Month: April 2008

Today, we finally conclude this section and tomorrow, that means we start looking at Hell. So how does Loftus wrap up his argument on prophecy?

Loftus is correct that the prophets were the ones that wrote “Thus sayeth the Lord” and others didn’t really do that. Is there any doubt in Jewish thought though that the words were not the words of God? There was no need to say it there. The prophets were saying it because they were standing out and announcing in the face of false prophets that they were giving the words of the Lord. Their writings weren’t seen as Scripture unless their prophecies came true.

Now we agree that prophecies are conditional in the sense that if people respond, God will not send his judgment. (Or if they are promised blessing and turn, he will not send it.) I don’t see the problem this poses with Deuteronomy 18. There would be prophecies that would clearly be seen as fixed. Some things did take place and the cases where they didn’t are the ones we do see a change on the part of the people.

We are told also that the OT prophecies weren’t much. They could be made by a newspaper columnist of the time. My thought to that is “Name one that would have been made that way.” I especially think of the destruction of Tyre being prophesied. What newspaper columnist in Judah would also write that the temple would fall to the Babylonians?

Loftus also wants to know that if God is telling the future, why not talk about DNA or a global network of computers? This is an argument from Sam Harris.

Right. God should have made prophecies centered on our time just to satisfy curiosity. Why would the church carry around a manuscript for 2,000 years talking about DNA? It would have been seen as nonsense by the church.

If the skeptics do not accept what is given, they won’t accept something else.

And it seems Loftus pretty much argues here the way he usually does. He’s started out with a weak case based on theology, thinking he’s trumped all others he gives a mild look at biblical prophecy, following that, he gives a small small small scattering of interpretations of the OT in the NT, and then thinks he’s refuted his case.

It doesn’t take a prophet to know we’re not convinced.

In our third look at this chapter, we are going to be doing exegesis today and looking at how the NT uses the prophecies of the OT. Of course, this constantly changes in skeptical circles. First, the prophecies are changed to make it look like Jesus is the Messiah, then the prophecies are misinterpreted, then the fulfillments are written after the fact, etc.

Now Loftus is sure that he’s shown the Virgin Birth and incarnation to be nonsense and that not even God can predict the future. For the first part, he hasn’t. For the second, we’ll have to look and see for there are several of these that the more we study them, the easier it is to say that prophecy has been fulfilled. Loftus wants to play the card that the verses were taken out of context. We’ll see as we move along.

Loftus complains about the Psalms. King David though believed that the Holy Spirit was speaking through him even in his prayers. (2 Samuel 23:2) I have no problem believing God guided the praises of his people somehow any more than I have a problem believing that God guided the thinking of Paul and the other writers of the epistles.

Psalm 2 is next on the list. It’s a hope. Yes. That’s correct. That assumes though that a hope can have no predictive fulfillment at all. It’s not an either/or. Psalm 110 is another one which was also seen strongly as messianic in Jewish circles of the time. David is speaking about someone who is greater than he, and this is obviously going beyond his son Solomon.

A humorous example is that Jesus is riding both a donkey and a colt in Matthew 21:2 based upon a misunderstanding of Zechariah 9:9. First off, the passage is actually Matthew 21:7. Secondly, hear what Craig Blomberg says about this passage in the New American Commentary on Matthew.

“The second ‘them’ in verse 7 has as its nearest antecedent in Greek the ‘cloaks’ of which probably more than one were put on each donkey, so there is little or no justification here for the common accusation that Matthw has created an absurd picture of Jesus straddling two animals.”

Please note that all it took was just a couple of minutes with a commentary to find a good explanation for what Loftus finds so unbelievable. Let’s also give the ancients the benefit of the doubt. They would know that one man could not straddle two animals like that at once. These people were probably much more familiar with animals than we are.

The next one we’ll cover is Matthew 2:14-15 with “Out of Egypt, I called my son.” Matthew is accused of misusing the text.

This is simply pesher interpretation which was accepted. Matthew sees Jesus as a new Israel as it were and sees the history of Israel taking place again in Christ. Let’s also consider this with Matthew. He’s writing to convince Jews, and these are Jews that do know their old testament. He’s not going to make a huge blunder like Loftus accuses him of if he’s trying to do that. Now we can say he’s wrong in his interpretation if we want, but let us not say he was ignorant of the OT. This is the same type in the use of Jeremiah with the slaying of the children in Bethlehem.

