The Jewish Bible, Gospels, and Early Church up to Constantine with Paul Williams (2022-08-05) #

0:00:04 okay salaam alaikum everyone i think we'll make a start um just a reminder that the last time we met 0:00:14 um we were looking at the uh you know what is the the western tradition and why should we 0:00:19 care about it basically we looked at hellenism alexandra the great is conquering of vast areas 0:00:24 of the middle east right up to india the spread of greek civilization culture language ideas 0:00:30 concepts we looked at plato aristotle perhaps the two of three socrates the three great philosophers 0:00:38 of the ancient world and their enduring influence in today's world we briefly touched on judaism 0:00:45 um but today i want to go much more into faith particularly christianity and judaism 0:00:52 and the early church up to constantine the emperor constantine in the 4th century
0:01:02 but before i touch on that
0:01:06 western politicians particularly america for some reason but happens in britain 0:01:11 as well like to talk about the judeo-christian tradition it's this great spiritual philosophical 0:01:19 intellectual tradition that we're very proud of in the west the judeo-christian 0:01:24 tradition and as i say is often mentioned by politicians and defending western values very 0:01:29 important we defend western values against i'm not sure who against but anyway that's the idea 0:01:34 now it's pretty obvious isn't it that this excludes 0:01:39 islam and muslims even though islam has been a crucial part of the west for over a thousand years 0:01:48 now we all know about islamic spain andalucia which i think was nearly eight centuries and 0:01:53 it was the most advanced place in the entire european area in terms of culture science learning 0:02:00 um in every way conceivable it was the most advanced civilization in the heart of europe 0:02:04 you know in the iberian peninsula what we today call spain and portugal and indeed there there's 0:02:11 so white muslim countries like bosnia of course which has a slight majority of uh european muslims 0:02:17 and other parts of europe which have been muslims muslim for hundreds and hundreds of years so islam 0:02:23 has been part of the european identity history civilization and uh and excellence in terms of 0:02:30 learning for centuries but you wouldn't know that by this kind of trope judeo-christian so it should 0:02:36 really be the judeo-islamic christian tradition that would be more accurate more fair now why 0:02:44 am i showing you this kind does anyone recognize this coin by the way does anyone know what it is
0:02:52 exactly exactly in fact um i think adnan rashid who's a friend of mine would love this i think 0:02:57 he'd love to own this coin but it's unique um that's the front and the back so you can just 0:03:02 about work out in latin i think offer rex rex's latin for king offer is the name of the king 0:03:10 and on the back is some arabic which is not very easy to read because it's not a terribly 0:03:15 accurate copy it's kind of like a mirror image rather than an accurate copy so why is this coin 0:03:21 so important well as as the brother has already says um this was this coin was made for author 0:03:30 he was the king of mercia and he reigned from 757 to 796 a.d okay so just shortly after well there's 0:03:39 a harbor actually and the design is uh copied directly from a dinar of office contemporary the 0:03:48 abbasid caliph al-mansur and he reigned he was the caliph 136-158 after after hijra after the hijra 0:03:59 and it's supposed to say that's supposed to be the shahada on the right
0:04:05 and it's in the british library uh in england in london and i've seen it it's on display usually 0:04:12 and it's gold so here we have a king of england if you like who was issuing currency coinage 0:04:20 with the shahada on it in the 8th century 0:04:24 a.d okay so what's islam got to do with europe well the english king was issuing coins 0:04:31 in arabic and that's his name offer there and there's a wonderful um comment on the website 0:04:38 of the british library which i recommend you have a look it says the choice of an 0:04:41 islamic dinar as a model for offers gold coinage should not be interpreted as an indication of 0:04:48 offers religious beliefs as other evidence leaves no doubt that he was a christian which is true the 0:04:56 coin probably reflects instead the importance of the gold dinar in international trade 0:05:02 it was the dominant coinage in the mediterranean and inspired the reintroduction of gold coinage in 0:05:09 northern europe so you get the real sense of the power the commercial political power of the muslim 0:05:16 world very early on to such an extent that england produced coins with the shahadaran in arabic 0:05:23 okay and this this is the real thing there's a wonderful website uh dedicated uh to this 0:05:28 on the british library you can google it lots of information about it i wish this was better 0:05:32 known uh because this is a literally gold dust it's a gold coin so that's just to perhaps knock 0:05:40 on the idea knock on the head on the idea that the judeo-christian tradition excludes islam 0:05:45 in fact europe the west is very much uh part of islamic history as well i mentioned islamic spain
0:05:54 now i want to briefly touch just change the subject now and go back to judaism because 0:05:59 this is really important subject here is a rabbi obviously not a photograph now what's he doing 0:06:07 he is studying the talmud now christians will often say jews follow the old testament yeah 0:06:15 they follow the old testament christians follow the new testament muslims follow the crime that's 0:06:19 actually not true no jews says they follow the old testament what their central text the central 0:06:24 text of rabbinic judaism which i'll define in a second is the talmud what's the talmud well it 0:06:31 comes in two forms a very very ancient library of texts and it's made up of several parts 0:06:38 um so we have the uh the torah which is i'm speaking now i'm trying to understand the 0:06:44 jewish perspective on this this is the torah given to moses on mount sinai of course usually 0:06:49 identified with the first five books of the old testament starting with genesis in the beginning 0:06:56 now there's a second part of the the talmud called the mishnah the mishnah now the mishnah is the 0:07:04 oral torah hang on jews believe in two torahs yes don't believe me google it they do they believe in 0:07:12 a written torah and an oral torah is a bit like the quran and the sunnah if you want to kind of 0:07:16 see a parallel with islam if you like so they believe that god revealed an oral in a verbal 0:07:22 torah to moses on mount sinai in addition to the written torah why would god do that according to 0:07:29 well because is to give extra detail extra instructions for example it says you don't 0:07:34 work on the sabbath it's the holy day but what is that what is work can i cook can i 0:07:40 you know can i flick a light switch can i what does it mean not to work and the oral torah 0:07:45 gives you all those details about what that really means so actually you can't cook on 0:07:49 this you're not supposed to do labor of any kind orthodox jews follow this quite quite strictly so 0:07:55 the author gives interpretation further directives detail how to implement the commandments of god we 0:08:01 find in the written torah again quran and sunnah so we have quran statements in the quran but we 0:08:07 need the sunnah to perhaps give further detail an implementation he's like well the quran says pray 0:08:13 but how do we pray what do we pray how many were cows and so on well the sunnah will give you that 0:08:17 in a similar kind of way by analogy we have the uh the talmud so we've got the written 0:08:23 torah the oral torah called the mishnah and then we have another thing which is part of 0:08:28 the talmud and this is the central text of judaism by the way if you're a devout jew 0:08:33 today you don't study the old testament you study the talmud and that's what that rabbi is doing 0:08:38 there's a wonderful app actually where millions of jews around the world follow a portion of 0:08:42 the talmud every day and you can follow follow him doing it so another part of the talmud is 0:08:49 something called the gemara and the gemara are the the rabbis the sages as they're called 0:08:54 their discussions arguments disputes um about all sorts of things whether it be history philosophy 0:09:01 the weather you know anything uh that and and this is and these discussions are actually recorded 0:09:08 and now part of the talmud and this kind of went on to about the fifth or sixth century a.d 0:09:14 um before the rise of of islam and then it kind of stopped 0:09:18 and then it kind of codified in many many volumes so you've got the the written the oral torah and 0:09:24 the the gemara which is kind of the rabbinical commentaries discussions um and just to make 0:09:32 it slightly more complicated there are actually two talmuds there's a babylonian talmud which is 0:09:36 the main one used today by jews around the world and there's also the palestinian or the jerusalem 0:09:43 talmud which is earlier and shorter but the one that vast majority of jews use today is the um 0:09:51 babylonian of course well why jews in babylon well we know from the exile it's all there in 0:09:56 the old testament they got exiled in iraq or mesopotamia whatever you want to call it 0:10:01 so the talmud is absolutely central to the jewish faith what is rabbinic judaism so i come back to 0:10:07 that because judaism is not just one thing that's always been just the same since the beginning 0:10:12 it has actually