All over the airwaves people are discussing the Passion of the Christ movie. A news commentator will line up two or three different guest. Guest one has not actually seen the movie but has rabid views on what effect the movie will have on the destruction of civilization as we know it. Guest two is an obvious believer who feels the movie is a wonderful portrayal of historical fact and that watching the movie is a spiritual experience because it gives new life to the story we have grow so accustomed to. The third guest, with a smirk on his face (I basing this on someone I saw interviewed this week..) says the film might be a good example of movie making but please don’t be confused into believing that what you saw on the screen had any similarities to actual history. This person (who is a reporter for another institution) speaks as if he has enormous levels of understanding of both, the Bible, and all of history surrounding the Bible. The commentator gives the man every bit as much credibility ( or more) as the Christian and millions of people around the country listen with rapt interest to this “expert” speak who am or may not have actually ever read the Bible and whose knowledge of Biblical history is limited to a history course he took in college.

I’ve been gathering various articles from unbelievers or theologically liberal people who do not believe the Scriptural account as written; who think the accounts we have in the Bible (Gospels) are simply the musings of well meaning people of the time, or who believe the Gospels were penned many years later by people trying to make sense out of the death of someone they thought highly of.

How do you know they are not right?________ What if you as a Christian really have been duped into believing a story that really has no foundation in the truth.

We read in the book of Mormon that at the time of Jesus this country was a highly civilized country with huge modern cities and that after Jesus died he visited this country and set in place the basis of what would later become Mormonism. Unfortunately huge earthquakes caused those vast cities to be buried under the surface of the earth and one day some well digger will run his pipe right into an underground city…… What you don’t believe that’s true?_____________

If you are so quick to dismiss that story from the book of Mormon why are you so ready to accept what the Gospel writers said?____________________

In the courtroom there are many different was at arriving at the truth. We are actually going to use some of the same methods over three Sundays to determine the truth of this crucifixion and resurrection of story about a man named Jesus.

In the courtroom, when someone has committed a crime there is few things more damaging than someone who says, I was there I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears, I felt it with my own hands. Martha Stewarts defense was badly hurt when her close friend took the stand and said, Oh yes, Martha told me she had gotten some good advise and was going to dump her Imclone stock. I was there…I heard it with my own ears.

Do we have credible eyewitness accounts of people who personally interacted with Jesus, who listened to his teachings, who experienced his miracles, who witnessed his death, who even saw him alive again after the resurrection?

That’s exactly who the four Gospel writers claim to be. Many say, no way, those books were written by anonymous people later on who simply picked the name of a famous disciple as the author. If that were true they certainly would have picked somebody other than Matthew the tax collector, John Mark the little nobody who eventually got on the Apostle Paul nerves, Luke the medical doctor turned historian who was not a disciple at all, and John the youngest, least credible of the disciples. Later on many books were written and said to have been written by the disciples… the Apocrypha, and Pseudapigrapha were all rejected and these four Gospels, with the exception of John, were never doubted, not for a moment.

Let me illustrate:

It’s like Vern’s book out there. He wrote it! We know him…We talked to him about the content of the book. People in this room were with him and were eyewitnesses of the events in the book. There is no chance in our minds that somebody else wrote it and just used Vern’s name. That’s how it was with the Gospels…the writers lived for many years going on book tours….. signing first edition copies………

It was hundreds, and hundreds of years before some enlightened thinkers who had an axe to grind against Jesus as the Messiah began to suggest that the gospels were written by other than those four eyewitnesses.

You see, that’s the whole point: There are those today who say that the Holocaust didn’t happen…6 million Jews didn’t die…it’s all a hoax. How do you prove it. Well you gather together eyewitnesses and you line up there accounts and you see if they are all saying basically the same thing. If each is credible, and even though each gives their own particular perspective on the story, they all basically agree…you can start to put some real weight in their story.

God took such care to give us clear, credible eyewitness accounts.. And then He made sure we have very early copies to show authenticity. Let me illustrate:

Every one of us believe the entire history about Alexander the Great. Yet the two earliest biographies about him weren’t written until 400 years after his death. Have you ever heard any one say they don’t believe the story of Alexander because so much time elapsed between his life and the first book written about him? Never!

Yet that’s the argument many use against the Bible. Between the years Jesus lived and the time the Gospel writers wrote( 30-50 years) there was a lot of mythology added until the account was nothing like Jesus real life must have been. Many say the Gospel of John (which repeatedly claim Jesus was the Messiah; God in the flesh) was written 300 years after Jesus died. But God in his wisdom (and sense of humor) allowed archeologists to find a copy of Johns Gospel that dated just 30- 40 years after he wrote it. That is unheard of in history.

If you want to read something we know was written very close to the time of Jesus we have only to turn to Paul’s Epistles. Paul was killed by 65 AD. His first Epistles were written within 13 years of Jesus death and resurrection, well before the first of the Gospels was penned. There wasn’t time for myths to be added to Jesus life…Here’s what he said:

(1 Corinthians 15:3-7) For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, (NIV)

Paul is quoting an early Christian creed he had to have learned in Jerusalem… this was what they put up on their power- point and recited together. If you trace Paul’s life back from his first missionary journey to where he went to Jerusalem and undoubtedly heard this Creed for the first time you are within 2-3 years of Jesus resurrection.

