Mankind's Greatest Hour

Today, as we fire up our grills and crack open our beers, let us remember why we even have a July 4th holiday: To commemorate the greatest act of shared, selfless courage the world has ever seen.

Everybody should know that Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence. Most people know the names of a handful of the 56 men who signed it, such as John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and of course Jefferson himself. But few people seem to realize that when those men signed their names, they were committing what was considered an act of treason against the British crown, punishable by death. Those men were property owners who were successful in their lives and businesses. Their lives were comfortable and they stood to lose everything by signing the Declaration -- yet they chose to sign it anyway, because they knew that casting off the crown and forming a new government based on individual liberty was the right thing to do, not only for their own descendants but for all of humanity. And here is what happened to some of those men after they signed the Declaration:

Five of them became prisoners of war.

Nearly one-sixth of them died before the war ended.

British forces burned, and/or looted, the homes and properties of nearly one-third of them.

When the British did that to the property of William Floyd, he and his family fled and spent the next seven years living as refugees without income. His wife died two years before the war ended.

After being forced into the wilderness by British forces, John Hart struggled to make his way home. When he finally got there, he found that his wife was dead and his 13 children were missing. He died without ever seeing them again.

Richard Stockton was dragged from his bed and sent to prison while his property was ravaged. From the day of his release from prison until the day he died, he had to rely on charity from others to feed his family.

Francis Lewis’s wife was imprisoned and beaten. Meanwhile, his wealth was plundered. His last years were spent as a widower living in poverty.

Thomas Nelson Jr.’s home was captured and occupied by British General Cornwallis, who used it as what we would now call an operations center. Therefore, Nelson ordered his troops to destroy his own home with cannon fire during the Battle of Yorktown. To assist in funding the war, he used his own credit to borrow 2 million dollars, which today would equal more than 25 billion dollars. Repaying that debt bankrupted him, and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave.

It is a safe bet that fewer than one percent of our citizens have ever heard of these people, much less know anything about the devastating sacrifices they made so that future generations could have the freedom necessary to build the kind of upwardly-mobile, always-progressing society we would come to take for granted.

The Founding Fathers bequeathed to us a wonderful gift called America, and we owe it to our children to make sure we don’t allow that gift to be destroyed. We should never hear the words “Fourth of July” without feeling a skip in our heart and a tear in our eye.

Much thanks to Jeff Jacoby, the late Paul Harvey, and all the others who have written and spoken about the fates of the signers, to keep their story alive. 

About "The" Book, Part 11

  

Pontius Pilate is one of the most intriguing figures in history. Many people place him squarely in the villain category, but he also happens to be one of the most quintessentially human figures in the Bible.

Pilate played a pivotal role in human history and is mentioned in all four gospels, yet the only day of his life that gets biblical ink is the one morning that Jerusalem's religious leaders caught him off guard by bringing him a prisoner and demanding he sentence him to death.

That morning is the only reason anyone still knows about him today. Since it was destined to be commemorated as Good Friday and today happens to be Good Friday 2023, it seems like an ideal time to think about this man who appeared and vanished in a flash from the pages of history.

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The thumbnail sketch of Pilate's role in the Bible is that he was the Roman Empire's governor of the province of Judaea; was therefore powerful; presided over the final trial of Jesus; and had doubts as to whether Jesus was guilty, yet ultimately agreed to consign him to death.

That is all true, but of course it only scratches the surface.

The average term of office for provincial governors was two years. The fact that Pilate held that office in Judaea for a full decade (26 to 36 A.D.) tells us he was strong, effective, and trusted by Caesar's cronies as well as Caesar himself.

When it came to Rome's interests in Judaea, Passover was the tensest time of year. It was when Jewish pilgrims from far and wide descended on the capital city of Jerusalem to memorialize an event that evoked both religious and nationalist passions. With upwards of 100,000 celebrants gathered on the Temple Mount to honor their ancestors' liberation from Egypt, might they become inspired to focus some ire on their present Roman occupiers who were in their very midst, and might their celebration suddenly transform into a revolt?

To project its authority, each Passover Rome stationed additional troops in Jerusalem while Pilate took up residence in the Antonia Fortress. A military edifice on the Temple Mount itself, overlooking the temple's open, bustling, outermost area, the so-called Court of the Gentiles, this fortress is where Pilate was when the chief priests and elders arrived in the early morning with Jesus in shackles. (For ease of communication, from here on out I will use the word "Pharisees" to describe those priests and elders, even though there might have been some particular individuals for whom that word did not technically apply.)

We know from all four gospels that Jesus was arrested at night and taken to the high priest Caiaphas, either at his own house or at that of his father-in-law Annas. There, he was questioned by Caiaphas and whichever other religious officials were able to hastily and sneakily assemble in the dead of night.

The questioning was largely for show. They already wanted him dead in order to protect their prestige, and Caiaphas had already given them cover when he declared it "better that one man should die" rather than "the whole nation" (John 11:50), so when they accused Jesus of claiming to be divine and he not only didn't deny it, but flatly affirmed it, they instantly considered him worthy of death according to the Levitical rules of their faith. They figured that would squash his movement in its tracks by dramatically demonstrating he was no Messiah. Surely that would send his followers fleeing to the hills in fear.