The last one is Matthew 2:22-23. This is one of my favorites as it talks about the word fulfilled through the prophets that he would be called a Nazarene. There is no direct text. I agree. However, when I studied this once, I noticed something. Every other time, Matthew speaks of “the prophet.” Here, he says, “The prophets.” What’s the point? I think Matthew is trying to show that according to the prophets, the Messiah would be lowly and rejected and Nazarene fits in quite well with that.

Now Loftus is upset about this saying that we wouldn’t use this method today or interpret by it. Oh my. Does anybody remember Loftus talking about the Outsider test and how one needs to begin with the worldview one is examining and understand it from their perspective? Apparently, the Outsider test doesn’t apply when it’s a worldview opposed to atheism.

It’s amazing that in all of this, only a few prophecies are seen. A websearch could give a list of several prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ. A key one would be to go to Daniel 9 and see how Jesus came at the exact time. I also think it’s convincing to look at Matthew 24 and see how Jesus accurately prophecied the destruction of Jerusalem. (So accurately most people think it was written after the fact!)

We shall conclude this section tomorrow.

This will be a short one again. I’m only going to cover a couple of pages. I was out late tonight with some friends from Seminary seeing the movie “Expelled.” I’ll go on and say that I think it’s excellent and everyone else should see it. I want to see it again. However, since I’ve done that, it is late and I am tired so I want to only write on a little portion to do due justice.

Thus, we’re only going to be talking about what prophecy means in a biblical sense. Not the discussion of usages of various prophecies or whether they’ve been fulfilled necessarily or not. It’s simply going to be that how does prophecy relate to the idea of God biblically?

First off, we are told that the Bible says God is eternal. This does not mean though that God always existed or always will exist.

Really?

I’m afraid I don’t know of any other definition of eternal. Now you can make it mean something else I suppose, but it sure would not be eternal. Does the Bible compare God’s existence to man’s existence? Yes it does. It’s done to show how small man is compared to the utter greatness that is God.

I do agree that before and after doesn’t apply to God. How does he act in time then? I’m not sure why this is a problem. I don’t really view it as God being outside of time so much as time being as it were kind of inside of God. There is nothing outside of God in a sense. Because he exists, all else that exists exists. It’s hard for us to imagine of course, but that is a far cry from saying that it cannot be done.

God is said to be unchanging but in those same passages, he is also described as repenting or changing his mind often. What is the case then? One is an anthropomorphism and one isn’t. The one that is describing actions is most likely anthropomorphic. Now we have a quote of Pinnock saying God should be like a dancer responding to us.

He is!

He is eternally responding to us. Every moment I’m at, God is eternally there and eternally giving me all of his love and grace. God eternally knows my heart and thoughts. When I turn to him, he is always there and when he gives his blessing to me, he has always been doing such. It is a far greater God than the God of Pinnock.

As for Impassibility, what’s so hard about that? God is not passive in his emotions. He’s active in them and they’re eternally in accord with his nature. God is not acted on. He is the actor. We are often subject to what goes on around us in our emotions. God is not like that. God is unchanging in his essence and is always acting in accordance with that essence.

Loftus tells us that God cannot know out future free-will choices. No reason is given why though. If God is in eternity, it would seem he can. Loftus wants to ask other questions like “Can God create a rock so big that he can’t lift it?” This answer goes back to Gary Habermas, but I’d like to pass it on to you all. It’s the most profound answer I know to that question.

“No.”

Now we’re ready to move on.

Loftus says that even from a biblical perspective, predictive prophecy can be explained in three ways.

#1-God is telling what he plans to do.

We can agree to a point. However, this is only if God has perfect knowledge of the future. Anything less and there is no agreement.

#2-God knows people so well he can predict what they’ll do and since he knows them so well, he can predict what they’ll do.

Which obviously includes knowing what they’ll name their kids (Cyrus) or where they’ll give birth (Bethlehem) or when or other such details.

#3-It’s a warning and conditional and thus based on human nature.

Please note this. Jonah is mentioned here as an example of how it’s conditional. Please note on page 125 Loftus says that since Jonah’s prediction didn’t come true, then can we really say Jonah was a true prophet? He then tells us there to see his section on prophecy and biblical authority and there, he makes the exact opposite argument that the prophecy can be conditional.
Talk about talking out of both sides of one’s mouth….

You really have to wonder…

And wonder we shall until tomorrow night when we continue.