changed uh fundamentally and the the key historical event to mark that change 0:10:19 is the destruction of the temple in jerusalem in ad70 and that changed everything and then in 0:10:26 fact in the second century because of the ongoing threat the existential threat to the jewish people 0:10:33 from the romans it was decided to write down the oral torah as the mishnah so now we have 0:10:40 two written torahs but it's so called the oral torah because there was a real threat that um i 0:10:45 mean it's like with the the early sahabah someone who were killed in battle you know who memorized 0:10:49 the quran we need to perhaps there's a similar kind of dynamic at work i think so that that's um 0:10:56 very very briefly is judaism and it's not quite the same as the religion of jesus or 0:11:01 the origin of moses peace be upon them both and i'll explain why um as we go forward 0:11:08 so let's have a look oh yes okay i'm just going to talk about um a man called jesus now who was 0:11:23 jesus what did he look like well we all know in the west he was a white guy he was a caucasian 0:11:28 of course he was there's a photograph and he's actually a famous hollywood actor 0:11:33 he's a white dude how do we know that because you can see the movies 0:11:37 you can see the art in churches you can see the statues well not that you'd want to see 0:11:41 statues but there are lots of statues of jesus in your local catholic church 0:11:46 of a white guy with a beard pretty fairly handsome probably his mid-thirties and his mother of course 0:11:52 is white as well she always wears a hijab by the way i find which is interesting so she's a hijabi 0:12:00 white caucasian woman in western consciousness western art um why is that wrong by the way 0:12:07 because the west tells us that jesus was white but why why is that a problem mad of interest
0:12:15 okay so he was from the middle east you say gosh okay so he wasn't from england okay
0:12:29 this is actually a very good point perhaps in mitigation for the the guilt that the west have 0:12:33 for misrepresenting jesus if you look at japanese and chinese iconography which you can just google 0:12:39 it you'll see a japanese jesus or a chinese jesus if you look in sub-saharan african you'll see a 0:12:45 black a somali jesus you'll see what it so actually everyone does it but because of the 0:12:49 the dominance of the west in defining faith and images of religious leaders we tend to go with 0:12:56 with that um so that's the first point he wasn't white he he was a jew he was an israelite 0:13:03 um i'm not sure what he would have looked like we don't know we have no photographs of course 0:13:07 but he certainly would have looked like me he would have looked um he might 0:13:11 he would have appeared more perhaps of an out like an arrow perhaps
0:13:16 now all this changed by the way in popular consciousness particularly in biblical scholarship 0:13:23 with the writing of a book this one by a guy called giza vermesh that's how you pronounce it 0:13:31 and he wrote a book in 1973 called jesus the jew jesus was a jew
0:13:38 yes actually he was a jew and this i forget this guy's name he's um in one of the hollywood 0:13:44 films portraying jesus i can't remember his name doesn't matter it's not important um so
0:13:53 this guy giza varmish by the way very very interesting he was uh he died just a couple 0:13:57 of years ago he was a hungarian jew by birth by ethnicity and in the 1930s because he he was a 0:14:05 young man in the 1930s he uh was baptized as a catholic roman catholic but he became 0:14:11 a catholic priest and he'd hoped that this would save him from the holocaust because obviously that 0:14:18 was obviously extremely important threat at that time so he left um it didn't and he left hungary 0:14:26 and ended up in england of all places and and he ended up being a professor of jewish studies at 0:14:33 the university of oxford and in his generation he was probably the most distinguished jesus scholar 0:14:39 in the world and he's actually more famous for being the world's expert on the dead sea scrolls 0:14:45 so if you get the the standard critical edition of dead sea scrolls published by oxy university 0:14:49 press he's the guy that edited it translated it from the original languages uh into english so 0:14:56 he's the foremost expert on the destiny scots but he's actually a brilliant jesus scholar as it's 0:15:00 called as well and in 1973 he published this book which i've read and what was really revolutionary 0:15:07 for many people is the idea that jesus wasn't a gentile he didn't he wasn't a westerner he was a 0:15:12 jew but not just a label he was a jew jesus was a torah observant jew you could understand jesus in 0:15:18 his historical context using the earliest evidence we have written evidence and other evidence 0:15:24 you have an understanding he develops an understanding of jesus it's actually quite 0:15:27 different from the christian understanding in fact there's an understatement for giza varmish jesus 0:15:33 the real historical jesus was a a jewish wise man he was a prophet an eschatological prophet perhaps 0:15:42 um he certainly didn't preach that he was god or the trinity or the church 0:15:46 these were later ideas he argued um and he has written a number of books i do recommend 0:15:51 them all they're quite brilliant and highly regarded by by biblical uh biblical scholars
0:15:58 um now i just want to introduce you to the uh the four gospels why is this important why are 0:16:06 we why am i even talking about the gospels we're in turkey the western tradition well 0:16:12 i would say that the bible is the single most important and significant book in the history 0:16:19 of western civilization bar none it's the most important and within that the gospels are the 0:16:25 most important texts within the bible bar none so whether or not you're a devout christian who 0:16:31 reads these for inspiration and guidance or you're a historian trying to understand 0:16:35 the nature of the texts what they're really saying or you're just curious these are the 0:16:41 at the most important i think over the last 2000 years texts of all deforming the western mind and 0:16:47 particularly perceptions of other religions like islam as well so you know they're important and 0:16:52 they're worth knowing about so there are four gospels uh what are gospels these are basically 0:16:58 well i'm not going to give you very very briefly the standard christian view of what these gospels 0:17:04 are and what they say and why they're important and then i'll tell you what scholars have been 0:17:08 saying for the last two centuries and they're not the same quite a big difference so they're 0:17:14 i'm now going to act like a christian so i'm going to tell you what the gospels are 0:17:19 from a christian point of view it's not my opinion but i'm just going to play this role for a second 0:17:24 so the four gospels obviously they're the word of god they are eyewitness accounts of the life and 0:17:29 times of jesus written by eyewitnesses so matthew the first gospel was written by the tax collector 0:17:36 matthew who knew jesus the last gospel john is written by the apostle john who knew jesus so well 0:17:43 and luke was a companion of paul paul was another apostle and mark was perhaps uh 0:17:50 closely associated with peter the prince of the apostles so these these gospels give us 0:17:56 reliable accurate historical information that not really any contradictions about who jesus 0:18:01 was and jesus was god and he died for our sins on the cross um that's been very simplistically 0:18:08 put now i'm going to take off my christian hat and come back to what scholars are saying 0:18:14 please yes i should say by do ask questions i'm not rambling on here carry on
0:18:21 yes christian yes the sisters asking the 0:18:23 the the new testament the gospel is seen as the word of god absolutely
0:18:30 i'll come to that how can they yes i i come to that in a second how can they be 0:18:33 eyewitness accounts i'll come to that so the to taking off the christian hat and putting on 0:18:39 what scholars would say and by scholars i mean academics at mainstream universities oxford 0:18:45 cambridge harvard yale stanford you name it you know this is mainstream historical 0:18:49 research that's been conducted for a couple of centuries now this is not my wacky ideas or some 0:18:53 kind of marginal theory i'm trying to give you the standard narrative i'm not saying it's infallible 0:18:58 but i'm saying it's really worth looking at and and being aware of so just take a few random 0:19:04 examples the gospels are eyewitness testimony no they're not scholars don't think that anymore 0:19:11 matthew's gospel the first gospel is not written by matthew how do we know that well firstly the 0:19:17 gospel isn't claimed to be written by matthew it doesn't claim to be eyewitness testimony 0:19:21 and it doesn't read like a text produced by a disciple of jesus who will probably be illiterate 0:19:28 i wouldn't be writing in greek because all the gospels written in greek not in the language of 0:19:33 jesus jesus spoke aramaic which is cognate to arabic and hebrew actually they're quite 0:19:41 similar languages in many many words i'm sure many of you know the gospels are not written in 0:19:45 the language of jesus they're in greek remember we talk about hellenization alexandra the great 0:19:49 this is another fruit of that they're written in greek so not eyewitness they're written in 0:19:54 the second generation they're not the first generation the second generation after jesus 0:19:59 and then um in the handout by the way you which you i have copies if you want i i mentioned 0:20:04 