Their plan faced a major obstacble, however: Judaea was ruled by Rome, and Roman law forbade anybody but Romans from imposing a death sentence. One of the ways Rome managed to keep Pax Romana going for 200 years was by giving people in its provinces some degree of latitude to practice their own religions and follow their own customs, so long as it didn't interfere with the empire's ability to control the big things and collect its taxes. As such, Rome was happy to let Jews adhere to their weird rules about things like not eating pork and not wearing a garment made of two fabrics. The death penalty, on the other hand, was a bridge way, way too far -- allowing Jews to wield that kind of power within Rome's official borders would undermine the empire's authority, especially if Jewish leaders got too big for their britches and started executing the wrong people.

The only way for Caiaphas & Co. to have Jesus executed without brining Rome's fury down on themselves was to convince the Romans to do the executing themselves. And they needed to move fast because the sun had yet to rise and the execution needed to be underway before news of Jesus's captivity could get out and trigger a riot. This is why the Pharisees arrived at the Antonia Frotress seeking to see Pilate so early. According to John 18:28 "it was early morning," and according to Mark 15:1 they met "as soon as it was morning" and "led him away and delivered him over to Pilate."

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The governor awoke that Friday having no idea what was going to happen. Little did he know that so many nuances of human nature were about to be tweaked and manifested that folks like me would be sitting around 2,000 years later referring to him as "one of the most quintessentially human figures" in something we call "the Bible."

Passover was to begin at sunset and Pilate's Jewish subjects, their numbers swollen by pilgrims, were to eat the sacred Seder feast when it did. The few hours prior to sunset were to be consumed by the obligatory slaughtering of countless paschal lambs (one for each family) in the Temple's court.

It was the busiest day of the entire year in Jerusalem, especially on the Temple Mount where Pilate needed everything to go off off without a hitch. Surely he wasn't pleased to have religious authorities show up at dawn demanding he kill a holy man who, according to them, was becoming dangerously popular among the commoners.

Pilate was a powerful man who dealt with powerful men, with men whose egos needed managing. He knew how to read a room and his shrewdness for doing so came to the fore that morning. Two of the gospels explicitly state that he realized what the Pharisees' real reason was for hauling Jesus in: According to Matthew 27:18 "he knew that it was out of envy," and according to Mark 15:10 "he perceived that it was out of envy."

Knowing he couldn't send a man to death simply because the holy hoity toity wanted him to, and keenly aware that sending a man to death could inflame the streets if he was beloved by a large following, Pilate demanded to know the charges against Jesus and why they warranted death under Roman law. The Pharisees, apparently having expected Pilate to simply do what they wished, were caught by surpise and had no good answer to give.

This caused the red flags in Pilate's mind to flap even harder, and he pushed back. All four gospels are clear that Pilate knew Jesus was innocent of violating any Roman law, and that he strongly suspected Jesus was not even guilty of violating Jewish law. On three occasions (once in Luke, twice in Matthew) Pilate is recorded as speaking the words "I find no guilt in this man" or "I find no guilt in him."

Wanting to get to the bottom of things, he questioned Jesus directly, and those conversations show him to be genuinely curious. Yes he wanted to keep the local populace at bay and maintain Rome's power and prestige, but that was not all he wanted. Yes he played for the bad team, but we're all sinners and, at his core, was he any more of a bad guy than your average Joe?

Pilate was used to seeing defendants feverishly proclaim their innocence in order to avoid conviction and escape punishment. But Jesus, faced with a litany of serious charges and knowing his accusers wanted him killed, responded with tranquility. He either said nothing, or spoke in ways that seemed riddling and showed no urgency to avoid death. Matthew and Mark tell us this caused Pilate to be "amazed," with Matthew beefing it up by saying "greatly amazed." I find myself wondering how many different wrinkles of amazement we're talking about and how deep they run. I wonder if the Koine Greek word rendered here as "amazed" might be one of those words that doesn't have an exact counterpart in another language?

Many people today don't realize that in ancient times it was almost unheard of to doubt or deny the existence of other people's gods. Nation X worshipped certain gods because it believed it had been assigned those gods, while Nation Y worshipped others it believed had been assigned to it. Maybe each nation thought its gods could whip yours if ever the twain should meet, but it still presumed your gods were as real as its. I believe this is why Pilate responded fearfully, not angrily, when finally told that Jesus claimed to be divine. He believed in supernatural beings and knew they were not for humans to trifle with; and now, suddenly, he was in the presence of someone who claimed to be supernatural and behaved like no human he'd ever seen, and he was being asked to pass judgment on him.

Also, ancient people placed great importance on dreams and believed the gods communicated to them in dreams. This probably explains why Matthew informs us that Pilate, while in the middle of adjuctaing Jesus's trial, received word sent by his wife that warned him to "have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream."

The wives of Roman officials weren't wont to send them urgent messages in the middle of them performing official duties. That a courier bearing a message showed up, ostensibly out of the blue, must have felt strange to Pilate in the first place; and it must have felt indescribably stranger when the message conveyed that his wife had dreamt of the man he was currently being asked to judge. Pilate himself had not even heard of him before. What kind of thoughts rippled through his mind when the message came?