Hello all my readers again. We will be going through this section in parts. The first part will be the problem itself of prediction. Can God predict the future of free-will human beings? I think at this time of Ravi Zacharias’s quip of “Prediction is always hard to do. Especially about the future.” Is it hard for God though? Let’s find out. (And of course readers, I am no open theist.)

The first question is how does God know the future. One answer Loftus gives is that he sovereignly decrees or determines what will happen. This is not my worldview so I will not be defending that aspect. If a Calvinist that holds to that wishes to do so, then let them. Already though, I think there could be a sense of hyper-Calvinism here instead.

I would instead hold to a timeless God in eternity. We can’t even say God sees the present from his perspective as Loftus does. God sees all things at once in an eternal now. It is true that 2005 B.C. and A.D. are simultaneous in God’s eyes but not in ours. How is this a problem? We are temporal and so bound by time it is hard for us to see outside of it.

The idea of a timeless God assumes all change is bad or good we are told. We want a watch to change to reflect the correct time after all. Yes. We want it to change to reflect that time. That is a change for the better. If it stops reflecting that time, that is a change for the worse. The change is more continuous in the former, but the watch is still changing.

And if God is completely perfect, then how can he change? Can he gain a perfection he did not have before? Then he was not perfect. Can he go to less perfect? Then he is no longer perfect. Either way, there is no need for change, especially if the case is that God is pure actuality. If he is pure actuality, then he has no potential and is incapable of change.

We are told when God began to create the universe, he changed. This is begging the question. To say that God began to do something is assuming that God is linear and in time. God is eternally creating the universe and eternally judging the world. He is actively doing all things at once in an eternal now. You might say you have a hard time grasping such a thing. Join the club.

We are told that to say that God has no new thoughts, does nothing new, or thinks nothing new has him static. Not at all. He’s totally dynamic. He is constantly in action. That action is simply always ongoing. He need not think new thoughts. He eternally has all thoughts going through his mind.  He does not need new thoughts to think. He thinks constantly on all that is knowledge.

The other arguments are views that I do not hold. The first is more open theist and the other is just that God has it innately because he is omniscient. If others hold these views and wish to defend them, fine. Let them do so. I see no need to defend the truth of a view I do not hold. If a view is misrepresented, that is one thing. If not though, then I will not defend it.

We shall see some of how this works on Scripture tomorrow.

And now we come to the devil. What about him? Is he different in the OT than in the NT?

It can be granted the OT doesn’t say much about Satan. Why should it really? It was about the preparation of the coming of the Messiah. The Jews did not have a Satanology nor would they really need one. Of course, writings in the Apocryphal period and in the DSS do feature an evil figure opposed to God and when Jesus is on the scene, he is not making up terminology with Satan. (Or Hell for some who wonder.)

There are a few places. In Zechariah 3, we read about the adversary accusing Joshua before God. It must be granted also that the word “Adversary” does not always apply to Satan. We would have no problem accepting that. Just like any other word, the context will make clear how it should be understood. (An interesting read from the liberal perspective on this is Elaine Pagels’s “The Origins of Satan.”)

Now we are told that YHWH can be translated to mean “He causes to happen what happens.” I would like to see more on this. Our stance here is that God allows at least all that happens. God is not the immediate cause of evil in the world, for instance, although he has allowed for evil to exist and yes, we will later be dealing with the problem of evil and focusing on natural evil.

The census of David is mentioned here, but there is merit to the interpretation that it’s the adversaries of Israel that cause David to do this and not necessarily a celestial adversary. Even if it is, I have no problem with God allowing Satan to do such a thing. It would seem the texts of Samuel and Chronicles can be easily reconciled either way.

As for the garden, I have seen no reason to read it as a parable. It could be that Satan did possess a snake somehow or that Satan was described as a snake.

I do agree also that Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 do not refer to Satan.

So let us go straight to the end as we simply have the usual canard of Satan coming from Zoroastrianism. It would have been nice to have seen some evidence but none is given. Loftus wants to know how an intelligent being like Satan could be in the presence of God and still choose to rebel? That would be a stupid being.

Quite simple. He was not in the presence of God. He had not yet been granted to see all the glory of God. Once he made his choice though for his own glory over God’s, then he was sealed for all eternity. When an angel chooses who he will serve, there is no changing. Let us hope some humans though who have the option of changing and are serving the other side do change their minds while they can.

We are finally on a different chapter and for this one, Loftus wants to discuss the Pharisees. Were they that bad? Now if we mean that these were evil men lurking in the shadows waiting to stomp on anyone who disagreed with them, then no. They weren’t. By and large, most Pharisees were simply ordinary citizens who had a certain view of the Torah and went about their own way. Ironically, I don’t see a mention of the historicity of the Pharisees starting out in the apocryphal writings.

