Showing posts with label reliability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reliability. Show all posts
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Wednesday Night Apologetics: Lesson 6
This weeks lesson is on steps 6 and 7 which are: the New Testament is historically reliable and the New Testament says Jesus claimed to be God.
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Wednesday Night Apologetics: Lesson 5
We are going to cover steps 4&5 in this lesson. Step 4 is: If God exists, then miracles are possible. An all-powerful God who created and is sustaining the universe can certainly do miracles. Unwarranted skepticism concerning miracles still exists however. How do we combat this? Dr. Craig S. Keener will demonstrate the fallaciousness of the common anti-miracle arguments and give an abundance of examples of documented miracles in the present time.
Step 5 then discusses what God can do with miracles. Miracles can be used to confirm a message from God. This is evidenced in the Bible in many places.
Moses is given signs to perform to show the Israelites and Pharaoh God had sent him. (Exodus 4:1-9)
Elijah defeats the prophets of Baal by a sign from God so that Israel will turn back to Him. (1 Kings 18:36-39)
Jesus told John the Baptist to look at the signs He was doing to demonstrate that He was the messiah. (Matthew 11:2-6)
Jesus also told the Pharisees they would be given one sign; the sign of Jonah (His resurrection) to prove who He was. (Matthew 16:1-4)
Next week we move on to steps 6 (The New Testament is historically reliable.) and 7 (The New Testament says that Jesus claimed to be God.).
Step 5 then discusses what God can do with miracles. Miracles can be used to confirm a message from God. This is evidenced in the Bible in many places.
Moses is given signs to perform to show the Israelites and Pharaoh God had sent him. (Exodus 4:1-9)
Elijah defeats the prophets of Baal by a sign from God so that Israel will turn back to Him. (1 Kings 18:36-39)
Jesus told John the Baptist to look at the signs He was doing to demonstrate that He was the messiah. (Matthew 11:2-6)
Jesus also told the Pharisees they would be given one sign; the sign of Jonah (His resurrection) to prove who He was. (Matthew 16:1-4)
Next week we move on to steps 6 (The New Testament is historically reliable.) and 7 (The New Testament says that Jesus claimed to be God.).
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Wednesday Night Apologetics: Lesson 1
Hey everyone! I have had some people express interest in hearing these lessons in some different ways than just on Wednesday night at Trinity Worship Center. Some people work with kids or youth or other places and can't make it; some people are in other classes, but still want to get this information; and still others are in my class and have told me they have trouble taking notes and keeping up with me (for that I apologize). I have decided to record my lectures over the powerpoint presentation that goes with it. That way, you can listen at your leisure and pause it wherever you need to. If you still have questions, please leave a comment or track me down at church. I am always happy to discuss God in the context of apologetics and theology. Below you'll find all the references that I have used in putting this class together. Enjoy!
Reference List for Christianity: True
or False?
I Don’t Have
Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek
Philosophical
Foundations for a Christian Worldview by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig
Chapter 6 Theories of Truth and Postmodernism
Chapter 23 The Existence of God (1)
Chapter 24 The Existence of God (2)
Relativism:
Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air by Francis J. Beckwith and Greg Koukl
Chapter 3 Three Kinds of Relativism
Chapter 4 Culture as Morality
Chapter 5 Culture Defining Morality
Chapter 6 Moral Common Sense
Chapter 7 Relativism’s Seven Fatal
Flaws
Tactics by
Greg Koukl
Reasonable
Faith by William Lane Craig
Chapter 3 The Existence of God (1)
Chapter 4 The Existence of God (2)
Miracles:
The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts by Craig Keener
The Case for
the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona
The New
Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by F. F. Bruce
Systematic
Theology by Wayne Grudem
Chapter 26 The Person of Christ
Friday, December 4, 2015
Book Review: The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright
N. T. Wright's book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is an argument for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. Wright goes about his argument mainly through surveying ancient beliefs about resurrection in general and Judaism/Christianity in particular by looking at pagan writings (ch. 2), Jewish writings both from the Old Testament (ch. 3) and the intertestamental period (ch. 4; i.e. after Malachi but before Matthew; 450/400 BC to 4/6 BC), Christian writings from both the New Testament (chs. 5-10), the early church fathers (100-300 AD), and apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Thomas (ch. 11 for both the fathers and the apocrypha). Wright's conclusion for each group is as follows:
1. Paganism: "'Resurrection' was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could (as it were) work backwards. Not even in myth was it permitted." (pg. 33)
"The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believe that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection." (pg. 35)
Pagans didn't believe anyone could be resurrected in the sense of new bodily life. While opinions varied, generally, pagans thought the dead went to a disembodied existence in the underworld or, very rarely, divinization by "the gods", whichever gods that might be. For us, as Christian apologists, this has implications. A common objection to Jesus' resurrection is that he was just a copycat savior in the pattern of other ancient mythical dying and rising gods. In other words, his resurrection was not a unique event. What Wright demonstrates, in a lot more detail than this post I might add, is that even if there were myths of "corn kings" as Wright calls them, and there weren't, wherein the hero savior died and came back to life, it meant nothing anywhere close to what Christianity means when it says Christ was resurrected into new bodily life; i.e. something like the life we live now, but different as well.