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For my money, the most intense indicator of his humanity is how he responded "late in the game" when chips started falling in ways he didn't like. That is when his actions reflected the influence of two instincts that weigh most heavily on human beings: fear and self-preservation.

Pilate knew the Pharisees were envious of Jesus, that they wanted his followers to be shown he was not who he claimed to be. He could live easily with that, but killing Jesus was a step he did not want to take.

Pilate was not a scrupulous, ahead-of-his-time proponent of modern due process. But he was a man of law who knew the importance of evidence and rules, of staying within guardrails and holding to standards. With all that in mind, he knew Jesus was not accused of breaking any Roman laws (especially any that called for capital punishment) -- and he sensed it would not go over well with his superiors for him to use Rome's imprimatur to sentence an innocent man to death in a province where that man was popular among the non-Roman locals.

Yet, here he was being asked to do just that. Early on the morning of the most important day of the locals' year. By the locals' own religious leaders, whose alliance he needed if he was to maintain Pax Romana and keep his bosses happy. In his mind, Pilate sought escape hatches and thought he found some.

Surely if Jesus were to be beaten, bloodied, and pilloried, in public view, without being able to stop it, that would show his followers he wasn't divine. Right? Surely that would sate the Pharisees without him having to impose the death penalty. Right? Surely that would shame Jesus's followers into stumped silence, without running the risk of turning him into a martyr around whose memory they might rally. Right?

It was Pilate, not the Pharisees, who came up with the idea of beating and mocking Jesus in lieu of killing him (Luke 15:16, John 19:1-4) but the Pharisees were not mollified. They liked the beating/mocking idea, of course, but wanted that plus death. If they couldn't have both, they wanted death alone. Anything short of death was not on their agenda.

And the Pharisees specifically wanted Jesus's death to be by crucifixion. Crucifixion was considered the most disgraceful way for a person to die. Its purpose was not "merely" to kill, but to shame and humiliate a man in such a way that his reputation would be permanently destroyed through the end of time. Only the absolute worst of the worst were subject to crucifixion.

Both the Jews and Romans had an honor/shame culture, and like Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou has explained, "honor and glory were so highly valued that preserving personal honor and avoiding shame were considered more important than money and even more important than life itself...The humiliation that accompanied crucifixion was one of the primary reasons it served as a deterrent -- people did not fear the pain alone...[a crucified man] is isolated, displayed without the dignity of clothing, as one who has violated the law and is now literally exposed as a wrongdoer for all to see. Therefore, obviously (in the Jewish mind), all crucifixion victims were cursed by God himself...Nothing surpassed crucifixion as a statement of culpability and rejection by God."

Undeterred by Pilate's unambiguous determination to bludgeon but not crucify, the Pharisees entrenched themselves and kept demanding crucifixion. Even when Pilate broached the Passover custom of releasing to the Jews "any one prisoner whom they wanted" and assumed they would choose the peaceful Jesus over the only other option, a violent criminal named Barabbas, the Pharisees shocked him by demanding that Barabbas be the one set free. According to Mark 15:9 Pilate did not even mention a choice between the two, but rather said simply "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?" only to have them respond by asking him to release "Barabbas instead."

Because in some passages English translations of the Bible refer to the audience before Pilate as a "crowd," modern readers often picture a large mob consisting of normal Jews as well as Pharisees. However, historical and linguistic context are important and they tell us this picture is not correct. Jesus was brought to Pilate very early, before people were up and about, precisely because the Pharisees wanted his crucifixion to be a fait accompli before the hoi polloi could get wind of it and try to stop it. Also, it is exceedingly doubtful that the Romans would allow a rabble of common folk to gather in front of the governor, especially during a compressed time of religious fervor. Thus the crowd in question would have consisted only of men who had cause to be present, namely religious officials and political figures.

It's almost certain that English phrasing like "the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus" (Matthew 27:20) would have been understood, by the original culture speaking the original language, to mean that the strongest people in Caiaphas & Co. used their power to convince any of their uncertain brethren not to go wobbly.

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It was a delicate and precarious position in which Pilate found himself as the sun rose higher that morning. But he represented the rulers, not the ruled, and could not let the Pharisees forget that. Plus, he had that little "what if?" birdie singing in his brain and reminding him that Jesus might very well be divine, so he kept refusing to grant the Pharisees their wish.

Luke 23:5-16 even recounts that Pilate, upon detecting Jesus hailed not from Jerusalem but from Galilee, attested that he had no jurisdiction over Galilee. Therefore he sent him over to Herod, the Jewish ruler of Galilee who happened to be rignt there in Jerusalem that morning because of Passover. Unfortunatey for Pilate, however, Herod found him innocent even of violating Jewish law and sent him right back to Pilate, making the horns of his dilemma even sharper.

Ultimately the Pharisees broke the stalemate by playing their trump card: Seeing that Pilate would not yield to their demands, they resorted to human politics and "cried out, 'If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend'."