something called marcan priority again this is what scholars say 0:20:08 scholars have worked out that the first gospel to be written is the gospel of mark 0:20:12 mark and priority that's what that jargon means this is the view that mark was the 0:20:17 first of the gospels to be written and was one of the sources used by matthew and luke 0:20:23 so the four gospels matthew mark luke and john the first was written by mark and i want to introduce 0:20:31 you to we don't have much time so i'm going to rush through this forgive me but i just want you 0:20:35 to i want to touch on some key ideas and you can we can discuss them further but something called 0:20:40 the synoptic gospels on the handout it i mentioned it there i'll just read what it says the gospels 0:20:45 of matthew mark and luke which narrates so many of the same stories that they can be placed side 0:20:51 by side in parallel columns in the greek and so can be seen together as the literal meaning 0:20:58 of synoptic so you get the same stories um in parallel greek columns you have the story in mark 0:21:05 then you have the the similar story in matthew then you have the stimulus story in luke and you 0:21:10 can compare the stories how they're told what happens who says what are there any differences 0:21:16 and scholars have concluded overwhelmingly that matthew and luke copy mark they gobble up mark 0:21:23 they basically edit mark they take mark and they change mark in subtle or not so subtle ways to 0:21:29 reflect their own views their own theology their own understanding of jesus their own understanding 0:21:34 of the law by which i mean the jewish law the torah and there's the surprising differences so
0:21:42 i want to give you an example of this um at work um there is a story in the earliest gospel 0:21:50 mark chapter 10 which i'm just going to read to you 0:21:54 and then explain to you how the later gospels change the story and why this is so significant 0:22:02 so mark chapter 10 verses 17 onwards i'm not going to read the whole thing but it goes like this i'm 0:22:09 looking i'm reading from the new revised standing version which is the standard academic translation 0:22:14 into english as he was setting out on a journey a man ran up and knelt before jesus and asked him 0:22:22 good teacher what must i do to inherit eternal life jesus said to him why do you call me good 0:22:31 there's no one good but god alone remember this is the earliest gospel there's no wonder why 0:22:37 are you calling me good jesus says you know the commandments do not murder do not commit adultery 0:22:43 don't steal don't bear false witness don't defraud honor your father and mother the man said to him 0:22:48 teacher i have kept all these since my youth jesus excuse me jesus looking at him loved him 0:22:55 and said you lack one thing it's the one thing he lacks to get eternal life go sell what you 0:23:04 own and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and then come follow me 0:23:13 so this is quite a startling passage for many people and many scholars like dale martin at yale 0:23:19 one of the world's leading biblical scholars who i've spoken to about this you can see the video 0:23:23 on videos on blogging theology consider this one of the most reliable and authentic statements from 0:23:28 the historical jesus why because it's so unlike later beliefs about jesus here jesus apparently 0:23:34 is denying he's god he's not saying yeah i'm good thanks i'm god you know you say why do you call 0:23:41 me good jesus is being humble he's being a devout jew who says look goodness real goodness belongs 0:23:46 to god alone don't use that word of me that's how i i understand it that's the first thing 0:23:52 and secondly the man who comes to jesus saying good teacher what do i do to inherit eternal 0:23:59 life you know what i do to be saved how do i enter into paradise how do i get into the 0:24:02 akira and be successful in the next life jesus gives them an answer you obey the commandments 0:24:08 what's that got to do with christianity you know don't steal don't fraud honor your father and 0:24:13 mother this is the quotes from the torah and the man says i've done all that you know it's 0:24:19 not difficult not to kill people not necessarily difficult not to steal and so you can probably 0:24:23 do that jesus says you lack one thing this is the one thing he needs to get to eternal eternal life 0:24:29 go sell what you own and give your money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven wow this 0:24:36 is christianity is it is this christianity is this what you hear from an evangelist in the pulpit 0:24:41 now that's the first thing matthew as i say quotes from mark he actually has this passage in front 0:24:49 of him this is the standard academic understanding and he changes the words of jesus so i'm not going 0:24:54 to go to matthew chapter 19 verse 16 onwards and we'll read the same story and see what happens
0:25:07 if i can find it
0:25:10 what was it again 1916 let's get the right passage
0:25:16 okay 1916. so just read what matthew says and then i'll um comment on it then someone came 0:25:23 to him this is jesus and said teacher what good deed must i do to have eternal life 0:25:30 and he said to him why do you ask me about what is good there is only one who is good 0:25:36 if you wish to enter into life keep the commandments it means the jewish commandments 0:25:42 which ones and jesus said don't murder don't commit adultery 0:25:46 the same ones um and then he says if you wish to be perfect because he lacks one thing again go 0:25:52 sell your possessions and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven
0:25:59 now attentive listeners and readers have long noticed that the words of jesus here are different 0:26:04 in mark you have jesus denying he is good in matthew in matthew's version jesus says instead 0:26:10 of saying why do you call me good jesus says why do you ask me about what is good there is 0:26:16 only one who is good huh what's going on there so i remember i i asked this question of john barton 0:26:24 is professor of the bible at oxford one of the world's most distinguished biblical scholars he's 0:26:28 an ordained church of england minister as well and he he says that matthew has been dishonest 0:26:35 his word not mine why because he's changed the words of jesus why has he changed the words of 0:26:40 jesus many scholars think that because matthew was embarrassed that jesus denied that he was god 0:26:47 in mark so he changes the words of jesus because it doesn't fit in with matthew's views about who 0:26:53 jesus was later in the first century to better reflect what matthew really thinks about jesus 0:26:59 so he he removes that embarrassment he then has jesus say why do you ask me about what is good 0:27:04 well you're the messiah it's pretty you should bear to ask you questions like that but anyway 0:27:09 and then he has uh jesus say if you wish to enter into life keep the commandments which is a very 0:27:14 jewish answer this is the jewish jesus the jew coming out here um so i mentioned this example 0:27:21 because that and there are many examples which i'm not going to go into of how later gospels change 0:27:26 alter embellish delete invent stories sayings about jesus to better reflect what they think 0:27:36 in the later centuries in the later decades of the first century all this is standard scholarly stuff 0:27:42 if you're a christian you study this at university which i did it's bull it's like
0:27:49 how can this be true but this is the historical understanding of the gospels now i've not 0:27:56 mentioned john yet there's a four the four gospels the last to be written was the gospel of john and 0:28:00 all written in the first century according to most scholars between ad70 and about ad95 so 0:28:06 marks are written about a.d 70ish about the time of destruction of the temple 0:28:10 and the last be written is the gospel of john no it's not an eyewitness account 0:28:14 it doesn't say who the author is it doesn't name john christians will say yes it does i say okay 0:28:22 show me where and there's usually several minutes of fumbling around in the bible until they realize 0:28:27 it's not actually mentioned by name remarkable isn't it the the titles the gospel according to 0:28:32 matthew mark luke and john which is found at the beginning these these titles or headings 0:28:37 were added in the late second century and we know this because someone called irenaeus 0:28:41 bishop of leon in france was the guy who first mentions this long after they were written 0:28:47 they're anonymous we don't know who wrote them anyway back to john john is the cinderella that's 0:28:52 not the right word john is the odd one out and this has been long noticed by scholars matthew 0:28:58 mark and luke you have these are synoptic gospels they actually are quite similar and they feel 0:29:02 jesus teaching is pretty much similar you go to john and you're in a different world here in john 0:29:10 jesus walks around saying i am the light of the world or before abraham was i am or i am 0:29:18 the resurrection and the life uh i i am the i am the light of the world it's amazing statements 0:29:26 they're only found in one place nowhere else in the entire bible are they found that only found in 0:29:31 the gospel of john and the way jesus speaks about his message uh his kerygma what he preaches is 0:29:37 very different in john than matthew mark and luke and scholars have concluded like 99 of scholars 0:29:43 have concluded and that's not my statistic that comes from um a book i recommend in the uh 0:29:49 recommended reading by the way by the historical figure of jesus on the handout by ep saunders