I’d also like to note that Loftus is wanting us to understand the Pharisees. I have no problem with doing such. I just wonder if he’s willing to extend the same grace to the Christians in the Crusades. Are we going to say that they weren’t that bad or are they immediately going to be seen as blood-thirsty warriors who sought to kill all who disagreed?

Now I won’t say either that I think all the Crusades were justified or all that happened in them was. I do believe there is some justification for some of the activity that went on and I’m sure many of the Crusaders were men who thought that they were doing right by going and freeing the holy land of Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims.

Enough about that. Let’s look at the Pharisees and what Loftus tells us about them.

First, they were patriots. Loftus tells us that they fought for the independence of Jerusalem years earlier. They were largely middle-class and the power they had depended on who was king at the time. They were respected by the people at the time and they were intent on living separatist lives from society. (Though certainly not as much as the Essenes.) They were zealous for the rabbinic traditions.

Second, they were indeed men of the book. These people knew the Tanakh backwards and forwards. This is something we need to grasp when we see how Jesus responded with them and said “Have you not read?” when speaking of the OT. This would have been seen as an insult to the Pharisees. They were, however, quite strict in their interpretation of the Law.

Examples Loftus gives are handwashing and the Sabbath. What is written is quite interesting and does show the point. Loftus wishes to make a caveat though. “It would be a mistake to think that the Pharisees were consciously trying to make life more burdensome for people.” (P. 217) I agree. I don’t think the Pharisees sat down with ill intent to think of ways to make life more miserable for people through the law. However, intent doesn’t tell whether something is right or wrong.

Next, Loftus gives the areas of content. The first is between the oral law and the written law. Jesus saw the oral traditions handed down as burdensome to the people. Again, while the Pharisees did not intend such, it is quite likely that that had happened. Jesus wanted to return to the law itself for them and reminded them that the externals of the law were not enough.

This gets us to the second point in fact. The Pharisees focused on external purity while Jesus emphasized internal purity. I don’t think though, if we considered this statement, that anyone would prefer people have external purity over internal purity. I disagree though that Jesus judged their motives. He judged their actions. The statements he makes in Matthew 23 refer not to the hearts of the Pharisees but their actions, like the oaths and the adding onto the law and the building of tombs for the prophets.

Lastly, the Pharisees wanted to separate themselves from the sinners. Jesus was a friend to them though and his reason was simple. He came not to call the righteous but sinners. In their defense, Loftus says they wanted to associate with people who fulfilled the law. Well and good. I would hope we would want to associate with godly people as Christians. I would hope though we would want to associate with ungodly as well though. That is the only way we are going to be salt and light to them after all.

Perchance, it would be easier to see the reason the Pharisees acted the way they did is not because of who the Pharisees were but who Jesus was. Jesus shocked the very social system of his time and that was not something the Pharisees were taking lightly. There was tremendous religious and political turmoil where Jesus went due to his nature and teachings.

Let us reconsider where the problem lies. It is not with our view of the Pharisees. It is with our view of Christ. Until we realize how revolutionary he was, how much of him have we really grasped?

Rejoice everyone! We are ending this section on the resurrection! (Also note that when the gospels end on the resurrection, that’s cause of rejoicing as well.)

To begin with, Loftus has Spong offering up a reconstruction of what might have happened after the death of Christ. Loftus does say that Spong emphasizes that it is conjecture. Let this be noted though friends. Apparently, Spong can conjecture. When a Christian though tries to harmonize the resurrection accounts, we suddenly can’t make conjectures. History is just unknowable then.

What is it? Why Peter had a vision after his dejection over seeing his teacher crucified and all hopes for the Messiah destroyed. He takes this vision to the other disciples and they go to the feast of tabernacles and from there, the story unfolds. Other voices chime in on this idea saying that over time, the accounts just became more and more legendary until there’s a physical resurrection.

It’s a nice conjecture, but is there any reason to believe it? Is there any reason to believe that Peter and the others would have a vision and believe Jesus was resurrected and base their lives on that while knowing there was a tomb with a body nearby? (The hallucination theory cannot be held in isolation. It has to be combined with some explanation of the empty tomb.)