2. Judaism: "It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert allusions which earlier readers had not seen - a skill shared, according to the gospels, by Jesus himself - there is general agreement that for much of the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later times and texts." (pg. 85)
One of the more interesting points Wright makes about the concept of resurrection in Judaism concerns the Sadducees. They do not believe in the resurrection as evidenced by Matthew 22:23 and Acts 23:6-8. But many Christians, myself included, assume this is because they are the "liberals" of ancient Judaism. In fact, it is just the opposite. They are the "literalists", the "fundamentatlists", the "conservatives". It was actually the Pharisees that held the "radical" position of an end of the age resurrection for all the faithful. When the Sadducees read Job 7:9, they took that literally and inferred there was no resurrection. Of course, they were wrong, but this was interesting to me. As Wright surveys the Biblical and post-Biblical literature of the Jews he establishes that when the Jews spoke of resurrection, it could only have meant a bodily resurrection. It was the reversal of death. Not simply "life after death" where we all float on clouds in heaven playing harps, but life after "life after death". From an apologetic standpoint, currently, the most common objection to Christs' resurrection is that it was not a newly embodied Jesus that the disciples saw, but a vision, hallucination, or spiritual experience. So when the early church talks about resurrection and the life that flows from it, they just mean that in some kind of nebulous, esoteric way; not in a concrete actual event way. Wright has demonstrated this to be demonstrably false: the Jews and subsequently, the early church could only have been speaking about a bodily resurrection. That is what resurrection meant and nothing else.
3. Christianity: "It is, then, remarkable that Christianity, apart from the texts studied in section 7, never seems to have developed even the beginnings of a spectrum of belief, either of the pagan variety or of the Jewish variety, but always stuck to one point on the Jewish scale." (pg. 552)
Here is where it gets interesting. Christianity, in terms of its' beliefs about resurrection, is a sect of Pharisaic Judaism that gained a fuller understanding of that resurrection because of Christ's example and the guidance of the Holy Spirit through the apostles and leaders of the early church. While the Jews always talked about a resurrection of the faithful at the end of the age and used texts like Ezekiel 37 which talked about a born again Israel from bones as analogical references to the literal bodily resurrection, the Christians reinterpreted this around Christ's resurrection. Jesus' resurrection was the inauguration of the new age, and the death knell for the old age, but, with the consummation and the full inculcation of that age yet to come when all the faithful, both Jew and Gentile, would be raised to new bodily life in a remade heaven and earth. Wright terms this new body "transphysical" for transformed physicality. Much like the life we have now, but different as distinguished by Christ walking through walls and disappearing. Christians also always spoke about the resurrection in terms of new creation. While we can't live in this transphysical body until Jesus' second coming, we can live the abundant, resurrection power life marked by holiness, discipline, love, and hope until our time is up or Jesus returns. Again, when considering objections to the faith, we see that there was not a wide array of beliefs about either Christ's resurrection being an actual event or about what that meant for the community of believers. It was not the case that orthodoxy "won" and was put into creeds. It was the case that orthodoxy was true and Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).
Overall, this book was fantastic. I am not doing Bishop Wright's argument any justice in this short blog post. Although the book was 738 pages, it did not read like a dry, academic book and was very easy to follow from one point to the next. If you are looking for a deeper look, both historically and theologically, at the resurrection of Jesus, I would encourage you to give this book a try.