one 0:29:55 of america's great biblical scholars he says 99 of biblical scholars in the last two centuries 0:30:01 have concluded that the historical jesus the real jesus is to be found in the earlier gospels 0:30:07 and that john represents a highly interpreted developed account 0:30:12 of what the author of the fourth gospel believed about jesus and i'm reminded 0:30:18 some words of richard burridge his professor at king's college in london also ordained minister 0:30:23 how do christians deal with this problem he's basically saying that they're secondary jesus 0:30:26 didn't go around saying these things and how how do why do they conclude this if jesus had gone 0:30:33 around galilee downtown jerusalem in a.d 30 saying i am the light of the world before abraham was 0:30:40 i am this is the divine name the tetragrammaton found in exodus 15. if you'd really done that how 0:30:46 come matthew never mentions this how come luke who says in the beginning of his gospel uh you 0:30:51 know dear theophilus i'm i'm going to write to you an orderly account of everything that's happened 0:30:56 amongst us how can luke knows nothing about this teaching of jesus how come matthew knows 0:31:01 nothing about this teaching eugene how come no one knows anything about this teaching of jesus 0:31:05 apart from the latest gospel written the end of the first century so 99 of scholars 0:31:11 included this is not historical because if he had gone around making these incredible claims 0:31:17 then someone would have noticed it before the end of the first century obviously but it's left no 0:31:22 trace in the earlier jesus tradition in historical evidence at all so and to be crude it's made up 0:31:31 now scholars by the way don't use words like that they don't say always made up because that's too 0:31:36 crude what they say is the jargon of the trade they say it's secondary it's secondary material 0:31:42 so you've got to kind of decode this language here but they really mean is he didn't actually say it 0:31:46 and that's the view of the overwhelming vast majority of scholars in the world 0:31:50 and most scholars are christians they don't want to reach this conclusion that's been honest 0:31:56 okay so um that's my very brief uh just to go back to the glossary by the way which um i've got extra 0:32:04 copies if you want um i've got i mentioned mark and priority i mentioned the synoptic gospels 0:32:10 and i mentioned the term um son of god i'll just briefly touch on this because it's a bit of a 0:32:14 it's interesting issue what does son of god mean you've asked many christians well 0:32:18 son of god god the son it means he's god obviously that's what the word means 0:32:23 no it doesn't mean that at all it meant that later on in christian tradition any human being 0:32:29 human or angels with a close relationship with god and who mediates god's will on earth can be 0:32:36 called as son of god and it's interesting adam is called the son of god in the gospel of luke 0:32:44 chapter 3 verse 38 look it up luke calls adam the son of god is luke divine of course not david's 0:32:51 called the son of god lots of people are called sons of gods in the bible and in jesus as reported 0:32:57 have said in matthew blessed are the peacemakers for they should be called sons of god it didn't 0:33:03 mean the second person of the trinity as as i put in the hand out here it's anyone with a close 0:33:08 relationship with god who mediates god's will on earth so lots of people it didn't mean that 0:33:13 in the jewish context jesus the jew if he it was addressed understood to be son of god it did not 0:33:20 mean he was the second person of a trinity i think it's a pretty well established historical fact 0:33:26 so um moving on so any questions i'm covering i i'm afraid there's a lot of material here i 0:33:31 apologize i'm just trying to condense it into this short time we have together so i apologize
0:33:50 um i don't know if it means slave it usually means someone a very very dignified righteous man 0:33:55 who was uh the special mission from god i i'm sure that's the equivalent 0:34:02 of slaves i'm aware of sorry are we going to talk a little bit about uh paul yes 0:34:09 i just want to establish some some ground here before we move on to yes uh directly i'll be 0:34:13 dealing with that so you want the gentleman's asking if you want to deal with paul absolutely
0:34:20 mentioned people but the authors of the gospels we've acknowledged that none of 0:34:25 them has eyewitnessed jesus correct but a lot of christians claim that paul was an exception 0:34:33 we'll deal with paul just in a couple of minutes so that the question brother was asking about 0:34:37 when we're going to talk about paul because he was an eyewitness of jesus as well so the 0:34:40 claim is made that is true that is the claim and we'll deal with that in a second thank you yes sir
0:34:47 i just wanted to throw the uh you know because i heard about the uh gospel of saint barnabas
0:34:55 i wasn't but i will know you mention it yeah uh i i just 30 seconds because this is a brother is 0:35:01 asking about the gospel of barnabas um fortunately it's becoming less of an issue these days but 0:35:07 uh according to all scott i've never come across a scholar historian in the world 0:35:10 that says anything else the gospel of barnabas is a renaissance forgery 0:35:14 we're going to be touching on renaissance in the next session it's not it's certainly not 0:35:18 by the barnabas who might have been a companion of paul it's for it's it's a fake and the it's 0:35:23 full of anachronisms so it says things which you know wouldn't have been known about in 0:35:28 the first century um so unfortunately it's uh it's very juicy it's very interesting but uh 0:35:35 if you want to if we believe in reliable hadith if we want islands to be good then this thing has 0:35:40 no islands and it's a fake i wish it wasn't so but that's the bad news i'm afraid i'm 0:35:45 just being very simple yes sir so when you speak about the gospel of matthew yeah being dishonest 0:35:54 john barton said that yeah not me yeah what sort of categories of evidence what types of 0:35:59 evidence are these goals on relying upon to make these claims to make these statements
0:36:05 i know it's a bit of a question yeah so the the uh the brother's asking you know what kind of 0:36:10 criteria how do they make this judgment that matthew is being dishonest i mean firstly i'd 0:36:14 say to do watch the interview on blogging theology with professor john barton um just 0:36:19 just put his word b-a-r-t-o-n as his name on the youtube site and you can watch the interview and 0:36:26 i think there's a time time slots as well and he's simply reflecting a common view which is 0:36:33 that matthew is being i mean i can't speak for him it's his word but he's he's playing fast and 0:36:39 loose with the sayings of jesus and he's happy to change them not john barton i mean matthew 0:36:44 um to suit his own views so from a kind of a scholarly point of view that's dishonest you can't 0:36:51 change your sources like that if you don't agree with them you know it's not how it works so i 0:36:56 think that i think that's where he's coming from and i was quite shocked when he used that 0:36:59 word because i wasn't expecting such a judgmental word but it was quite refreshing as well because 0:37:04 this is just plain speaking let's move away from euphemisms like secondary material let's 0:37:09 call his spade a spade so i was quite pleased he did that was there anything um yes sir oh
0:37:20 what's similar with um the gospel of thomas and mary
0:37:26 yeah that these are um i wasn't going to cover them today because i simply don't have the time 0:37:30 and i i'm slightly concerned that we're going to run i don't even touch paul yet in the early 0:37:34 church so these are very good questions maybe we can talk about it afterwards 0:37:38 the danger is i get we we end up going down a different track although there's a very 0:37:41 very good question about the gospel of thomas gospel judas and his other gospels so yes sir 0:37:48 by the way it it seems pretty straightforward that you know jesus is not god and um even even 0:37:55 the arguments seem pretty valid so what is usually your response when you disagree without presenting 0:38:01 what's the yeah that's a very a very good point um often christians go instinctively to the fourth 0:38:07 gospel the gospel of john so when jesus says i am the way the truth my life or or statements that 0:38:13 seem to suggest that jesus is called god so thomas for example in uh john 20 28 addresses jesus as my 0:38:19 lord and my god directly but these are questions of interpretation it's not at all clear that 0:38:25 john means what christians or thomas means what christians believe 0:38:29 but i think the earlier you go back in history to the earlier tradition 0:38:34 you get a much less and less and less divine jesus and so if you re rewind the clock going 0:38:39 forward you can see a trajectory from low to high crystal it's called christology this is the 0:38:45 uh study of the the status nature of jesus you get this definite kind of rocketing up you know um 0:38:52 as you go through it's interesting that all the quran says about this of course to the christians 0:38:56 do not go to excess jesus was just a messenger of god the quran really laser-like theologies 0:39:05 goes in and say nope don't do that wrong um and that's one of the the extraordinary things about 0:39:11 the quran that he really gets to the issues on this and on many other subjects as well um 0:39:17 i better press on because i don't want to run out of time sorry about this um i want to um look at 0:39:24 paul