Not in those days. No Jew would abandon the central tenets of their faith for a new movement unless they were absolutely convinced that it was true. They also would not take a crucified messiah, who would be said to be under God’s curse, and rally to him as their leader. N.T. Wright makes an excellent point here in his work “The Resurrection of the Son of God”, that if they had wanted a new Messiah figure, the logical choice would have been James, the brother of Jesus.

This theory doesn’t explain James either! How do you explain him and Paul converting? It would take more than a psychological experience for someone to suddenly believe that their brother was the Messiah, and even more God. What about Paul? Why would he suddenly leave behind what he’d grown up with and embrace the faith he tried to destroy? These kinds of theories rely on psychology more than facts.

Loftus gives us the real reason for his buying these theories. He says “The sum total of my modern life experience is that truly dead bodies stay dead.” (p.215) Oh really? That’s your experience? You actually think most of us in this world have a different one? Do you really think for a moment that the ancients as well had a different one?

There’s something to be noted. Even if you don’t think the tomb was empty, you can believe Jesus was buried. Now why would they bury Jesus? It’s the same reason they buried anyone. They were dead! They did not expect for dead people to come back to life again. (For Jews, at least not until the final resurrection at the age of the Messiah.)

This is where I’m just stunned at what I see. If you want to come up with theories to counter the resurrection, all right. Go ahead. However, don’t give us this nonsense of dead people stay dead as if we don’t know that. We know it and we expect it. We bury our own dead as well. Barring the second coming of Christ, I’ll be buried someday as well and I don’t expect to come out until the second coming.

That concludes our look at the resurrection. Tomorrow, we shall go to the next section.

We now move on to the next part of the empty tomb. Loftus says that there are several mainline Christian scholars who argue against the empty tomb.  Some references as to where they do this would be nice, but it appears we’ll have to do without. I am wondering though how it is that Rudolf Bultmann is considered a mainline Christian scholar.

The argument that it was a legend though is that Paul never mentions it. (Maybe Jesus teaching the Sermon on the Mount was a legend also.) However, Paul does not need to mention it. In the 1 Cor. 15 creed, he says that he died, was buried, and he rose again. In the Jewish mindset, he would not have to mention an empty tomb left behind. The Jews would have known that one was.

Loftus knows of this and says that Peter presupposed the empty tomb based on his Acts 2 sermon. If it’s so important though, why didn’t they mention it more? Again, Peter is also speaking right next door to the empty tomb and being explicit is good for him in this case. For the other times though, if you mention the burial and the resurrection, there is no need to say “empty tomb.” Apparently, the only way the apostles can show they believe in one is to say “empty tomb.”

We’ve already looked at the idea of the gospels being embellished also. Apparently, it’s not enough that evolution apply to biology. It has to go to everything else as well. Loftus compares this to Catholic doctrine and states that since the virgin birth became perpetual virginity, then we can see how the gospels were being embellished as well.

I’m not a Catholic, so I won’t defend a concept of perpetual virginity, however, there is no doubt there was an oral tradition as far as I can see on these statements as one can read earlier saints and find where they made statements that would not mesh with later Catholic statements. This is one for the RCC to deal with though.

As for the ending of Mark, Mark has in earlier places in the book mentioned the resurrection. (See Mark 9:9 for instance.) Mark is a writer who focuses on abrupt endings and action. Why not think this was his purpose here? Having said that Christ would be raised from the dead earlier, Mark gets to the end and leaves the reader to realize that and decide what to do with that from there.

Also, the mention is made that the darkness over the land is not in any texts. Unfortunately, it is in Phlegon. Most people would have read of what happened as an eclipse. Even if told though that it was in connection with the death of a man, they would have scoffed. Why is that? A simple reason. Loftus still hasn’t learned that ancient people weren’t gullible.

And why was the tomb not venerated? It wasn’t because which tomb it was didn’t really matter once Jesus rose. Tourism was not a big deal for the Jews. The idea that locations connected with famous people should be venerated came about from Gentile influences. Also though, there are even Jewish NT scholars who believe we have found which tomb it was.

Now Loftus does hint at a couple of other resurrection theories. Unfortuantely, there is no reason given to believe any of them. Without evidence, it’s hard to give them credibility.

Loftus also says the empty tomb alone doesn’t prove a resurrection. I don’t know anyone who says it would. It is necessary, I agree, but not sufficient, as his source of Stephen T. Davis says. That is why the other facets are mentioned along with the empty tomb such as the conversion of skeptics and the appearances to the apostles.

Tomorrow, we shall look at Loftus’s arguments on “What Really Happened?”

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been on this one chapter for a week. Bear with me! We are nearing an end!

Tonight, the question is what is meant by resurrection. I would definitely recommend as helpful to anyone on this reading Guthrie’s work “Soma in Biblical Theology.” Guthrie makes a strong case that when the Bible uses the word Soma, it refers to a body and not to a person. There is one exception and the exception is what proves the rule, and that’s slaves. It doesn’t take much pondering to see why. Slaves would not be seen as persons but simply bodies.

So what about the idea of flesh and blood not inheriting the kingdom of God? It’s amazing that Loftus doesn’t see the problem in this for someone who studied apologetics. Flesh and blood was a common idiom of the time in Jewish thought. It did not refer to a physical nature but rather it referred to the sinful nature of humanity. Our human bodies as they are cannot inherit the kingdom. It doesn’t mean we take on an immaterial nature.

While Paul does speak of spiritual bodies, he does say that the spiritual man inherits all things in 1 Cor. 2:15, the very same letter. He surely does not mean the immaterial man. What he refers to in each case is that which is dominated by the Spirit rather than the flesh. When the Jews heard about a body, they would think of a physical body.

What about being like angels in Heaven? Jesus says how they will be like angels. He says that they will not marry or give in marriage. He does not say they will become immaterial. In Christian thought, the body is a good thing. God was not being foolish when he created our bodies. How they will work in the new kingdom is something we’ll have to wait to find out, but we will have them.

Loftus refers to the 1 Cor. 15 appearance to 500 and how Robert Price refers to it as an interpolation. I have a good friend though who happened to talk to Bart Ehrman and present this view to him and got told that “Well, if he wants to believe that.” It can be claimed that it is a good case, but a case that will not receive credibility in the scholarly world.

Loftus wants to know then how to reconcile the physical actions in the gospels with what Paul says. It’s really simple. You simply reject the modern view of a spiritual body and understand the text as it was meant to be written.

Unfortunately, what we have afterwards is simply a repeat of the same arguments and as has been said before, there is not much credibility given to someone who considers Spong an authority.

Today, we’re going to look at the question of if the disciples intended their stories in the gospel to be historically accurate. There’s only a couple of paragraphs on this one and the first one is simply introducing the theory and telling why we shouldn’t trust the accounts since they were written with an agenda for Jesus, an issue we have already dealt with.

If they never intended to tell the historical truth, they picked an odd way to show it. The disciples were willing to die for their beliefs and be sure to tie them in with history. Go read Luke 3 sometime and see how it starts. Luke lists several historical figures that were active at the time and then ties it all together by saying that the Word of the Lord came to John.

There is a reference to midrash which is defined as “The attempt to penetrate into the spirit of the text, to examine the text from all sides, to derive interpretations not immediately obvious, to illuminate the future by appealing to the past.” (p. 207 quoting from a Jewish Encyclopedia entry by Funk and Wagnall.) For those that might question this, it is an accepted one by Richard Longenecker in “Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period” although he admits it wasn’t as cut and dry.

Loftus quotes Spong as saying the question when approaching the interpretation is not “Did it happen?” but rather why Jesus’s life was interpreted through the great figures of the OT.

Um. No. I think the first question is a great one to ask actually. If the accounts given in the gospels did happen, then they are the greatest news of all time. If they did not, well let’s just forget about them. I have no need of a story to base my life on. The idea of Jesus’s resurrection is not going to be enough when I face death. The reality of it is.

This was the question asked to me once at a coffeeshop. “Does it really make a difference if Jesus didn’t rise again? Isn’t the story enough?” No. It’s not. If I’m going to base my life on a story, that story had better be anchored in reality. I think stories about knights saving princesses are excellent, but I hardly expect to find my future bride by getting a sword and going to fight a dragon. (Not that I’d complain. That sounds pretty cool actually.)

And as to the second part of Spong’s question, could it be they interpreted Jesus’s life that way because that’s the way it was? That Jesus was exactly what he said he was, the fulfillment of the OT? If that is the case, then we should expect that when we look through the OT, we will see Jesus. When we get to the NT, we will understand the OT in light of him.

There is also the claim that Christianity moved away from its Jewish roots and this made the midrashic retellings of ancient themes into literal events.

This would be a nice one to see demonstrated. The gospels fit in perfectly into a Jewish milleu as does the historicity of them. Now the church could have moved away later, but concepts like the Trinity are firmly rooted in Jewish soil.

Tomorrow, we shall see what is meant by resurrection.