1. Paganism: "'Resurrection' was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could (as it were) work backwards. Not even in myth was it permitted." (pg. 33)
"The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believe that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection." (pg. 35)
Pagans didn't believe anyone could be resurrected in the sense of new bodily life. While opinions varied, generally, pagans thought the dead went to a disembodied existence in the underworld or, very rarely, divinization by "the gods", whichever gods that might be. For us, as Christian apologists, this has implications. A common objection to Jesus' resurrection is that he was just a copycat savior in the pattern of other ancient mythical dying and rising gods. In other words, his resurrection was not a unique event. What Wright demonstrates, in a lot more detail than this post I might add, is that even if there were myths of "corn kings" as Wright calls them, and there weren't, wherein the hero savior died and came back to life, it meant nothing anywhere close to what Christianity means when it says Christ was resurrected into new bodily life; i.e. something like the life we live now, but different as well.
2. Judaism: "It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert allusions which earlier readers had not seen - a skill shared, according to the gospels, by Jesus himself - there is general agreement that for much of the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later times and texts." (pg. 85)
One of the more interesting points Wright makes about the concept of resurrection in Judaism concerns the Sadducees. They do not believe in the resurrection as evidenced by Matthew 22:23 and Acts 23:6-8. But many Christians, myself included, assume this is because they are the "liberals" of ancient Judaism. In fact, it is just the opposite. They are the "literalists", the "fundamentatlists", the "conservatives". It was actually the Pharisees that held the "radical" position of an end of the age resurrection for all the faithful. When the Sadducees read Job 7:9, they took that literally and inferred there was no resurrection. Of course, they were wrong, but this was interesting to me. As Wright surveys the Biblical and post-Biblical literature of the Jews he establishes that when the Jews spoke of resurrection, it could only have meant a bodily resurrection. It was the reversal of death. Not simply "life after death" where we all float on clouds in heaven playing harps, but life after "life after death". From an apologetic standpoint, currently, the most common objection to Christs' resurrection is that it was not a newly embodied Jesus that the disciples saw, but a vision, hallucination, or spiritual experience. So when the early church talks about resurrection and the life that flows from it, they just mean that in some kind of nebulous, esoteric way; not in a concrete actual event way. Wright has demonstrated this to be demonstrably false: the Jews and subsequently, the early church could only have been speaking about a bodily resurrection. That is what resurrection meant and nothing else.
3. Christianity: "It is, then, remarkable that Christianity, apart from the texts studied in section 7, never seems to have developed even the beginnings of a spectrum of belief, either of the pagan variety or of the Jewish variety, but always stuck to one point on the Jewish scale." (pg. 552)
Here is where it gets interesting. Christianity, in terms of its' beliefs about resurrection, is a sect of Pharisaic Judaism that gained a fuller understanding of that resurrection because of Christ's example and the guidance of the Holy Spirit through the apostles and leaders of the early church. While the Jews always talked about a resurrection of the faithful at the end of the age and used texts like Ezekiel 37 which talked about a born again Israel from bones as analogical references to the literal bodily resurrection, the Christians reinterpreted this around Christ's resurrection. Jesus' resurrection was the inauguration of the new age, and the death knell for the old age, but, with the consummation and the full inculcation of that age yet to come when all the faithful, both Jew and Gentile, would be raised to new bodily life in a remade heaven and earth. Wright terms this new body "transphysical" for transformed physicality. Much like the life we have now, but different as distinguished by Christ walking through walls and disappearing. Christians also always spoke about the resurrection in terms of new creation. While we can't live in this transphysical body until Jesus' second coming, we can live the abundant, resurrection power life marked by holiness, discipline, love, and hope until our time is up or Jesus returns. Again, when considering objections to the faith, we see that there was not a wide array of beliefs about either Christ's resurrection being an actual event or about what that meant for the community of believers. It was not the case that orthodoxy "won" and was put into creeds. It was the case that orthodoxy was true and Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18).