now and james um and address um some of the points that were made let me just see what's 0:39:32 uh oh yeah this is a picture of the bible by the way i guess you've never seen one before 0:39:37 it's the holy bible the king james version this is the most popular english translation in the world 0:39:44 james didn't actually do it himself he employed a bunch of scholars at hampton 0:39:47 court in london to do it but this is the basis of virtually all modern translations until 0:39:54 the 20th century um so incredibly popular especially the united states 0:39:59 some christians think this is a perfect translation this is the real word of god 0:40:02 but it ain't because jesus didn't speak king james english he spoke aramaic i'm sorry 0:40:08 that no one in the bible spoke english it's just unfortunate anyway that's a rather nice copy of 0:40:13 the bible um i just quickly mentioned this if you want some jargon um this is purely academic so um 0:40:21 we have the synoptic gospels the earliest gospel as i say is mark the there's another source called 0:40:27 q q is the word is short for quell quell is a german word meaning source and scholars now say 0:40:34 that the later gospels of matthew and luke used mark the earlier gospel and another source q 0:40:40 in in compiling their own gospels so here we have luke um we have that kind of i don't 0:40:45 know that red color so he he takes on board mark gobbles it up and changes it sometimes 0:40:51 he's got his lucas consists of mark q and his own unique source material that kind of green 0:40:58 is material unique to luke and not found anywhere else like the power brother good samaritan or the 0:41:02 the prodigal son this is only found in luke and that's unique material for him and in matthew's 0:41:07 gospel matthew gobbles up matthew mark as we know he changes it embellishes it corrects mark this by 0:41:13 the way means that matthew did not regard mark as the word of god because if he did he wouldn't have 0:41:19 altered it would he so he changed uh and corrected mark he he also used gobbled up q a source 0:41:27 also shared by luke and matthew has his own unique material the sermon on the mount for example 0:41:32 a lot of it is unique to not all of it a lot of it is unique to matthew and the other stories are 0:41:36 unique to matthew so this is called the two source hypothesis and notice john is nowhere to be seen 0:41:42 as a separate thing in thailand it's so different from matthew mark and luke 0:41:46 um oh that's my last slide so i'll leave that up for the moment um you don't have to learn 0:41:52 this i'm just giving you a flavor of the academic understanding of the the gospels back to paul paul 0:41:59 who was paul embarrassing actually i wasn't going to say this in greek the word paul means small 0:42:06 i don't know why i mean why is that a name my name is paul very embarrassing now it was sword 0:42:10 is a hebrew word named after king saul the first king of israel yeah i'm just saying in 0:42:14 english um so yes if you're addressing paul as a hebrew you call him saul um 0:42:21 but anyway that's beside the point so who was paul um he was a hellenistic member hellenism 0:42:25 he was a hellenistic jew born in tarsus in this country well turkey didn't exist then of course 0:42:33 but in tarsus which is i think somewhere in the coast of turkey today um important things to know 0:42:39 about paul he never met jesus he really didn't he never met him but he did claim to have met him on 0:42:47 the road to damascus where according to acts this is a book in the bible paul says he had a vision 0:42:53 of jesus a vision of jesus and the story of jesus appearance to paul is told in three different 0:43:01 versions in the in acts acts as the luke's history of the early church in the bible and in one of the 0:43:08 versions of the story they differ actually the people with paul when he saw jesus i'm seeing 0:43:12 jesus people with him saw nothing at all they saw nothing so paul i don't have a problem with 0:43:18 believing paul had a vision lots of people have visions visions of mary visions of buddha visions 0:43:24 of their dead mother-in-law i don't know they have visions this is normal in human experience 0:43:28 so paul had a vision but he never met the fleshly the earthly the historical jesus of nazareth at 0:43:34 all um it was several years later probably that he had his his conversion experience 0:43:39 and because we don't have much time i'm just going to make a simple but perhaps controversial point 0:43:44 which i think goes to the heart of the matter i'm not being controversial for the sake of it but 0:43:48 i think it goes to the essence of the issue if you look at the earliest jesus evidence we have 0:43:53 like in mark or q remember these marking q are used by the later gospel writers when they wrote 0:43:59 their own gospels back in time we have q and mark these are our very earliest historical sources 0:44:05 um in the gospels if you look in the earliest gospels and and queue jesus is not really 0:44:13 preaching about himself he doesn't go around saying i am god i am the second per i am the 0:44:18 savior i am the light of the world i am divine i am the son of god didn't say any of this 0:44:24 what does he do i mean it's there in mark chapter one you can look it up he preaches 0:44:27 god in his kingdom the good news of god in fact that's there in mark chapter one the very first 0:44:34 chapter of the earliest gospel um and when people come to him and say good teacher what must i do to 0:44:39 be saved he says obey the commandments okay so we will recover that briefly but what does paul say 0:44:47 well i'll give you an example in um acts where's my bible gone um acts again 0:44:54 is the alleged history i say alleged because historians don't regard it as very reliable 0:44:58 but here we have a story of paul and what his preaching is about so in acts chapter 16 0:45:04 someone asks him what must i do ask paul what must i do to be saved and paul says 0:45:12 quote believe on the lord jesus and you will be saved you and your household 0:45:19 so to be saved for paul you've got to believe in jesus that sounds evangelical that's sort of thing 0:45:24 you'll hear a fundamentalist bible preacher in the united states preaching to his church believe in 0:45:29 jesus and you'll be saved you'll be born again and you'll go to paradise you'll go to heaven 0:45:35 hang on did jesus just preach that did jesus preach that i i don't think he did there's no 0:45:41 evidence that jesus preached any of that he didn't preach that so what we have here and this is my 0:45:47 key point i guess my takeaway point is that we have the we have we had originally the gospel of 0:45:53 jesus the injil as the quran calls of jesus this is the message that jesus was tasked to proclaim 0:45:59 it's interesting the quran and the earliest evidence agree on this 0:46:03 paul comes along and preaches a gospel about jesus
0:46:09 this is the fundamental difference this is what christianity becomes 0:46:12 the message the gospel of jesus becomes the gospel about jesus and this is what paul preaches 0:46:20 he doesn't preach jesus message he preaches jesus and not just jesus as the historical jesus 0:46:27 but a jesus who died on the cross and rose again for the sins of the world and that's the way 0:46:33 you'll say by believing in that you are justified as paul says in romans you're made right with god 0:46:39 do you see a huge difference isn't it is that the same religion i mean bart ehrman president in one 0:46:44 of his books says did the tradition miscarry that's literally a quote did the tradition 0:46:50 miscarry in other words did it go off off completely off beam yeah i said 0:46:55 yes because the gospel of jesus and the gospel of paul are completely different 0:47:00 and christianity is the gospel of paul it's believing in jesus it's not what jesus preached 0:47:08 and this is the fundamental for me this is the fundamental fact of the issue and what does the 0:47:15 quran do it preaches the angel of jesus and calls people back to the original message and rejects 0:47:21 the christian dogmas of the trinity and and so on so that's very interesting that the quran actually 0:47:26 calls back to the original facts about jesus um back to paul so um again i'm just going to um 0:47:34 very simplistically mention another figure who's really key to unlocking the secret we 0:47:39 want to talk about unlocking secrets the guy's name is james james who is james 0:47:46 james actually historically believe it or not was the brother of jesus jesus had brothers and 0:47:51 sisters and james has mentioned it in our earlier sources as the brother of jesus believe it or not 0:47:57 what happened to him was he a disciple perhaps not early on 0:48:01 but we know that later after jesus left the scene ascended into heaven who became head of the church 0:48:08 well peter did of course he was the first pope two billion catholics well not two billion anyway 0:48:14 a lot of catholics will tell you that forget their numbers these days but actually if you 0:48:18 look at the historical record if you look in acts james became the head of the church in jerusalem 0:48:25 it says that in acts it says in other sources eusebius the early church historian in the 0:48:30 third century second and third century he actually mentions that the first one 0:48:34 to be appointed or elected by the disciples of jesus himself was james the brother of jesus 0:48:42 why why well because well this is a good question it's like a dynasty or dynasty as americans call 0:48:48 it um it's almost be controversial a bit like a sheer kind of emanate you have the family of 0:48:55 jesus taking control so you have jesus