Category Archives: Apologetics

7 Unbiased Facts about Jesus’ Death

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cross and crownArticle by Timothy W. Massaro (original source here)

Before asking whether Christianity is true, whether the resurrection happened—or even could— it is helpful to clear away the hype and rhetoric and look at the unbiased facts concerning the death of Jesus. Today, even liberal scholars agree about some very basic data. Moving on in the debate requires coming to an agreement concerning these seven things:

1. Jesus was a real person.
Before discussing the death of Jesus, we should recognize that most scholars agree Jesus was a real person who lived and died in first century Palestine. This fact is even held by hostile sources outside the Christian sources.

(Cf. Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 20.9; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin Tractate, 43a; Toledot Yeshu).

2. Jesus was condemned to die by the Romans.
According to multiple sources, Jesus was condemned to die for specific reasons. He attempted to lead Israel away from God through miraculous deeds. His enemies attributed his works to the devil as acts of sorcery. He was then condemned to die for blasphemy for claiming to be God. Jesus was handed over to Pontius Pilate by the Jewish religious leaders in Palestine. (Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth [New York: Bloch, 1989], 18–46; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin Tractate, 43a; Shabbat 11.15; b. Shabbat 104b; Toledot Yeshu).

(Cf. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus [San Francisco: Harper, 1996], 123–25).

3. Jesus was executed by crucifixion.
Jesus’ death was a well-known fact throughout the ancient world. Historians and politicians of the century spoke of the events that happened in Jerusalem. As the liberal Jewish Rabbi Samuel Sandmel observes,

Certain bare facts are historically not to be doubted. Jesus, who emerged into public notice in Galilee when Herod Antipas was its Tetrarch, was a real person, the leader of a movement. He had followers, called disciples. The claim was made, either by him or for him, that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. He journeyed from Galilee to Jerusalem, possibly in 29 or 30, and there he was executed, crucified by the Romans as a political rebel. After his death, his disciples believed that he was resurrected, and had gone to heaven, but would return to earth at the appointed time for the final divine judgment of mankind (Rabbi Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament, 3rd ed. [Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010], 33).

4. Jesus was buried in a tomb after his death.
While some people argue that this is contestable, they are in the minority. Most scholars see the multiple sources and witnesses from that century as proof of a factual claim. Jesus received an honorable burial, even though he suffered a dishonorable death. Liberal New Testament scholar John A. T. Robinson argues from the evidence that the burial of Jesus in a tomb is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus” (John A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973], 131).

5. Jesus’ tomb was empty two days after his death.
Jewish, Roman, and Christian sources all agree that the tomb of Jesus was empty. The location of the body and why it did not remain there is up for discussion but the empty tomb is not. As D. H. van Daalen points out, “It is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions” (D. H. van Daalen, The Real Resurrection [London: HarperCollins, 1972], 41).

(Cf. Toledot Yeshu; Clyde E. Billington, “The Nazareth Inscription,” Artifax, Spring 2005).

6. Jesus’ followers claimed to see him alive.
The disciples of Jesus believed that he was raised from the dead and appeared to them on many occasions. He first appeared to women, who in the first century would never have qualified as witnesses. Jesus’ disciples even went so far as to worship him as God and claimed he met with them to eat meals after his disappearance.
Suetonius (75–130 AD), a Roman official and historian, recorded the expulsion of Jews from Rome in 48 because of controversy erupting over ‘a certain Chrestus’ (Claudius, 25.4).

In a letter to the Emperor Trajan around the year 110, Pliny the Younger, imperial governor of what is now Turkey, reported that Christians gathered on Sunday to pray to Jesus ‘as to a god,’ to hear the letters of his appointed officers read and expounded, and to receive a meal at which they believed Christ himself presided (Epistle, 10.96). (See following for more: Communicating the Claims of Easter).

Whatever happened it is certain that the disciples believed they saw the risen Jesus and worshiped him as the promised Messiah (cf. Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus? [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995], 80).

7. Jesus’ enemies never presented his body.
The hostile sources that present a different rationale for the empty tomb could never present a body. While this does not necessarily prove the resurrection, it does leave the door open to other possible explanations. As Michael Horton concludes,

Although unable to locate Jesus, dead or alive, the very fact that Jewish and Roman leaders sought alternative explanations for the resurrection demonstrates that the empty tomb was a historical fact. For the gospel story to have come to an easy and abrupt end, the authorities would only have had to produce a body.

Geographical Historical Reliability of the Gospels

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Lecture – Dr Simon Gathercole “The Journeys of Jesus and Jewish Geography” given 05/07/2016 at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, TX

Simon Gathercole—Reader in New Testament Studies and Director of Studies at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University—recently gave a lecture at Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, on “The Journeys of Jesus and Jewish Geography.”