The Roman Caesar at the time was Tiberius, and, like all dictators, he had trust issues. People he suspected of not being his friend saw their life expectancies plummet, and one of those people, a man named Sejanus, happened to have been the man who appointed Pilate governor of Judeea in 26 A.D. Sejanus was considered Tiberius's closest friend back then, but things had since changed. Reportedly tipped off that Sejanus wanted to take his place on the throne, Tiberius had him arrested and executed for treason, then had his corpse thrown down the Gemonian Stairs and paraded through the streets.

Naturally, anyone appointed to office by Sejanus had to assume his actions were now under the microscope; and although a half-decade passed between Pilate's appointment and Sejanus's execution, the association was still there. Pilate knew he could not afford to be fingered as "not Caesar's friend," so when the Pharisees used that phrase he would have understood it as a threat: It meant they would tell Rome he was "not Caesar's friend" if he failed to do what they wanted.

He knew the threat was not idle, and that it would put his life in jeopardy if the Pharisees carried it out, so the impulse to save his own skin kicked into overdrive and he acceeded to their demands. But the "what if?" birdie must still have been singing, for the Bible tells us Pilate still tried to portray himself as innocent. Luke records that on three occasions he refused to give the death sentence before ultimately delivering Jesus "over to their will," while John says he "delivered him over to them" at the end of the proceedings, and Matthew affirms that he "washed his hands before the crowd, saying, 'I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves'." (emphases mine)

We all know verbal sleights of hand like these cannot slip past the Almighty. Nevertheless, we have all tried them at one time or another.

Pointius Pilate, human to the core, tried them too. He was pagan, but he knew divinity is out there and he responded accordingly.

Every human responds to divinity, even if many humans refuse to admit it.

To be continued...

Note #1: Since I have now quoted Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou's book The Crucfixion of the KIng of Glory in back-to-back posts, I might as well go ahead and recommend you read it. I think it's one of the best books I have ever read.

Note #2: If you care to read the previous installments in this series, they are as follows:

1.   introduction

2.   needless translation hang-up

3.   Genesis hyper-literalists

4.   mindset, interpretation

5.   truth, contemporary culture, abortion

6.   universality of God

7.   thoughts on Luke

8.   thoughts on Titus

9.   thoughts on Psalm 40

10. Lazarus

  

About "The" Book, Part 10

Palm Sunday gets lots of attention every spring. Which makes sense, seeing as how it is the first day of Holy Week and the image of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey, with throngs of people laying down fronds to herald his arrival, imprints itself strongly on the mind's eye.

Between that and the subsequent images of his passion, betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection, what often gets overlooked is the event that took place right before Palm Sunday: His raising of Lazarus.

Because Lazarus's story has been told so many times and usually in a cursory way, people tend to give it little thought, but make no mistake: It was a seismic event in real time. By happening a scant two miles from the Holy City as pilgrims were flooding in for Passover, it functioned as the match that lit the kindling and became the most effective curtain-raising in history. 

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The Lazarus we're talking about -- Lazarus of Bethany -- is discussed only in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John. Within the first two sentences we are informed that one of his sisters is the same Mary who will eventually annoint Jesus's feet. Remember that John was writing to a contemporary audience of early believers, at a time when living memories of Jesus existed and many (probably most) Christians had been taught by eyewitnesses who put their own lives at risk. It tells us something that John identifies this Mary as being that Mary the moment he first mentions her, before the anointing chronologically occurs.

Lazarus is struck with a life-threatening illness. Aware that Jesus is on the road, Mary and  Martha (Lazarus's other sister) send messengers to intercept him and encourage him to come cure their brother, identified as "whom you love." However, by the time Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, "Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days."

Leaving Mary behind, Martha hurried from the house upon hearing that Jesus was approaching. The first words she is recorded as saying when she got to him him are "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." There is disappointment in those words, a tinge of wondering whether God even cares.

Martha returned to the house and told Mary "in private" that Christ wanted to see her, and Verse 31 tells us Mary reacted without hesitation: "When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there." When she reached Jesus she fell in front of him and repeated her sister's plea verbatim: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."

Being "deeply moved" by the mourning he witnessed, Jesus inquires about the location of the tomb and is invited to "come and see." This brings us to the shortest verse in all the Bible, John 11:35, which consists of just two words: "Jesus wept." His weeping was such that no adverbs have ever been needed to convey its depth.

Once at the tomb, Jesus asks those who are with him to open it by moving the stone that sealed its entrance. This makes them participants in a miracle, not simply observers of it -- a repeated habit of his that receives little commentary despite being evident ever since the wedding at Cana.

At first Martha responds to his request by protesting that "there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days." This drives home another point, namely that Lazarus wasn't only merely dead but really most sincerely dead. More dead than a doornail. Sure, Jesus had previously raised Jairus's daughter and the unnamed young man, but each of those resurrections happened within hours of death. By the time day four rolls around, a corpse's decomposition is underway and even a hyper-dreamer with the rosiest spectatcles would know there's no chance of the deceased coming back to life.

Jesus, however, brushed all that aside and proved everyone wrong. People answered his call to move the stone after he replied to Martha by asking "did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?" Then, looking skyward, he thanked the Father for "always hear(ing) me" and said he was speaking aloud "on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me."