then you have his brother and after that we know who came 0:49:01 after it was a cousin of jesus i'm not making this stuff up he's there in historical record there was 0:49:06 a succession of jesus's family members like in in the sheer understand i'm not saying it's the 0:49:10 same i'm trying to give you a a parallel um and this died out in the second century by the way 0:49:17 but there was a jewish succession line from within the family of jesus who ruled the church centered 0:49:23 in jerusalem the gentile church this is the non-jewish church centered on paul's teaching had 0:49:28 a different trajectory and we see that focused in rome in rome where paul died and there you do have 0:49:35 the idea of apostolic succession through gentile bishops allegedly starting from paul peter i mean 0:49:42 but that's disputed very much so by historians but you clearly have a gentile christianity emerging 0:49:48 and james's faith was what was james's what religion did james follow do you think 0:49:54 he's a jew he followed judaism he was a jew jesus was a jew he followed the same religion 0:50:01 of his brother did james see his brother as god no did he see him as a messiah probably 0:50:08 prophet probably um but not as god and no no no jews saw messiah as god he was not expected 0:50:17 to be divine he was expected to be a king like david anointed to liberate the jews from their 0:50:23 enemies the romans in this case so another really important takeaway point i want to stress here 0:50:30 is that we're talking about christianities there is no thing called christianity i mean there's 0:50:35 a thing called islam that islam is a different kind of faith where it's been preserved intact 0:50:41 on a purely human level if you like right from the crown the manuscripts the authentic hadith 0:50:45 right up today we know exactly how the prophet upon mbps prayed because we have this massively 0:50:50 inherited tradition you know you know all this but christianity is not like that we have multiple 0:50:55 christianities and that's the word i'm kind of stressing here we had the christianity of james 0:51:00 because james was a christian you know he believed his his brother was the messiah that makes him a 0:51:05 christian paul was a christian but their views were very different and and there was a many 0:51:11 many scholars but most of us have noted a schism a split right at the beginning of the jesus movement 0:51:17 between those who followed paul and said believe in jesus this dying and rising savior figure 0:51:23 and those who follow james the jewish christians centered in jerusalem who obey the law who did not 0:51:30 think their brother was jesus was god you saw him as a prophet a human being and if you quick quick 0:51:36 look at the uh the handout i've given you i make reference to i think oh yeah the ebionites it's 0:51:42 the fourth one down i just want to mention them very briefly a group of second century christians 0:51:47 who maintained their jewish identity and insisted that followers of jesus need to keep 0:51:53 the jewish law and the ebionites were the direct successors of james in jerusalem remember james 0:51:59 was jesus brother he was appointed or elected by the apostles themselves according to our earlier 0:52:05 sources in eusebius and other places josephus the jewish historian and the ebio knights 0:52:14 i mean this is my opinion the ebonites were very islamic in terms of their understanding of jesus 0:52:19 the law god tawheed very islamic and there was the sense that again this is my opinion 0:52:26 that the more you put jesus back into his jewish context his history his culture his faith 0:52:32 the more you islamicize jesus because in many many ways islam and judaism are almost twins 0:52:40 they're very now i'm not talking about political events since 1940 i don't forget about that 0:52:44 i'm talking about the religion here they're very islamic you know their understanding of the law 0:52:49 understanding of god the understanding of the messiah very very similar islamic judaism are very 0:52:54 similar so the more image is my personal view take it or leave it the more you put jesus back in his 0:52:59 historical context and you put the his family and the followers the more you're looking at a very 0:53:04 islamic kind of understanding of jesus why is that well the irony is that later christians of course 0:53:11 turn jesus into a savior god and there's a certain family if you look at the ancient near 0:53:17 the greco-roman world there were lots of gentile cults pagan cults and many of them had a family 0:53:24 resemblance because it was a greco-roman world the hellenistic world and they had certain features 0:53:30 which are actually quite common to the gentile christianity that came out of paul so there would 0:53:34 be a common meal in honor of the god this is not christianity this is the pagan cults the idea of a 0:53:40 dying and rising god or demigod is a common theme in ancient pagan religious practice and mythology 0:53:48 there are many family similarities between what developed with paul 0:53:52 and the pagan world conversely if you can compare um james and jesus religion we're looking at 0:54:01 something that is very similar to islam a strict monotheism belief in the prophets that god sent 0:54:06 and and so on we know that is um i don't got much time let me just move on quickly to um 0:54:16 yeah i'm just gonna mention the council of nicaea this is jumping about a bit we don't have much 0:54:21 time um is not a photograph this is um the council of nicaea and there are certain misconceptions and 0:54:31 myths about the council of nicea i just wanted to hit on the head if i have the opportunity to do so 0:54:36 counselors here matters because this took place in turkey well nicaea nicea is kind of 0:54:43 virtually extinct now there's a few ruins left but it's actually in this country geographically 0:54:48 um it was called by the emperor constantine a roman emperor in 325 a.d and he called the 0:54:56 council because he was obviously the emperor of the roman empire and he wanted to settle a 0:55:00 dispute that was splitting apart the empire the christian christians were arguing about who was 0:55:06 jesus and he really wants to settle this matter so he called all the bishops of the world together 0:55:11 uh in turkey as anachronistic of course turkey didn't exist but anyway in nicaea 0:55:16 to decide the issue and they voted as you do they voted um by majority vote that jesus was god 0:55:28 as you do you have a vote that's how decisions are made i see you do theology no i i don't mean 0:55:35 to mock but i mean they seriously they did have a vote and i'm not making this up and 0:55:40 the people who voted against it they were sent into exile by constantine so there was a heavy 0:55:45 pressure to kind of go the right way because they knew if they didn't they'd be exile that means 0:55:50 leaving your family your home your everything and a number of them were exiled for giving the wrong 0:55:56 answer to the question um the technicalities was is jesus uh because it was athanasius and 0:56:03 there was aries athanasius defending what we were called christianity aries doubted or said that 0:56:08 jesus wasn't yahweh and uh the council and uh here it is in all its splendor um decided that jesus 0:56:17 was homoseon that means of the same substance of the fathers and the son was the same substance as 0:56:22 the father as the father is god the son is god and the technical greek word is homozygous meaning the 0:56:28 same uzia is the greek word for being so jesus was the same being in latin it's called consubstantial 0:56:35 of the same substance this by the way so what what are the myths about this there are several myths 0:56:41 i just want to knock on the head this council was not talking about the trinity the trinity is the 0:56:45 father the son and the holy spirit one god three equal persons they didn't discuss the trinity they 0:56:51 discussed who was this who was jesus who was the son but they did proclaim him to be god secondly 0:56:58 um i'm going to mention the da vinci code thinking well i'm mentioning that uh um the da vinci code 0:57:05 you might i don't know dan brown's novel and turned into a film with um who was the guy 0:57:10 who played thank you thank you tom hanks um uh the film is based on his 2003 best bestseller 0:57:18 bestseller the da vinci code now this planted the idea in many people's minds in the ways who saw 0:57:24 the film or what read the book that somehow constantine or nicea established the bible 0:57:31 established which books went in the bible it decided which gospels went it's complete myth 0:57:35 no evidence whatsoever it's a made-up story the council was concerned with who was jesus 0:57:40 was he was he co-equal with god or was he a creative being and nothing to do with the canon 0:57:46 of scripture the bible and that's a myth that unfortunately people because of dan brown bless 0:57:51 him anyway um we've got to deal with that issue um that's wrong i say it's not to do with the 0:57:56 trinity it's to do with who jesus was the first creed i think that explicitly teaches the trinity 0:58:03 um the trinity of persons is the athanasian creed and that was in the sixth century a bit later and 0:58:10 there you had the idea of the explicitly says you must believe that the father is god and the son 0:58:15 is god and the holy spirit is god but they're not three gods there's one god that's what it says my 0:58:21 mass is terrible by the way anyway i tend to think if one if the father is god and the son is god 0:58:28 and the holy spirit that makes three but that having stated that and then he denies what is 0:58:33 just stated by saying