Here is a description:

The Gospels in the New Testament contain a remarkable amount of geographical information, especially in the quantity of references to areas, towns, and villages that Jesus (and John the Baptist) visited.

Are these genuine or fictitious?

Some Jesus skeptics have doubted the existence of places like Nazareth and Capernaum.

Even many New Testament scholars are unaware of the evidence for Gospel sites.

Strikingly, however, a huge proportion of the place-names in the Gospels are paralleled in Jewish literature outside the New Testament, even down to some of the small villages.

This illustrated lecture will examine the historical evidence, some already known, some presented for the first time, for the places in the Gospel. It will show how this evidence has clear implications for the reliability of the Gospel narratives.

You can watch the lecture below (and view the slides here):

Extra Biblical Sources

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Why Does the New Testament Cite Extra-biblical Sources?

Dr. John Piper

Audio Transcript

“Sometimes we talk about textual matters. Joe from Santa Barbara, writes, “Jude 9, 14–15 confuse me. Where is Jude getting the information from in these verses? Paul usually quotes the Old Testament (and it tells us where he is quoting from on the bottom of our Bibles), but I have no clue where Jude gets his info. I have asked others about these texts and they usually say something like ‘Paul quoted pagan prophets,’ but it seems to me that Jude is actually quoting Scripture. What do we know? What do we not know?”

Here is what we know and what we don’t know: Jude is not quoting Scripture. That is pretty plain. He doesn’t claim to be quoting Scripture, but we will get to that in a minute. Here is what we know and what we don’t know: We know that Jude was in the middle of rebuking some arrogant opponents in the church, and we know that in verse 9 he does this by contrasting their willingness to blaspheme what they don’t understand with the archangel Michael’s unwillingness even to pronounce a blasphemous judgment against the devil. So, that is the point: to rebuke their arrogance and presumption.

So, he says this in Jude 9–10: “But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’ But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand.” So, we know that Jude refers to a situation at the burial of Moses where Michael the archangel and the devil are disputing over what can be done with Moses’s body. And we know this is a story that is not in the Old Testament. Nothing is said. God took care of the burial up there in the mountain. Nobody knows where Moses was buried.

What we don’t know for sure is exactly where this story comes from according to verse 9. There is more in Jude 14–15 that we do know, but here we don’t know where it comes from. There is a Jewish book called the Assumption of Moses written between the Old and New Testaments which has a story like this, but Jude doesn’t seem to be giving an exact quote. We can’t say for sure that is where he is getting it. So, the answer so far for verse 9 is this: We just don’t know where he got that story. But he got it from somewhere, and he doesn’t make any claim to get it from Scripture.

Here is a further issue in Jude 14–15: Jude is still criticizing the ungodliness of his opponents, and this time he actually quotes a source outside the Bible. He doesn’t say what it is. At least, it looks like a quote. Most people think it is a quote, namely, from 1 Enoch. That is a Jewish book written about 300 B.C. and not regarded as inspired or Scriptural by Protestants or Catholics, and it was not in the Old Testament that Jesus used and endorsed. Jude 14–15 are a fairly close rendition of this verse. That is why most people think it is a quote.

These verses go like this: “It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying” — so, he is quoting now this prophecy that Enoch gives — “‘Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.’” So, Jude quotes Enoch, the seventh generation from Adam, as prophesying, and he turns his words against the opponents as a judgment on them. And that is the judgment they can expect.

Now, here is the question: What does this mean for Jude, who cites this from outside the Bible? Where did he get it? What is he doing? Here are two possibilities:

1. He believed that even though these sources — 1 Enoch and wherever he got the verse 9 idea, the story — these sources, though not inspired, contain truth that he is willing to use. That is one possibility.

2. A second possibility — and I kind of lean toward this one, but it is impossible to prove — namely, that Jude knew that his opponents in the church, the people that he is so upset with, his opponents in the church loved to make use of 1 Enoch and maybe the Assumption of Moses, these books. And they were their favorite books to use, and so he is citing their own documents in an ironic way to bring them back on their own heads.

Now, that is where this issue about Paul quoting the poets becomes relevant, because that is what Paul did when he quoted the poets in Acts 17 from the pagan authors. He said that God “is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man” (Acts 17:27–29).

So, Paul reached into sources that he didn’t believe were inspired, saw something that was written there, drew it out, used it in a Christian way, and turned it back, as it were, on his conversation partners there in Athens. So, even though we don’t know for sure, my inclination is to say that Jude chose to cite these extrabiblical sources because his adversaries put such a high premium on them, and then he turned them around and used them to indict the very pride that was using them.