Overall, this book was fantastic. I am not doing Bishop Wright's argument any justice in this short blog post. Although the book was 738 pages, it did not read like a dry, academic book and was very easy to follow from one point to the next. If you are looking for a deeper look, both historically and theologically, at the resurrection of Jesus, I would encourage you to give this book a try.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
The Chronology of Kings and Chronicles, Part 3
In part 1 and part 2 of this series we looked at how we can begin to unravel the chronological mystery that is the reigns of the Judean and Israelite kings. Edward Thiele, in his book, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, showed how he came to a fixed date of King Jehu of Israel's accession in the year 841 BC. He used Assyrian eponym lists that listed kings and special events from 892-648 BC. Once he had a foothold he was able to calculate everything else. But, as we have seen, it wasn't as simple as counting years. He also discovered 3 rules that had to be considered when doing the regnal calculations. They are:
1. Judah started their year in the month of Tishri (our Sept/Oct); Israel started their year in the month of Nisan (our Mar/Apr)
2. Judah used accession year dating; Israel used non-accession year dating. Remember though, that when they were friendly for a time, they used the same non-accession year dating system, then both switched to accession year dating until they were conquered.
3. Judah and Israel used their own dating system when counting the other kings reigns.
Those 3 rules are really the complicated part. This last portion is very simple. Sometimes, when a king was old or, as in the Northern Kingdom, there was infighting between 2 people who wanted to rule, there were 2 kings at once. A list with times would be the simplest way to show this
Judah
1. Jehoshaphat co-reigned with Asa for 3 years
2. Jehoram co-reigned with Jehoshaphat for 5 year
3. Azariah (also called Uzziah) co-reigned with Amaziah for 25 years
4. Jotham co-reigned with Azariah for 10 years
5. Ahaz co-reigned with Jotham for 3 years
6. Mannaseh co-reigned with Hezekiah for 10 years
Israel
1. Zimri ruled for 7 months which is already counted in Elah, Tibni, and Omri's counts; 1 year
2. Tibni and Omri ruled separate kingdoms at the same time in the North for 5 years
3. Jeroboam II co-reigned with Jehoash for 11 years
4. Zechariah ruled for 6 months which is already counted in Jeroboam II's count; 1 year
5. Shallum ruled for 1 month which is already counted in Menahem's count; 1 year
There is much more to learn about the chronologies in Kings and Chronicles. But, you will have to go get Thiele's book to go even more in depth. I hope this series has been helpful.
Resources
The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings by Edwin R. Thiele
The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant? by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. (ch. 9)
1. Judah started their year in the month of Tishri (our Sept/Oct); Israel started their year in the month of Nisan (our Mar/Apr)
2. Judah used accession year dating; Israel used non-accession year dating. Remember though, that when they were friendly for a time, they used the same non-accession year dating system, then both switched to accession year dating until they were conquered.
3. Judah and Israel used their own dating system when counting the other kings reigns.
Those 3 rules are really the complicated part. This last portion is very simple. Sometimes, when a king was old or, as in the Northern Kingdom, there was infighting between 2 people who wanted to rule, there were 2 kings at once. A list with times would be the simplest way to show this
Judah
1. Jehoshaphat co-reigned with Asa for 3 years
2. Jehoram co-reigned with Jehoshaphat for 5 year
3. Azariah (also called Uzziah) co-reigned with Amaziah for 25 years
4. Jotham co-reigned with Azariah for 10 years
5. Ahaz co-reigned with Jotham for 3 years
6. Mannaseh co-reigned with Hezekiah for 10 years
Israel
1. Zimri ruled for 7 months which is already counted in Elah, Tibni, and Omri's counts; 1 year
2. Tibni and Omri ruled separate kingdoms at the same time in the North for 5 years
3. Jeroboam II co-reigned with Jehoash for 11 years
4. Zechariah ruled for 6 months which is already counted in Jeroboam II's count; 1 year
5. Shallum ruled for 1 month which is already counted in Menahem's count; 1 year
There is much more to learn about the chronologies in Kings and Chronicles. But, you will have to go get Thiele's book to go even more in depth. I hope this series has been helpful.
Resources
The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings by Edwin R. Thiele
The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant? by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. (ch. 9)
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
The Chronology of Kings and Chronicles, Part 2
In part 1, we learned that Edward R. Thiele, in his PhD dissertation and book entitled; The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, acquired fixed dates for 2 events in the chronology of ancient Israel by using Assyrian eponym lists covering the years 892-648 BC. These 2 events were the rise of Jehu to the throne of Israel (Northern Kingdom) in 841 BC and Shalmaneser III's invasion of Judah during the 14th year of Hezekiah in 701 BC. From there, Thiele was able to calculate the dates for the reigns of every king in Judah and Israel. However, it was not without complication. As I said yesterday, the Assyrian lists and the foothold dates were only the first layer of confusion. Today, we will discuss 3 procedures that Thiele discovered in trying to piece together a chronology for these kings.