no there's only one god anyway that's um that's the athanasian uh creed 0:58:38 and they're all equal of course so the nicer didn't do that that was a later uh creed um 0:58:47 right so i'm going to um i've skipped over so much there's so much we could say 0:58:51 and i just want to give you some as i say some summary points this is my opinion please 0:58:56 investigate it for yourself i've got some recommended reading there this fundamental 0:59:00 shift in my view is from the gospel of jesus the injure preached by the messiah the prophet of god 0:59:07 to a later injil where jesus himself is the content of the message he is the subject of 0:59:13 the gospel but jesus didn't go around preaching himself how do we know the earliest evidence is 0:59:17 he didn't do that so we have a religion that really is fundamentally changed 0:59:23 actually and this is if you can speak on a purely human level this is the genius of 0:59:28 islam that actually correctly diagnoses perhaps the problem and suggests we need to go back to 0:59:34 to be faithful to jesus so you could say in fact i do say if you want to be a faithful follower 0:59:40 of jesus today you've got to be a muslim because then you're going to follow the religion of jesus 0:59:46 now i didn't notice i didn't say judaism why not judaism rejects jesus he rejects jesus completely 0:59:53 and muslims don't reject jesus so if you want to follow jesus in fact if you want to follow 0:59:58 moses if you want to follow jesus and muhammad peace be upon him all there's 1:00:01 only one village in the world that will do that and that is islam you get all three 1:00:06 judaism you only get one christian you get two it's a great bargain you get three in islam 1:00:12 um if i can put it that way um so i i'll end it there because i'm conscious there 1:00:17 are so many loose ends there but if you have any questions or comments even please do 1:00:23 um just something that struck me with the you know going from when you mentioned about john 1:00:30 and the change in the bible yeah i was just thinking about that
1:00:38 topic but some of the examination of the formation of is that there was a beloved server 1:00:45 who became muslim and then preached about uh yeah
1:01:04 some followers of ali who ali disowned completely who saw ali as divine in some incarnation of it 1:01:11 and yeah there is the idea of dynasty the idea of of the faith centre around a family 1:01:17 i think is there an early christianity which with jesus and his brother and his mother and 1:01:22 his cousin i think it's simeon um it's it's there in josephus it's there and eusebius 1:01:28 that they kind of chronically said who came after james your other family members and in the in the 1:01:32 early second century the emperor uh apparently took an interest and he actually sent people to 1:01:37 quiz this uh family member of jesus because he was concerned of you know is he such is is this 1:01:44 person subversive are they a threat to the roman order uh and he's basically said he wasn't so the 1:01:50 family continued to exist even the second century jesus own family and they were seen by many jewish 1:01:55 christians as you know the the in a sheer way you know the family itself from the prophet to his 1:02:01 his sons and cousins and so on compared to paul who just completely rejects that it's 1:02:06 just purely faith in jesus death and resurrection will get you saved it's a very different message
1:02:13 um so i don't know he was next yeah yeah i was just wondering so if we look to like the earliest 1:02:19 sources what exactly is jesus teaching in relation to jesus like what what is 1:02:26 like does he have his own even if he's not claiming to be 1:02:29 you know the son of god yeah the the the view now that consensus view i think most 1:02:34 historians is and this is quite shocking if you're christian is that jesus was a torah observant jew 1:02:42 okay he's a torah observant jew he followed the law now hang on i thought jesus abolished the law 1:02:48 no but paul said that paul says in ephesians 2 15 that jesus abolished the law with its 1:02:53 commandments and ordinances if you look at the earliest historical evidence say in matthew even 1:02:58 jesus tells people to obey the law in matthew chapter 5 and matthew 23 um he says obey the law 1:03:06 don't abandon it so he uh christians so take the the the issue of uh eating pork 1:03:12 would jesus have eaten pork absolutely not why because he was a jew it says you don't eat it 1:03:19 but paul said you could eat pork because he said all foods are clean i mean these are the 1:03:25 fundamental differences between the two religions so who who has greater claim on us as god-given 1:03:31 truth paul or jesus was a no-brainer if you're a muslim and i guess i was wondering is there a 1:03:36 feeling that like at the time is jesus accusing the jews of his time of losing that law or
1:03:46 yeah no i think the emphasis uh if if we can work this out the emphasis 1:03:50 for jesus then would not be on mere external obedience of the law but uh he radically 1:03:55 interiorizes the truth of the law so in the sermon on the mount he says uh you know you've heard that 1:04:00 it says you know don't kill don't murder i say to you jesus you know don't have hate in your heart 1:04:07 or you've heard it said don't commit adultery which does say that in the law but jesus says 1:04:13 but don't even lust in your heart you know he takes it a step further he makes it even more 1:04:17 difficult to obey in a way you know he takes the demands on the believer much higher so he's not 1:04:24 just an external legalist because he's very much against that he believes in a god of love and 1:04:29 compassion and mercy rahma that comes across very clearly in the earliest sources um and there's an 1:04:35 interesting nuance here which again come back to the quran the quran suggests i think that 1:04:39 uh that in the ministry of jesus some of the the laws were relaxed or changed or abolished 1:04:44 rather and that's exactly what we find in our earliest sources in the in the gospels um and 1:04:51 something that dr shabar ali has mentioned in his brilliant book on this actually um it's extremely 1:04:56 when you compare the earliest evidence to what the quran says there are some stunning 1:05:00 parallels that make it virtually impossible that a 7th century arab could have known these things 1:05:05 you'd have to be you know a modern scholar with all the the evidence and 1:05:09 knowledge of aramaic and jewish culture it just didn't exist in arabia so sorry
1:05:17 yes yes thank you for your presentation i'm just wondering um what uh can muslims learn from 1:05:25 the christians so that we don't end up losing uh hearts and minds of people as christians have 1:05:34 quite obviously yeah i mean that's a good question i mean in my own conversations of christians i 1:05:41 like to stress that the the actual message that jesus went around preaching is actually completely 1:05:48 compatible with islam and that's relatively easy to show and for example in luke's gospel 1:05:54 um there are lots of parables stories about jesus i saw how it was about god about salvation and 1:06:00 half of them could be hadith i mean they could i mean it's extraordinary i mean you really 1:06:04 wow you know it's very islamic and there's no reference there to jesus dying for your sins 1:06:10 um i'm going to give you one of my favorite examples here's luke chapter 18 uh it's a 1:06:15 story of two people who go up to the temple to pray this is jesus teaching this only found in 1:06:19 luke one is a tax collector and one's a pharisee now tax tech is a bad people because they collect 1:06:25 taxes on behalf of the romans the pharisee is a good guy because he's pious he prays and so so 1:06:31 these two guys go up to the temple in jerusalem which was destroyed in 1870 to pray and um 1:06:38 the fact the the tax collector the bad guy says um uh you know god god had mercy on me a sinner 1:06:46 you know he wouldn't we wouldn't even look up to heaven according to the parable uh because he's 1:06:50 so conscious of his sin but the pharisee the holy man says thank god i'm not like this tax collector 1:06:56 i fast i mean to put it in muslim language i i pay zakat i fast during ramadan i pray five times 1:07:04 a day thank god i'm not like this tax collector who was so humbled he wouldn't even look up to god 1:07:12 and jesus said that the tax collector went home justified before god because 1:07:20 and this is the punchline i guess whoever humbles themselves will be exalted whoever 1:07:25 exalts themselves will be humbled wow i mean that's just pure islamic spirituality 1:07:32 so yeah if you say i'm proud because i do this that's not what god wants he wants his servants 1:07:37 to be walk humbly with him so this i mean the idea being justified by the way in that passage 1:07:45 how do we get right with god and god is saying we get right with god by humbling ourselves before 1:07:50 our creator and that's not islam i don't know what is but that's it you know i mean he's not 1:07:56 saying well believe in my death on the cross and my atoning sacrifice and the shedding of my blood 1:08:00 and on the third day i rose again for your sins believe in that and you'll be right before god 1:08:06 it's not doesn't say that anywhere in the early evidence but he says that in luke and in many 1:08:10 other passages and parables um so basically i i because i'm fairly familiar with the new testament 1:08:16 i use all these stories from the gospels and i play them back to christians and then point out 1:08:21 the correlation the connection the similarity often the identity of that and islamic teaching 1:08:26 in the hadith in the quran and that's all i do you know your jesus is actually better as is not 1:08:34 historical the real jesus is the muslim jesus i would argue and i can argue that on historical 1:08:40 grounds let alone believing in the quran but that's just me sorry yeah with that just said um
1:09:04 dawah how do you relate to saying that that is the actual message of jesus or like example the 1:09:11 resurrection and stuff like how do we when we're given a doubt using the word how can we well i 1:09:19 focus on the message of jesus because like say luke's gospel lesson much less so in mark but 1:09:24 in matthew as well you get lots of tracks of teaching of jesus alleged teaching of jesus 1:09:30 and you know the vast majority of it is very islamic and i i just referenced that and it 1:09:35 points to how people are saved how it may write by god these are not trivial things 1:09:39 these are fundamental matters of spirituality and theology 1:09:43 and i say this parallels islam amazingly now bits in the gospels don't power that of course 1:09:48 so in in the end of matthew uh and in john there's the talk of the death and resurrection of jesus 1:09:55 um but that's a slightly different subject the quran has something quite nuanced on that you know 1:09:58 it appeared to them the jews that he was crucified jesus was crucified but in fact he wasn't 1:10:04 but the appearance was given and if you look at the earliest gospel the gospel of mark 1:10:10 there is no resurrection appearance in mark and the disciples when the crucifixion as described by 1:10:17 mark is happening all of the disciples run away they're not there and the women it says 1:10:24 saw the crucifixion at a distance that's literally what the nrsv says in english 1:10:29 so they saw what they thought disciples that just a few women at a distance what they thought was 1:10:34 jesus being crucified and that kind of you can see the quran is saying well the appearance was given 1:10:39 that he was but in fact he wasn't and i think what i think the quran is saying that god rescued jesus 1:10:45 by some kind of miracle um and indeed in gethsemane the day before jesus according to 1:10:51 the gospels anyway jesus begs god to deliver him from this ordeal and i think i would argue that 1:10:57 god answered jesus prayer and said yes i will rescue you from the enemies of god 1:11:02 and the enemies of jesus um and that's kind of but it the thing is the gospels are not 1:11:09 eyewitness testimony that's the consensus of historians they're second generation they're 1:11:15 embellished occasionally they make up stories um and so it's very difficult to kind of navigate 1:11:22 around the evidence because you're dealing with kind of some fiction and made up stuff as well as 1:11:26 some history that's why historians develop quite sophisticated scholarship to try and 1:11:31 laser like go in and find out what's original historical and what's secondary or made up anyway
1:11:41 um you know the gospel of mark that seems to be the most authentic one 1:11:45 is there any chain of narration to go to that's a very very very very good question short answer is 1:11:53 no i i mean the whole thing about is nad and changed narration and reliability unfortunately 1:12:00 doesn't exist now christians will say it does what do they say well matthew was a tax collector he 1:12:06 knew jesus he wrote that gospel you don't need a chain narration you've got an eye the problem is 1:12:11 it's not true it doesn't claim to be about matthew historians don't think it was by matthew of a 1:12:16 whole bunch of reasons if you take away the first person if you take away the eyewitness authorship 1:12:22 then you're left with an anonymous second generation text we don't know who wrote it 1:12:27 where it was written who the guy was or anything so we have to reconstruct from the contents of the 1:12:33 gospel itself to try and work out who the author might have been and we think in matthew's case he 1:12:38 would have been a jewish christian who advocated torah observance for christians that christians 1:12:44 should still obey the law and this is radically different from what paul said paul said you don't 1:12:50 have to obey the law in fact you shouldn't obey the law because that's the old dispensation so you 1:12:54 have a fundamental contradiction between matthew taught about jesus teaching and the law and so on 1:13:00 and what paul taught and again these are not my wacky ideas this is totally mainstream 1:13:05 this is standard stuff it's just oh the one one final issue i wanted to address i nearly forgot is
1:13:13 christians generally and again it's not just mark this is a well-known 1:13:18 observation don't know anything about this they've never heard of giza varmish they've 1:13:23 never heard of the synoptic problem they've never heard of markham priority they've never heard of 1:13:27 james being the head of the church and they don't know about this why don't they know about 1:13:32 it this is a this is a really fundamental issue and people but irma have addressed 1:13:37 this and others uh john barton i discussed it with him you can watch it on blogging 1:13:41 theologians professor oxford we discussed this and the reason is probably several fold um
1:13:49 christians you know who go to church are often intelligent people they might have a degree in 1:13:53 engineering they might have degree in psychology they might have responsible jobs when it comes 1:13:57 to the faith their own christian faith often usually that they're not very well informed 1:14:03 i'm not being rude i'm just saying they're not and they're not aware of this scholarship 1:14:09 why aren't they aware of it well their priests their ministers their pastors have been trained in 1:14:14 seminaries and universities like at oxford where giza vermice taught 1:14:18 they know about it so why didn't they tell their parishioners well okay
1:14:24 partly because um many people think because they don't want to 1:14:29 harm the faith of their parishioners they don't want to tell them you realize the gospels are not 1:14:33 eyewitness testimony i mean who wants to be told that maybe they're fearful they'll lose their jobs 1:14:38 maybe they're maybe they just know how how do you communicate all this stuff in a sermon on 1:14:43 a sunday morning to the congregation because this is not great news you know it's you know 1:14:49 the idea that john's gospel is a much later highly interpreted account that is heavily fictionalized 1:14:56 i mean who wants to hear that so that there is a colossal chasm between the the scholarship on 1:15:04 the one hand and the lay christian on the other and christians normally know nothing about this 1:15:10 which is why i want to share it with you because it is useful for daoa need i hardly need to say um 1:15:17 and it's useful to know about these things and i said i've got the recommended reading ep sanders 1:15:22 a book on the historical jesus which is a classic text if you really want to go into this 1:15:26 read ep sanders are there many other but bart ehrman's books are very good as well 1:15:30 actually very readable so for me this is a scandal it's a scandal it's as if to give a an analogy you 1:15:38 know the ulama knew lots of stuff about the quran on the hadith and they're not telling us about 1:15:43 it but by the way they are there's no such thing that's just that's made up there are no secrets 1:15:50 but in christianity there are and um and part of the reaction to biblical scholarship particularly 1:15:56 the united states has been a thing called fundamentalism fundamentalist christianity 1:16:02 and this is kind of a drawing in the trenches and saying we don't know about these scholars we're 1:16:07 going to say the bible is the inerrant word of god of course jesus is god he's born of a virgin 1:16:12 trinity is true the bible's perfect we don't want any any of this stuff it's called fundamentalism 1:16:17 there's a reaction against the threat of this so that's kind of a cultural reaction you see 1:16:23 in the media particularly the united states and the southern states um and it's a real problem 1:16:28 and many many missionaries you'll come across are fundamentalist christians uh and that's in 1:16:33 fact normally they are fundamental as christians i should say and some of them these are not fools 1:16:38 many of these people are very bright nice people but that they they've dealt with this problem 1:16:44 uh by putting up the shields and putting in is armor plating they think to protect them from this 1:16:52 unfortunately it's not very attractive and it's not very honest um yeah so uh so there is uh most 1:16:59 christians have no idea they perhaps don't want to know and their own leaders don't tell them why 1:17:04 they don't tell them is the question and i think there are multiple reasons to do with job security 1:17:10 not knowing how to do it not wanting to upset people not wanting to undermine people's faith 1:17:15 and all that but it's very patronizing very patronizing well we're not i'm not going to 1:17:19 tell you the truth it might upset you okay i want to know the truth please even if it's painful 1:17:25 better to know the truth um but i think some people are scared to share the truth and this 1:17:31 has been going on for two centuries now this is not like last week this is like old news and this 1:17:35 was published in 1973 jesus the jew i mean that's like 50 years ago or something 40 years ago anyway 1:17:43 yes i'll end it now uh because i've yeah um but thank you very much for your uh time 1:17:51 and um i'm sorry it's been so on the surface there's so much more one could say 1:17:55 but there's a reading list to follow it up thank you very much