Finally he called directly to the dead man by saying three words: "Lazarus, come out" -- which Lazarus did, still completely bound in his burial wrappings, and once again Jesus summoned others to participate in a miracle by saying "unbind him, and let him go."

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Something like that can't help but rock the countryside, even way back in those ancient days before electricity and mass communication.

When dinner was served that evening at Lazarus's house, a "large crowd" came because news of the miracle had already spread. The buzz was so loud "the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus."

This all happened the day before what we now call Palm Sunday. It was in this setting, pregnant with excitement and anticipation, and intensified by the influx of pilgrims, that Jesus arose the next morning and made the two-mile walk to Jerusalem. A donkey and colt were waiting there unsuspectingly, destined to encompany him into the city through the Gate of Mercy.

Talk of Lazarus's resurrection undoubtedly reached Jerusalem ahead of Jesus's arrival, and its pitch could only be compounded by the pilgrims. Lazarus's resurrection unleashed the downstream flow that would reach Class Five rapids with overturned tables and cat-and-mouse questioning... before plunging over the deadly brink of crucifixion, to find calm in the lush valley of resurrection.

Holy Week would have happened without Lazarus and it would have been just as glorious, but it would not have been the same.

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Tomorrow is Palm Sunday 2023, marking the approximate 1,990th anniversary of Jesus's triumphal entry to Jerusalem. Throughout the Christian world it will be celebrated and observed as such.

This means today marks the approximate 1,990th anniversary of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, but throughout the Christian world it will be celebrated and observed as such only in Orthdox circles.

The Orthodox Church officially celebrates the Saturday of Lazarus and considers it to be the start of Holy Week. I feel like Catholics, Protestants, and "mere Christians" (I count myself among the latter) are somewhat missing the boat today, and failing to appreciate the full significance of this episode from that great collection of opuses we call the Bible.

According to Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou's masterful book The Crucifixion of the King of Glory, "the apolytikion (primary hymn) of both the Saturday of Lazarus and Palm Sunday explains, 'When you raised Lazarus from the dead before your Passion, you confirmed the common resurrection of us all, Christ God'."

This cathedral is 15 miles from where I sit. Maybe one day I'll go to a service there in person, even though I might be the only one in sight without Greek blood in my veins. 

To be continued...

Note #1: Many thanks to Matthew Hartsfield for pointing out, during a sermon some years ago, that Jesus invited people to participate in his miracles. I was listening!

Note #2: If you care to read the previous installments in this series, they are as follows:

1. introduction

2. needless translation hang-up

3. Genesis hyper-literalists

4. mindset, interpretation

5. truth, contemporary culture, abortion

6. universality of God

7. thoughts on Luke

8. thoughts on Titus

9. thoughts on Psalm 40

  

Resurrection

 

Since I plan to publish at least one more post (hopefully more) in my "Bible series" between now and Easter, but have only published two of them in the last thirteen months, I figured now is an ideal time to explain why I take the Bible seriously in the first place. Therefore, today I am re-publishing this post from 2021:

Today is Palm Sunday, designated to memorialize a particular day almost 2,000 years ago (specific date unknown) that an itinerant, 33-year-old, rabble-rousing, street rabbi from Nazareth rode a donkey into the city of Jerusalem.

We often hear the phrase "according to Christians" or "according to Christian tradition" grafted onto the beginning of articles which go on to state that during the fifth through seventh days after his arrival in Jerusalem, this street rabbi was arrested, sentenced to death, killed by crucifixion, then rose from the dead... and that he then proceeded to spend 40 days walking around, sermonizing to people and instructing his disciples to become apostles by spending the rest of their lives teaching the world about him... and that after those 40 days were up, he departed Earth not by dying but by ascending (being supernaturally teleported, if you will) into Heaven... and that although he was fully human on Earth, he was also God Himself, having chosen to become flesh and bone and to enter the material world in order to engage in a supreme act of spiritual warfare that transcended the material world and reverberated through the supernatural one.

We cannot blame people for using "according to" language when discussing this account. It is not the kind of account that even sounds possible, much less plausible, at first blush -- especially in our modern age here in the Western world.

Even among believers, many (most?) Christians accept the resurrection account with a faith that is divorced from historical evidence. It is fair for critics to refer to such faith as "blind."

But what if there is historical evidence? (There is.)

And what if the evidence is so strong that an overwhelming majority of historians, including those who are atheists and skeptics, concede to it? (It is.)

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There are six things about which experts in ancient history agree. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I am going to re-emphasize what I said just one paragraph above: Even the experts who are atheists and skeptics agree on the six things, and they do so in overwhelming numbers. The six things are as follows:

One: Jesus was an actual person.

Two: Jesus died by crucifixion during the governance of Pontius Pilate.

Three: Jesus's body was buried in a tomb.

Four: After his body was buried, both friends and enemies of Jesus claimed to have seen him alive again in the flesh... and their belief about what they saw was so strong and sincere that their behavior was radically and permanently changed, and there is no record of a single one of them ever recanting despite being violently persecuted and some of them even being put to death for their claims.

Five: Resurrection claims were made extraordinarily soon after Jesus's death and were opposed by the entire power structure of Jerusalem, both Roman and Jewish.