The first of these is recognizing when Judah and Israel started their respective calendar years. Judah began their year in the month of Tishri (our September/October) while Israel began their year in the month of Nisan (our March/April). This complicates things because a regnal year in Israel would overlap 2 regnal years in Judah. Also, both of these calendars would overlap 2 of our years (Jan-Dec). An illustration is in order. This comes from Thiele's book, page 45.
Each wedge with the month labeled is the beginning of the year. Judah is on top with Israel on bottom. What you can see here is that year 2 in Israel covers part of years 2 and 3 in Judah. So while Judah has counted 2 years, Israel has only counted one.
The second chronological procedure has 4 layers of confusing. This has to do with accession year and non-accession year dating. Non-accession year dating means that the year a king comes to power counts as the first year. For instance, if Hezekiah became king in June of 715 BC, that short time, from June to August, would count as year one. Year two would start in the month of Tishri (our Sept/Oct). On the other hand, if we use accession year dating, we would wait until the new year to start counting his reigning years. Using the same example, June of 715 BC, Hezekiah's year one would not start until Tishri, about 3 months after he had ascended to the throne. At this point you might be saying; "Great, which one did the kings use? This isn't so hard." Well, the 2 kingdoms, for most of their existence, used the opposite system of counting regnal years. This is the second layer of this one rule.
Judah used accession year dating from Rehoboam until Jehoshaphat. Remember, this means they counted the first year from the beginning of the new year. Israel used non-accession year dating from Jeroboam I to Ahaziah. Essentially, during this time, Israel counted an extra year compared to Judah. The chart below, from Walter Kaiser's book, The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant?, page 123 demonstrates this principle and clears up our counting of the years from the beginning of part 1 of this series.
The first of these is recognizing when Judah and Israel started their respective calendar years. Judah began their year in the month of Tishri (our September/October) while Israel began their year in the month of Nisan (our March/April). This complicates things because a regnal year in Israel would overlap 2 regnal years in Judah. Also, both of these calendars would overlap 2 of our years (Jan-Dec). An illustration is in order. This comes from Thiele's book, page 45.
Each wedge with the month labeled is the beginning of the year. Judah is on top with Israel on bottom. What you can see here is that year 2 in Israel covers part of years 2 and 3 in Judah. So while Judah has counted 2 years, Israel has only counted one.
The second chronological procedure has 4 layers of confusing. This has to do with accession year and non-accession year dating. Non-accession year dating means that the year a king comes to power counts as the first year. For instance, if Hezekiah became king in June of 715 BC, that short time, from June to August, would count as year one. Year two would start in the month of Tishri (our Sept/Oct). On the other hand, if we use accession year dating, we would wait until the new year to start counting his reigning years. Using the same example, June of 715 BC, Hezekiah's year one would not start until Tishri, about 3 months after he had ascended to the throne. At this point you might be saying; "Great, which one did the kings use? This isn't so hard." Well, the 2 kingdoms, for most of their existence, used the opposite system of counting regnal years. This is the second layer of this one rule.
Judah used accession year dating from Rehoboam until Jehoshaphat. Remember, this means they counted the first year from the beginning of the new year. Israel used non-accession year dating from Jeroboam I to Ahaziah. Essentially, during this time, Israel counted an extra year compared to Judah. The chart below, from Walter Kaiser's book, The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant?, page 123 demonstrates this principle and clears up our counting of the years from the beginning of part 1 of this series.
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| Our final chronological procedure is that each kingdom used its own system when counting the years from the other kingdom. If we look at the chart above, this means that Israel counted Rehoboam's reign as 18 years with non-accession year counting. The final piece of this complicated puzzle is the figuring of co-regencies (when a father and son ruled during the same year) and overlapping reigns from multiple "kingdoms" in the north due to infighting between rivals. In other words, some of the years in Kings and Chronicles are really counted twice. Next week, I will finish this 3 part series. Enjoy your holiday! God bless you! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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