The Early Church were so “confused” about the events of Jesus life that within three years they were all reciting specifically that he died for their sins, was buried, rose on the third day, appeared to at least 512 people almost all of whom were still living. You think maybe if it wasn’t true somebody might have raised there hand and said: Excuse me…. That’s not true! The tomb is still full….Nobody says they saw him risen. No there were people still alive who had witnesses the living Christ

By some strange “stroke of luck“, all the eyewitness account of what happened seemed to be saying the exact same thing with minor variations, the entire early church accepted every single detail of the story as absolute fact, and 100% embraced all the written accounts that we have in our Bibles without question… until some 1500 years later when we all got smarter and begin to really look for the truth. Since then we’ve gotten so smart that some have managed to dismiss it all as fabrication.

The History channel gets their panel of “scholars” all lined up who, have all studied the situation and figured out that there never really was a resurrection. The poor disciples were so distraught at the death of their nice friend that they fabricated a story to help them in there pain.

Oddly; the disciples story was so convincing that the Gospel story spread over the entire civilized world in the next 80 years; hundreds of thousand became believers in the story, the disciples were so charged up that they poured the rest of their lives into spreading it as truth and every single one of them, except John were brutally executed for their belief in the Christ.

Every account about the Christ written by an eyewitness was in complete agreement, like a fine symphony for the first 100 years.

If this was a court of law our prosecuting attorney would try to discredit the eyewitnesses to see if they were telling the truth by applying several tests:

Test#1: Was it the intention of the writers to record the events exactly as they happened or were they just embellishing at will?

John: (John 20:31) But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (NIV)

The first gospel wasn’t written for 40 years after Jesus death, the last was written 60 years after his death. All of Paul letter were written before the first Gospel of Mark; why didn’t they tackle the job immediately.

1) All of them expected Jesus to return in their lifetime. Why write down historical facts for your descendants when the one you are writing about is going to be returning any day to bring history to a close.

2) The first century wasn’t a write it down society.( They didn’t have paper or pencils) It was an oral society. Stories were told and memorized. They were constantly checked for accuracy by those who originated them. This was a day when a Rabbi reached the top of his profession by memorizing the entire Old Testament. Every historical story, every math table, every grammar lesson was committed to the memory of every student in every school. There were no textbooks and notepaper. The idea that eyewitness could accurately remember a story 40 years later when everyone they had ever told it to had memorized it word for word and put it into creed was a “duh” in the first century. The only reason they finally put it on papyrus was because they finally figured out they might die before Jesus returned.

Critics point to the 1% of cases where the writers seemed to be saying two different things about the same incident. There are explanations if we had time to go over them one by one, but the reality is; we would expect people from two different times and placed to describe something slightly differently. If each account was exactly the same the critics would jump on that and say that they had collaborated and copied each other.

They wanted the world to believe their story. They were followers of the Christ. Perhaps they advanced what made their cause sound good and deleted what made it sound bad.

The most profound argument against that view is that every one of the Gospels say enough negative things about the Christ’s disciples to make them look really stupid. If the writers were trying to make first century Christianity look good there is a whole lot of others things they would have left out!

Test #5: Were there “adverse” witnesses available

Could this Christian movement have taken root right there in Jerusalem- the very area where Jesus had done much of hi public ministry; where he, in front of witnesses, was crucified, died, and rose again, If people who knew him heard that the disciples were distorting the facts…would they not have made a huge outcry. We all know human nature…our nature…If there had been people there who were purposely distorting the facts to achieve a personal end, many would have made it there mission in life to discredit them. Had you been there you might have been leading the pack…..

Unless, of course, there was no actual evidence contrary to what they were saying and all the evidence pointed to it’s validity and thousands of Jews were seeing the evidence and converting over to Christianity on a daily basis. That’s exactly what was happening…

III. Submitting the Evidence to CSI, Jerusalem (Only time to scratch the surface)

Defense attorneys search far and wide for evidence that will corroborate their clients story.

Corroborate- to make more certain, to confirm….evidence that serves to back up the eyewitness account.

Last Monday I and several others were talking to a young man about the Passion movie. He responded that he wasn’t going to the movie because he not only didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, he didn’t believe that he even existed.

I gave him an immediate, on the spot, private sermon about such a response using such spiritual words as “ridiculous” and “asinine.” Anybody can argue with whether they will accept the claims of Christ for themselves but no thinking person can say, I don’t believe he ever existed.

Unfortunately, when you turn on your cable TV you will hear statements made by “expert” like this one in the novel “Act of God” by Charles Templeton:

The Christian Church bases it’s claims mostly on the teaching of an obscure Jew with messianic pretensions who, let’s face it didn’t make much of an impression in his lifetime . There isn’t a singular word about him in secular history…not a word. No mention of him by the Romans. Not so much as a reference by (the historian) Josephus.

The word asinine once again comes to mind…..When people hear this kind of stuff spouted in an interview they don’t know that it’s pure fabrication.

Josephus, the most noted Jewish historian of his time, certainly not a Christian, collaborated with the Romans so even the Jews hated him. He worked for Rome writing history as it took place. Here’s what he wrote:

At this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people who accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. An d the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day, not disappeared.

That’s called secular corroboration. Sounds a whole lot like what the Gospel writers said.. don’t you think ? And nobody, today doubts any other thing that Josephus wrote. Everything else he wrote has proven to be perfectly accurate. The only paragraph in his writing that anyone questions…is this one.

The great Roman Historian, Tacitus spell out the same type of thing. There is no doubt in the world that Jesus lived, that the events of his life happened more or less just as the eyewitnesses said they did. The question everyone has to ask is not, did the events happen, but what do those events mean to my life.

Pliny the younger, a governor in (Turkey) write long about criminal cases he dealt with where Christian were condemned for following Christ “as if he were a god” .

There are mounds of secular evidence for anyone who seriously wants to go looking for it…. Phlegon, a Greek author, writing a time chronology writes