Six: Despite that resistance by the power structure, Jesus's corpse was never removed from the tomb and presented as evidence that he had not risen, although that should have been exceedingly easy to do. (In other words, the tomb was empty.)

I hope you don't mind hearing my broken record skip yet again, but now I'm going to repeat that these six things are agreed upon even by atheists and skeptics who are experts in the field of ancient history. They are accepted as being true even by professionals who doubt the overall accuracy of the Bible.

Of course this does not prove that Jesus rose from the dead, not in the conventional sense that to "prove" something means to confirm it with absolute, one hundred percent certainty. But then again, nothing can be proved to that degree of certainty.

People earnestly and fairly disagree about whether or not Jesus was resurrected, and it's not like there are no reasons to question it. Dead bodies are known to stay dead, after all. But in my humble opinion, if anybody wants to engage in a serious and objective discussion about this topic, he must should acknowledge and account for all six of the above points. I find it noteworthy that after 2,000 years of discussion, debate, disagreement, scholarship, scientific advances, technological advances, archaeological research, and so on, literally no theory other than resurrection has been offered that can account for all six.

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The lack of "sufficient alternative" theories is certainly not for lack of trying.

Plenty of alternate theories have been proposed, including the swoon theory, hallucination theory, and stolen body theory, to give just three examples. But while all of the alternates account for some of the six points mentioned above, none of them account for all six. The resurrection theory stands alone.

Resurrection alone accounts for all of the accepted historical evidence. Resurrection alone does so without simply rejecting other theories out of hand. Resurrection alone does so without the luxury of merely ignoring alternate theories.

It's easy to blame Western culture in general, and American culture specifically, for the fact that so few people are aware that the case for the resurrection is based on evidence and logic rather than gullibility and superstition, and it is not inaccurate to cast such blame. However, we must blame the church -- i.e., ourselves -- for the fact that Western and American culture has come to this pass.

The reason millions of people, including millions of believers, are clueless about the strong case for the resurrection is that they have never heard it. And the reason they've never heard it is that churches don't teach it to their own congregations.

This is not merely shameful, it is scandalous. It results in people being told from youth to "believe in Jesus" but never being educated as to why they should believe. And so, when they inevitably have questions or doubts and when they inevitably encounter atheist arguments and competing religious claims, their faith often crumbles. They have been set up to fail, sent into battle without armor, tossed into the ocean without a lifejacket, or any other long-odds analogy you want to use.

Why should parents who fail to educate their own children about this topic turn around and criticize "America" for "removing God from the schools"? Why should pastors who fail to educate their own parishioners about this topic turn around and criticize "the culture" for not understanding Christianity or not respecting it?

If you choose to spend the night naked in the snow, you should not be surprised to find yourself with hypothermia come dawn.

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The week that begins today is called Holy Week. Good Friday is on the horizon and Easter is just beyond, ready to send up its rays next Sunday morning.

I think those of us who believe in God -- and especially those of us who believe Jesus rose from the dead twenty centuries ago -- should treat this week as a call to carry ourselves with confidence and without timidity, but also without arrogance.

Like clockwork, Holy Week brings an abundance of documentaries and magazines that superficially acknowledge Easter while unsubtly casting doubt on whether it commemorates an actual event. Christians often respond to these "mainstream media" provocations with irritation or defensiveness, or by withdrawing from the "secular" conversation. But we should not. Instead we should relish these provocations and relish this week, for they present us with a golden opportunity to explain the rational foundations of our faith.

We should take this opportunity and offer an explanation respectfully and cheerfully. It's an almost ironclad guarantee that any explanation other than "I feel it in my heart" will fall upon ears that have never heard it before; and thus it will be heard by people who currently have no idea there is any evidence-based reason for believing in Christianity. 

At the end of the day, when people reject the historicity of Jesus's resurrection, their logical reasoning usually hinges solely on the pre-supposition that nothing supernatural can be real. But if that one pre-supposition gets removed and a person admits that "supernatural" does not equal "impossible," the philosophical ground on which he stands will, by definition, shift beneath his feet. That is a game-changer because it means the historical evidence for the resurrection must be dealt with in order to continue any investigation -- and the historical evidence itself is an aggregate doozy of a game-changer.

At all times, however, we believers need to remember that very few human beings are wired to remain calm, cool, collected, and accepting when game-changers arrive on the scene and challenge their worldview. If we mention something and somebody reacts negatively, we need to remember that we would probably react the same way if the roles were reversed. 

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There are of course other questions non-believers can raise about Christianity. Why does evil exist? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do children sometimes get cancer? Why do natural disasters occur?

Such questions are valid. Believers have them too, and they are troublesome. But they all fall under a single category that C.S. Lewis dubbed "the problem of pain," and they have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not God is real, whether or not God is Yahweh as identified in the Bible, whether or not Jesus rose from the dead, et al.

The problem of pain is a serious one, but it happens to be the only one that believers must wrestle with in the great question of theism versus atheism -- as indicated by the fact that even atheists like Richard Dawkins have recently been reduced to uttering phrases like "the universe has the appearance of design" when they are confronted with evidence. (emphasis mine)

And the problem of pain happens to be one that every religion must grapple with.

