal’ with the historical Jesus is that He came according to the prophecies to this earth in order to redeem humanity from self-inflicted death.  This He is able to do only with the consent of the individual.  There is no other way.  Humans were made free moral agents.  They were not robots.  They hold themselves accountable for their actions.  So, too, does God hold us all accountable for our actions.  God gave them the blueprint to live a successful life; following this manual would enable humans to live sinless and free forever.  To reject the rules of engagement would only bring rebellion, suffering, and death.  The sad reality is that the rejector of Jesus is not the only person affected by his dismissal of God.  The individual may live in a family.  In that family, if he is the father, or central figure, of the home, he can occasion the rejection of Jesus by his entire household through persuasion or force.  And this scenario is repeated in the school, the workplace, and the world’s governments.  Fortunately, in some countries with more liberty, individuals may have the arm of the law to protect their freedom of choice, although in many cases there are several levels of consequences for rejection of the rules of the majority.  Yet the freedom of choice is still with the individual as daunting as that may be.

        The third reason Jesus is a ‘big deal’ in our world is concerning morality.  Most every country has a code of ethics which impacts social mores and living.  Several of these mores or ethical actions seem to be universal. They even can be traced further back than the Code of Hammurabi and as far back as the Sumerian culture.[ii]  D. Winton Thomas, in his translation of Documents from Old Testament Times, brings to light many of the moral and ethical patterns of these people of great antiquity, demonstrating how far back moral and ethical beliefs go.[iii]  That morality appears contemporaneous with the existence of humans and is interestingly brought to light in Chinese historical research.  Sino-research appears to show that China may have the longest unbroken culture of 4000 years.[iv]  Morality in China was connected to holiness and God’s law of heaven.[v] There also seems to be a huge affinity between Chinese and  Hebrew biblical morality, as if they were quoting from the same source.[vi]

        The morality then, that we say amounts to a big deal in our world and which Jesus supported and promoted, is a code of moral or ethical behaviour which God Gave to humanity.  In our world today concerning morality, what are we witnessing? Is it being discarded or promoted? Morality has been observed in most societies for millennia, but as society became more industrialized and sophisticated morality and ethics have taken a huge hit.  Some say the collapse in Western morality began with Epicurus and his erroneous understanding of the God-man relationship.  Since, in Epicurus’ eyes, all the natural disasters were the gods’ attempts to speak to man in order to communicate their will, then it would be far better to attune oneself to nature in order to know how to get around these natural phenomena.  It was this downplaying or rejection of God or the gods that control nature that led to the downplaying of religion and the acceptance of ‘nature’ as the entity to be appeased.[vii]  This rejection of religion led to the ascendency of ‘man’ as the source to be followed and not the gods or God.

        It has been observed by anthropologists in a recent study entitled Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past, published in October 2020 by Richard E. Blanton Gary Feinman, Stephen A. Kowaleski and Lane F. Fargher, that as state-building incorporates fiscal economies of joint production fostering the implementation of good governance, as accountable leadership and policies and practices highly regarded by citizens, incorporating moral exemplar roles,  these states prospered. Declension, on the other hand, slipped away fast when the moral and accountable roles were eclipsed by autocracy and exploitation of the citizenry.[viii]  Across the world, it seems like society is on the verge of collapse with their moral codes in total disarray.  It is only the voice of Jesus, the God-man, through the voices of genuine Christians and dedicated men and women, holding fast to the moral codes and ethics and accountability, given us by God in the Bible, that can be heard calling humanity back to the true principles of Godliness before the total collapse of human society.  It has been observed that with the decline of morals and ethics comes the consequent decline of society.  No wonder the psalmist can say in Psalms 144:15: yea, happy is that people, whose God is the LORD.

        They tell us that we are now living in a post-human society where the norms are not delineated by an external God but by humans themselves, if there is a God we have no need of him were the sentiments of Stephen Hawking, the world’s late celebrated physicist. Here are some other pronouncements of our dying world:

• we are no longer humans, we are posthumans.
• Western society says male and female gender is antiquated. A person can be whatever gender he wants.
• Woman, with her biology to affirm it, is not a female, that is only her identification; she can choose whatever gender she chooses. The same for men.
• Canadians can choose to defer a baby’s sex until it is older.
• British Columbia definition of gender: Trans or transgender is a broad term that describes people with different gender identities and expressions that do not conform to general ideas about what it means to be a girl/woman or boy/man. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/law-crime-and-justice/human-rights/human-rights-protection/discrimination-gender-identity-expression.pdf.
• We no longer say, ‘breast-feed,’ that’s discriminating against men who say they are females but do not have breasts, instead we should say, ‘chest-feed,’ although nature shows us that breasts and their nipples only grow on females to feed their young.

        While society is fast collapsing God will have a people who will fear nothing and proclaim the good news of Christ’s return to this earth for all those who have accepted His salvation and are reaching out to men and women of the world with this good news.  My prayer, folks, is that you will accept Jesus into your life and let Him transform you into the divine image in order to join the Cosmos.  May the blessings of the Almighty be upon you.

[i]The Age of the God-Kings (3000-1500) Editors of Time-Life Books; Time-Life Books, Amsterdam (1987); Jan Assmann: The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, (Cornell University Press, 2001).

[ii] The Age of the God-kings (3000-1500), Breakthrough at Sumer, 9.

[iii] D. Winton Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times, translator and editor, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961.

[iv] Ethel R. Nelson, Richard Broadberry and Samuel Wang, The Beginning of Chinese Characters, Reed Books Pub., TN. (2001), introduction.

[v] Samuel Wang and Ethel R. Nelson, God and the Ancient Chinese, Pub. Zapada Rd., ID, (1998), 108…

[vi]  Chan Kei Thong with Charlene Fu, Faith of Our Fathers, Finding God in Ancient China, Pub. Originally published in China by China Publishing Group, Orient Pub. Centre, Shangai, 2007; later by Campus Crusade Asia Limited, Singapore, 2009.

[vii] Benjamin Wiker, Moral Darwinism,  How We Became Hedonists, Pub. InterVarsity, chapt. 1 It All Started With Epicurus, p. 31.

[viii] Richard E. Blanton, Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski and Lane F. Fargher: Correspondence: Richard E. Blanton blanton@purdue.edu.  Edited by: Anna Herranz-Surralles, Maastrict University, Netherlands. Moral Collapse and State Failure: View from the Past. Article.  (2020).

If you have any comments or questions please contact Pr. Ron Henderson at ronhende@outlook.com.

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