Christianity is unique in that it builds its foundation on the singular event of Jesus rising from the dead... and has built its foundation on that event since the early days when it could have been easily disproved... and yet it grew into the world's largest and most far-reaching religion, and remains so to this day.

As Holy Week unfolds we should be gracious, and should not be in anyone's face, but at the same time we should be transparent and unafraid and unashamed.

We must not allow anyone to get away with suggesting that we are playing with a weak hand, for nothing could be further from the truth.

Note: For the sake of time and space, I did not use this post to specifically tackle each alternate theory that has been offered to address "the six points." Instead I simply (and correctly) stated that none of them explain all six points. If you want to learn more about the alternate theories and why they don't suffice, good resources include writings and/or lectures by Michael Licona, Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, J. Warner Wallace, Nabeel Qureshi, and many others. This one by Peter Kreeft is especially good for being both succinct and thorough.

Credit When It's Due

In this era of hyperpartisan conclusion-jumping, we need to acknowledge when a person does something good that our assumptions weren't expecting.

Of course I have known about Bianca Jagger for years. Who my age hasn't? But if I am being honest, all I have really known about her could be summed up in three bullet points:

1. She once was married to Mick;
   
   
2. She has lent her name to a number of trendy causes; and
   
   
3. She and Mick once spent an evening with Billy Joel, during which her behavior inspired a hit song about a woman with Dom Perignon in her hand and a spoon up her nose waking up the next morning with her head on fire and her eyes too bloody to see.

As knowledge goes, that is very, very little -- yet it was enough for me to assume she's probably nothing more than a dime-a-dozen limousine liberal with more money than morals and more self-absorption than self-awareness. 

Until this week rolled around and I learned that the 77-year-old native of Nicaragua has named names.

Technically speaking, Jagger took aim at one name, not names, but her aim is notable because it is focused on a notoriously wicked man. It's focused on a man who has been free to wreak havoc for many years because the First World stopped paying attention to him three decades ago: Daniel Ortega.

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Ortega is the Sandanista strongman who ruled Nicaragua with an iron fist throughout the 1980's (behind a fig leaf of dubious elections).

Ortega returned to power in 2007 and has been strangling civil and religious liberty ever since. One of his bravest critics in Nicaragua is 56-year-old cleric Rolando Jose Alvarez Lagos, who was appointed Bishop of Matagalpa 12 years ago by Pope Benedict XVI.

On August 4th of last year, government forces arrived at Lagos's house and prevented him from leaving to attend mass at the city's Catedral San Pedro. They kept him trapped within his home from that day forward, and on December 13th the government charged him with "undermining national integrity and propogation of false news...to the detriment of the State and Nicaraguan society."

He was schedued to be tried last month, but on February 10th the government stripped his citizenship and sentenced him to 26 years in prison without trial.

Lagos has not been seen or even accounted for since. Although he is rumored to be at the infamous La Modelo Prison, Ortega's regime has not confirmed this and has given his family no indication of his whereabouts.

Eight days ago Jagger released a video in which she directly addresses Ortega and asks him to provide "proof" that Lagos "is alive and in good health," and "to allow me to come to Nicaragua to visit Monsignor Alvarez Lagos."

She ups the ante by recollecting a time she went to Nicaragua while working for the British Red Cross and "asked the then-dictator Anastasio Somoza to allow me to visit La Modelo, the same prison where Monsignor Alvarez Lagos is supposed to be -- and he did," and also by recollecting an interview in which Ortega claimed "that the person you most admire was Jesus Christ."

Transitioning to referring to Lagos by first name, Jagger says to Ortega: "So now I'm asking you: Will you please let me come to Nicaragua to visit Monsignor Rolando Alvarez? It would be a wonderful action on your part, especially during this Easter season...In the name of Jesus Christ, let me see Monsignor Rolando Alvarez, and let him free. He is an innocent man whose only crime is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ."

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Materially speaking, Bianca Jagger has nothing to gain by this.

She is not doing it to gain points with the in crowd, or to get applause from the media.

She is calling out a tyrant nobody else in the West is paying attention to, and is putting her own neck on the line by offering to go behind enemy lines, so to speak.

She is doing this in explicit defense of a Christian believer, at a point in history when defending Christian believers is very much out of fashion.

And she is unapologetically grounding her request in Christ's name, at a time when doing anything in his name is monumentally out of fashion in chic circles.

Rolando Jose Alvarez Lagos deserves his freedom. And Bianca Jagger deserves recognition for having convictions, and, more importantly, for having the gumption to stand behind them.

Many thanks to Jay Nordlinger for highlighting Jagger's video in his March 20th Impromptus column.

About "The" Book, Part Nine

It has been a long time -- one year minus a day -- since I published anything in this series, and frankly that post wasn't very strong. Which means it is past time to get back in the saddle, especially with Ash Wednesday having come and gone.

I was recently asked to speak online about the Bible to some villagers from Pakisan, and happily said yes. When subsequently asked which Bible passage I would discuss, I felt a bit pushed and rushed (yup, that's one of my character flaws) and hurriedly said "Psalm 40."

I wish I could say I chose that psalm because it's always spoken to me, but that would be a lie. Instead, it popped into my head because at that moment one of my brain cells happened to remember that U2 often closes their concerts by performing an abbreviated version of it.

Who am I to ignore a voice that enters my head at a time like that? It could be the "low whisper" mentioned in 1 Kings 19:12, or the "word behind" mentioned in Isaiah 30:21, right? Probably not, but maybe so. 

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It has been said that "the Bible is meant to be studied, not read," and Psalm 40 provides a good example of why this is true. Only 17 verses long, it fits onto a single page of most Bibes and can be finished in a breeze if you are merely reading the words. I just timed myself and was done in 85 seconds.

We should not merely read words, however. We should pay close attention to what those words are, the context in which they were written, and what they meant at the time the text was composed.

Psalm 40 is attributed to King David, who reigned 3,000 years ago and whose native language was probably a nascent form of Hebrew that fizzled out of use even before Jesus was born. But the oldest surviving copy of Psalm 40 is a Greek translation written down centuries after David died. The oldest surviving Hebrew copy was not written down until circa 1,005 A.D., and is actually a translation back into Hebrew from Greek.

In the modern English translation I consider my "go-to," the ESV, the psalm's first four verses read as follows:

    I waited patiently for the LORD;
      he inclined to me and heard my cry.

    He drew me up from the pit of desctruction,
      out of the miry bog,
    and set my feet upon a rock,
      making my steps secure.

    He put a new song in my mouth,
      a song of praise to our God.
    Many will see and fear,
      and put their trust in the LORD.

    Blessed is the man who makes
      the LORD his trust,
    who does not turn to the proud,
      to those who go astray after a lie!

It is tempting to traipse through these words and pay only slight attention to the adjectives and adverbs, but if you slow down and marinate in them and take each one seriously, you will find there is lots of meat on the bone.

Verse One talks not just about waiting for God but waiting patiently for him, and man oh man isn't that distinction an important one in today's world of short fuses and shrunken attention spans? We should never forget that God freed the Hebrews from Egypt and guided them to the Promised Land after four centuries of enslavement.

Verse Two talks of God not only coming to the rescue, but coming with a rescue far greater than a promotion at work or good score on a test. Rather, he pulls the psalmist from a pit of destruction then gives him a lasting, life-changing gift by securing his steps on a rock (rock was, and in many places still is, the world's foremost symbol of stability and permanence).

Verse Three credits God not with helping the psalmist to sing but with flat-out putting a whole new song in his mouth. And before you perceive something negative from the word "fear" being used, please recall that many words do not transfer directly from one language to another; it is no secret that when ancient Hebrews spoke about fear of God, they were speaking not about being scared but about being in awe, often to the point of trembling.

It is not perchance that Verse Three flows directly from referencing fear to referencing trust, with Verse Four then grabbing the baton and proclaiming that those who trust God will be "blessed." We must pay attention to both words, for what this psalm affirms is that God blesses those who trust him.

Now is not the time for my personal testimony, but I do have to mention that for many years trust was a major missing ingedient in my relationship with Christ. When I finally trusted him (and approached him without ulterior motives) he answered my plea by pulling me out of a pit that felt bottomless. It was a pit I had filled with alcohol by drinking sneakily, and heavily, almost every day for years. Had I not come to trust Jesus, I probably would have have died at the bottom of that pit several years ago.

Anyway, the word "trust" is not hidden in the psalm. It's sitting right there in the open. But we are apt to overlook it when we read casually rather than intently.

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In June 2020 a professor at Trinity College Queensland, John Frederick, wrote of the Old and New Testaments that "without the Old, we cannot understand the New, and without the New, we have an incomplete understanding of the Old...the New Covenant is incomprehensible apart from what preceded it. The Old is in the New Revealed, the New is in the Old Concealed."

As Psalm 40 progresses, it offers glimpses of what Frederick meant.

In Verses Nine and Ten the psalmist says "I have told the glad news...I have not restrained my lips...I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation." Such lines here in the Old Testament sure seem to foreshadow the importance of carrying out the Great Commission, even though the Great Commission would not be given until after the resurrection of Christ, do they not?

Psalms can't help but be psalmy, of course, so a lament rears its head in Verse Twelve when we read that the psalmist has been "encompassed" by "evils" and "overtaken" by "inquities" more numerous "than the hairs of my head." Nevertheless faithful, he appeals to God for deliverance and the psalm closes with a pair of verses that yet again remind me of foreshadowing: Verse 16 speaks of "all who seek" being able to "rejoice and be glad," while Verse 17 sees the psalmist refer to himself as "poor and needy" without expressing even a scintilla of doubt that deliverance is coming... These sentiments will echo resoundingly much later in history, specifically in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus declares "blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3) and promises "seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened" (Matthew 7:7).

I had read Psalm 40 before, but for some reason I didn't think of those connections until I perused it again a couple weeks ago. I guess that's a good example of why we should read the Bible more than once and pay studious attention when we do. You never know what it is you're going to glean from it today compared to yesterday.  

To be continued...

Note: If you care to read the previous installments in this series, they can be found here: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight.