Hello. It's been more than a week. But here I am again. I'll be downloading the next installment of Re-Intro. This section deals with the claims of Jesus. Is he God? Or just a good man? Is there anything from the Biblical record that can give insight into whether his story holds up? What is there in outside sources that can help explain or discredit Jesus' claims? Well, take a look and see.



Jesus and His Claims:

Jesus was not content to have the people hail him as a particularly nice guy. The way that Jesus is characterized by most people in this age, He’s either totally spaced out, mouthing nice little things about loving your neighbor, or shaking his finger at hypocritical religious men caught bullying some fallen woman, or saying out-of-touch philosophy.

And then you have Him, saying for all the world to have to deal with: I AM GOD!!!
This is not a guy saying, “I found God,” “I found a way to God,” or “I found the conciousness or the enlightened path of God.” He, with all his wisdom, all his compassion, and his inexplicable power, said, “I AM GOD!!” Without apology or elaborate attempts to defend Himself, Jesus of Nazareth bluntly declared that He was the guy who made the Universe. He claimed the identity of the One who created all the galaxies, all the planetary solar systems, all the suns that connected those systems, all the comets and meteors that roar across the vastness of space, all the complex occurrences of plasma and physical properties that formed planets and moons. He, in effect, claimed to have created matter, the time-space-material continuum that came from matter. He claimed to have created the properties that formed the combinations of air, water, and organic material that made for this delicate rock called Earth, and the properties that made up every other planet in the universe, including those upon which life may be found one day, if by chance we are not alone.

And by endorsing the Bible as literally true, He in effect, claimed that He did it all in six 24-hour days. And He claimed the power of life and death over every living human being who ever had or would live on this planet.

All this enormous power, this massive intelligence, all this authority, all was claimed by one relatively poor, obscure Israeli carpenter from a town of only a few thousand people, in a backwater region of the Roman Empire, whose source of educational attainment, if any, was and is unknown.

If He is not God, then what would He be? Think about it, just some of the things Jesus said about Himself. And remember, we’ve already established the clear historical reliability of the Bible, with both internal and external evidence. So what the historical accounts in the Gospels say that Jesus said, there's a 99.99% probability that He actually said them. Here are just a few of them:

1) I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to [God] the Father except through me;

2) I am the door [of eternal life]. All who came before me were thieves and robbers. I am the gate. He who comes to me will be saved, I will open to him and he will find safety;

3) I am the Bread of Life. He who comes to me will never be hungry;

4) If any man believes in me, a spring of living water will well up in him for eternal life. (By this spring he meant the Holy Spirit);

5) Abraham (the founder of the Jewish people, who lived 2,000 years before Jesus) rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day. He saw it and was glad. (And when his enemies were dumbstruck at the thought of a man only 33 claiming that he had seen a 2,000 year old holy man, he said the following.);

6) I tell you the truth, before Abraham lived, I AM (the ultimate Hebrew word for GOD).

Only 3 kinds of people would make such a audacious claim: a lunatic, an evil monster—a megalomaniac like Hitler, Stalin, or Saddam Hussein, or an honest man who told the truth. In other words, that Jesus is GOD.

But you might say, “That’s your own conclusions, I decide to conclude that He was a good man, a great teacher... I don’t need to say that He was a lunatic or a liar. I can’t accept that He is God, because I just don’t think His disciples were above making it all up.” The problem was, as we talked about earlier, was that way too many people were alive at the time the Gospels were written who could discredit any falsehoods in the Gospel accounts. And all these writers paid for their accounts with their lives, or at least with many years in prison. For that and other reasons, once again, you have to take the historicity of the Bible accounts of Jesus’ life as true.

So you have to take up the big issue: “Would a good man who is a good teacher but not God say the things Jesus did?” Examine it---would a non-God say, over and over and over again---I am God?” Let’s see the different options we could take---Good Teacher/Philosopher/Good man, Liar, Lunatic, God. Let’s take each one in order.

Good Teacher/Philosopher/Good Man:

So, what kind of a good philosopher or man would claim to be God? Sure, Jesus is unparalleled as a moral teacher, but there’s a little problem. As we showed earlier, Jesus repeatedly kept saying that He is the God of the Universe, both bluntly and in symbolic ways that everyone in his time could understand. At the top of the group of audacious things that He said, one statement that set Him apart from everyone else put His followers in trouble for the rest of their lives, and made Christianity unique. That was when He was challenged by the religious leaders of His time. And let me tell you, these guys were a match for Cardinal Law, theft, extortion, bribes, kickbacks, you name it. The religious leadership of Jesus’ time were, for the most part, a patented disgrace. So that sets the context.

On two occasions Jesus was so outraged over the garbage He was watching that He single-handedly wrecked the crooked market that was conducted right in the Temple of God in Jerusalem. And the man didn’t politely ask them to leave. Each time he made a whip, we’re talking Indiana Jones here. And he used it on them, and ran the crooked merchants out of the place, hundreds of them. Well, on each occasion the leaders, who profited from these merchants went straight to Jesus, and demanded to know who did this little peasant carpenter think He was. (The first was early in his 3 ½ year ministry, the second was on the Sunday before He died.). The first time He was confronted Jesus told the leaders this reply: “Destroy this sanctuary, and I will raised it again in three days.”

The leaders were clueless. They thought Jesus was talking about destroying the Temple, which took 46 years to build, and then rebuilding it in 3 days. But John, one of Jesus’ close followers, said He was talking about His body, and that He was saying, in effect, “You want to know where I got my authority? I’ll show you some authority! Kill me, and when I come back from the dead in 3 days, you’ll see what kind of authority I have.” In a word, Jesus said that He was God, and that He had the power of life and death, including His own. NOBODY EVER SAID THAT AND GOT AWAY WITH IT!! Because sure enough, the day came when they murdered Him by execution on trumped up false charges of blasphemy and treason, and He let them take Him. And sure enough, about 50 days later Jesus’ followers were going around claiming that He had risen from the dead, and began busily gaining converts---and grief.

Every single one of Jesus’ top men, they’re called apostles, died a violent death except one, John, and he sometimes wished he had. I mean, he lived through being boiled in a pot of burning oil and got exiled for at least 3 years on a deserted island. And since then, wars have been fought, and people have been murdered, raped, robbed, beaten, imprisoned, exiled, or forced to flee their homes as refugees, because of their faith that Jesus is God, and risen from the dead. In fact over 140,000 people a year between 1980 and 2000 were killed because of the crime of being a Christian.

Jesus, at least, had a pretty good idea that the world would hate Him, and all who would believe in Him. In fact, He told His followers as much the night before He died. Well if He had that much foreknowledge of what death and carnage would happen because of His claim to be God, and He WAS NOT GOD, what kind of a man would He have been for letting His followers go on in the charade? A good man and a great teacher? NO WAY!! Jesus of Nazereth would be, justifiably stated, a jackass. He would be the worst kind of megalomaniac you ever saw. But let’s just wait a minute. Maybe He couldn’t help it. Maybe He just thought that He was God, because He was mad. Insane. Mentally challenged. Let’s look at that option for a second.

Jesus The Wacko:

I know that there are devout Christian people and others of more sensitive personality who are horrified at this subtopic’s title. But hey, let’s be truthful. If Jesus is not God, and He certainly can’t be merely a good man or teacher, then He’s either totally evil or totally deranged. If you can’t handle the choice of words to bring the reality of this issue to get into your emotions, GET OVER IT!!! NOW!!! Because this subject is not pretty, and it is the most high-stakes issue of all time. Who is this guy?

So, let’s consider whether He was just crazy. Maybe that’s it, Jesus was nuts! He just went around, thinking He was virgin-born, that He was God, that He could raise the dead, give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, that He could heal genetically-based deformities like Down’s Syndrome, and people who suffered from cerebral palsy, and people who were paralyzed from birth. Maybe He just fantasized about going on a mountain and getting translated from a physical man into a purely spiritual one. Maybe he was delusional about rising from the dead. But what’s more, he got hundreds of thousands of people to go along with it.

That’s the problem you have now. You had all these thousands of followers, all of whom could have come forward, if there was any falsehood to this man, and exposed Him. There have been insane men who have fooled masses of people before, like a Hitler, if indeed that man was only insane. Why not conclude that about Jesus? But yet, none of Jesus’ followers ever came forward and tried to publicly renounce the whole image of Jesus that was, and has been built up about Him? WHY?

Because there is one thing about Jesus that is separated from all of the men who were insane and had power. Everything about these other guys was about themselves, and their own benefit, their own power. If there was anything about Jesus that was unique, it was that He was totally secure about who He believed Himself to be, and yet it seemed that He could care less about whether He looked good. He was a whole lot interested about helping people in desperate need, including people who were so poor and despised by the world of their time that they were the last people a man like Jesus would want to befriend, if he was a real lunatic.

And that’s the whole point. If there is anything universally accepted by every Christian, it is that Jesus had no concern about Himself, but about everyone else. He didn’t need for people to adore Him---He adored people---everybody! Even the most wretched! He would make it a point to go and transform the lives of the very least of his time—prostitutes, the hopelessly insane, sick and diseased, lepers, the outcasts, you name it.
One thing about crazy people—about psychopaths, they are totally self-absorbed. Jesus was totally absorbed with two things---His Father—God, and with everybody He met each day. A lunatic would not have done that. So, our options continue to diminish.

Jesus the Nazi:

There you go again, the horror at my choice of words. I’ll say it again. Grow up!! If Jesus isn’t God, it’s the most plausible explanation of all!! Face it!! Confront it!! What suffering would have been prevented if He had not been allowed to manipulate His followers to spread this preposterous lie! Think!! This common everyday guy—HE SAYS THAT HE MADE THE UNIVERSE!!! AND HE’S GOING AROUND GETTING EVERYBODY TO BUY INTO IT!! And He has some pretty strange magical powers, to the point of stopping storms—the guy has his men claiming He can change the weather!! And they were prepared to die for it!!

If Jesus isn’t God, and He was in touch with reality, and He knew what He was getting people to believe to the ultimate degree of devotion, then a more evil, malevolent man has not been born. And noone was more skilled. Go back to the beginning of this chapter, to the statements made by Napoleon. No armies, no political power, yet an equal amassment of loyalty by masses of people has not been approached in all of human history. So why not believe that?

There is one answer. The whole plot goes down in flames if He’s dead! Everything that He claims for himself is exposed as a colossal fabrication—totally discredited, if He stayed dead after His crucifixion. How can you believe a man’s claim that He created matter itself, with everything that has material substance from it, that He created every single star and planet, complete with the atmospheres on each one of them that results in the very atmospheric conditions that exist on them, if the man is dead? You can’t! You won’t! Who, in the name of all sanity, can buy into a dead man’s claim that he can command lightning and thunder by his spoken voice, that he could heal every disease known to man—or unknown (we’re talking Ebola and other similar diseases which in his time were all lumped into a category they termed “leprosy”, bubonic plague, kill viruses like HIV, instantaneously restore limbs to dismembered people, undo the effect of Down’s Syndrome on a child within seconds, recreate healthy brain tissue in a person ravaged with cerebral palsy, and restore a dead man to life within seconds who had in four days of semi-desert heat rapidly decomposed)?

His ability to manipulate people into such a belief, no matter how skillful a magician, fails the moment He’s assumed room temperature and become the main course for worms. And that’s where we’ll move next—the issue of Jesus’ death—and the issue of His “alleged” resurrection and ascension into heaven. Because if He’s alive, and He never died after rising again, then He’s the Lord God Almighty. It’s no longer just an intellectual exercise, He has a right to ask for you and I to submit ourselves to Him, as the central core of our lives, the emotional and moral and spiritual center from which everything that has value originates. So let’s look into those issues now.


Come back by Monday, I should have the next installment up by then.

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Hi. This is the latest installment of Re-Intro. I'm into the second unit in the series on the person of Jesus of Nazereth. I hope you like it. We, hopefully will be getting new articles from a group of new people who have said they want to help me, and I'll be looking forward to adding all sorts of new links to the weblog. Anyway, hope you enjoy. Ciao.


THE PERSON OF JESUS OF NAZARETH

It's more than a little strange to go into a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth that will last a handful of pages. It's about like spending ten pages on "The Nature of Air, Water, Earth, and Fire." You can't really do it, and it's almost insulting to try. But here goes anyway.

The Christian church today has more than 35,000 different sects, denominations, associations, and organizations of churches. They have for 2,000 years argued among themselves, cut off contact from each other and condemned each other to eternal damnation, fought wars against each other, treated each other in the most shameful ways, all of which are condemned by the teaching of Jesus Himself. They have almost literally "devoured" each other. Mahatma Gandhi was a great leader, I don't always agree with his philosophy, but one thing he said about Christians was true. "The greatest enemy of Jesus Christ is the church. I like your Christ but I don't like you Christians."

Yet there is one thing that Christianity, in all its forms and its almost two and a half billion adherents, hundreds of millions of whom are truly devout believers, marches in lockstep on. Jesus of Nazareth is who the Bible says he is, the man who is God. His teachings are the center of their lives, they shape how they do their business, how they raise their families, how they relate to their marriage partner, how they approach sex, money, power, education, their relationship to politics, authority, relationships, … everything! When they hear the words, "Jesus said," an emotional response comes over them that does not occur even with other passages in the Bible. They accept the entire Bible as the sole Book of God. But there is something about the words and deeds of Jesus that cause an electric response unique in all the world. I'll review a few of them for you.

First, the account of his coming into the world shows that God has a character unique among every kind of belief system in the world. God is shown as desiring to identify himself, first and foremost, with the least among us, the poor, the outcast, the despised. His forerunner, John the Baptist, was born to two old people who were barren and had been so all their lives. The announcement of the impregnation of Jesus in the womb of Mary, came to a 14-year old girl from a small town in an area of the world smaller than Korea which was under domination by a foreign power. The circumstances of her pregnancy, were such that his mother would always be suspected of immorality, that he was illegitimate, and that his father married his mother out of pity to protect her from being executed by stoning, still the means of dealing with unwed sex in much of the Middle East. The birth would take place in Bethlehem, a town of a few thousand with a notable past but with little to show for it. When he was born, he was born in a cave, because that was what a manger was. It was a wonder that he and his mom survived the trip of some 120 miles from Nazareth while great with child, either on foot or a donkey.

The first persons who were notified of the birth of Jesus were shepherds, whose occupation was close to the most despised one of its time. They were close to the low people on the social ladder. That group, quite understandably, were tax collectors, one of whom was one of Jesus' first followers and the author of the account of Jesus' life that bears his name--Matthew. And when Jesus is first visited by the first genuinely rich and powerful men who would worship him and give him rich gifts, the result was that the king over that region, Herod I, sought to kill him so intensely that he slaughtered over 2,000 children under the age of two. That massacre is also recorded in Josephus' Antiquities. Jesus and his family, totally obscure and an apparent threat to noone, had to spend the first few years of his life as fugitives in Egypt.

Following an almost completely obscure childhood after moving back to his parents' home, he emerged at age 30 in a public ministry that was almost totally spent among the common people of his time. Virtually the only times spent with the wealthy and powerful was when they came to him first, usually to confront him over his teachings and claims to be divine. And when he died, the only thing he owned was his cloak, and it was gambled over. Only the compassion and probable premonition of two rich secret followers of his ensured that his body had a resting place. And when the Bible says that he rose from the dead, none but the humble men and women followers he had would get the privilege of witnessing his resurrected state, although, as we’ll see later, that group numbered in the hundreds.

Jesus frequently spent time with, and showed compassion to, people that the world, even today, would find unfit for the attention of any man who would aspire to a more spiritual life. His social contacts included prostitutes, corrupt civil servants (tax collectors), sexually infamous women, the mentally deranged (especially those who had been demon-possessed as the cause of their derangement), and multitudes of people suffering the most hideous, contagious, and disfiguring diseases. He never once showed disdain for them, never refused to display the most heart-rending compassion, and yet never gave one centimeter of moral compromise in an effort to ingratiate himself to them.

He wasn't impressed with power, wealth, or social position. Yet he never refused to help or instruct anyone who came from such privilege who possessed the humility to receive it from him, poor as he was.

Jesus was a man who never wasted words, never sought to use words and his personality to control people against their will. And his words---what has civilization become because of his words---and could have been if they had been consistently obeyed?

It has been said of his most famous sermon, called the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Book of Matthew, that it is the foundation of Western Civilization, along with the Ten Commandments which the Bible says was given to Moses by God. But the Sermon on the Mount goes into detail in areas very close to us all. He identified the lust for money as a master that cannot be kept on equal status with anyone, including God. He upset the prevailing attitude of many even to this day of making women primarily responsible for men's sexual lusts and misconduct. He placed it squarely on the shoulders of men, giving women and their beauty and their humanity a dignity that all societies are just now beginning to acknowledge.

In this Sermon, and in many others, Jesus showed not only a distaste, but an open hostility for religion as it was, and as still is most commonly practiced in the world by its leaders. In a word, he hated and loathed the hypocrisy, greed, and lust for power and recognition that most commonly characterizes religious leaders. "When you pray," he said, "do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to be seen by men. I tell you, they have received their reward in full." Jesus would have none of religious leadership who lived as though the people who attended their houses of worship existed for their own pleasure. Jesus wanted authenticity. He wanted spiritual leaders who lived like they were human, like men and women who understood their need for God to be as great as anyone else.

In particular, he hated the ability of men in power to abuse the helpless, the poor, and those who had fallen into one kind of public wrongdoing or another. Jesus today would not tolerate the actions of some so-called "Christian leaders," including much (though not all) of the bishops and cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church who in recent years would cover up for priests who molested thousands of children and teenagers, reject the pleas for justice from those who were victimized, and would then promote the same perverted priests to higher positions in the church. (This is not an anti-Catholic statement alone, there have been enough instances of Protestant and Orthodox religious leaders who have abused children under their charge.) He once said, "If any man causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a rope with a millstone tied around his neck, and to be dropped off a cliff into the bottom of the sea." He attacked men like that and called them: "Brood of vipers! Snakes! How will you escape damnation?!… Blind guides! You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! Unwashed graves--beautiful on the outside but on the inside full of dead men's bones and all corruption!" (Matthew 23).

Jesus especially despised those religious and political leaders who abused women who had fallen into sin, but who would do nothing at all to men who would be equally, or even more at fault, even those who would seduce the very women who would be punished by them. He defended the weak, emphatically. The best example of his compassion to women, and his unmitigated hate of religious hypocrisy is the case known as "the woman taken in adultery," which is related in the 8th chapter of the book of John, the fourth book of the New Testament. In it a married young woman was dragged out of her bed with another man, in the midst of her act of making adulterous love with him, by a bunch of religious teachers and priests! (How did they know when to go after her in bed?!) There they were, dragging her out in the middle of Jerusalem, completely naked! These "holy men" threw her right in front of Jesus, who was teaching a large crowd in the middle of an outer area of the Temple, the holiest shrine in all of Judaism (such propriety and respectfulness!), and demanded to know what he should do.

First of all, they all knew that, according to the ancient law of Moses, the penalty for adultery was death by stoning! (By the way, the man was supposed to die, too! Where was he? Most scholars believe he was one of the priests, and they decided to pick on his girlfriend and leave him be! How gallant, decent, and upright was that?!!? Yikes!!). And it was intended as a BIG trap!! If he told them to forgive her and let her go, they would attack him as a false prophet and kill him--because the Bible taught that only God could forgive sins. If Jesus told them to stone her to death, he is discredited as being as heartless as they were, and they would still kill him, because he was not authorized to judge her, only the chief judges of the land at that time were, and the penalty for what they considered treason against their government in this case was death. It looked like they had him.

But what did he do? He deliberated carefully, writing on the ground with his fingers. It was a normal act done by Jewish teachers, or rabbis, in that time. Then he stood and said, in his native Aramaic (literally), "Let him who is without [this] sin be the first to cast a stone at her." Then he sat down and began writing again, and, many believe, began writing the names of the illicit lovers these "righteous" men had. They left, quickly, one by one, beginning with the oldest and ending with the youngest.

Then Jesus stood up, and, with the woman still crumpled in a heap of frightened nakedness, he asked her [literally], "Dear woman (the same way he spoke to his beloved mother Mary, elsewhere), where are your accusers? Does any man condemn you?" She, in renewed shock over the sudden change in circumstances, replied, "No one, Lord." She figured out who He was in that one pregnant moment. Then he said, "Neither do I condemn you (even though He had the right as God!). Go, and sin no more." He was more interested in setting her free from her self-destructive behavior and giving her a new life than in upholding a religious, legalistic interpretation of what the Law required. That was Jesus! And that is the kind of God Jesus is, and what he wanted to represent to us!

He loves you, he does not want to condemn you, but he wants to deliver you from the self-destructive consequences of your sin, and set your feet on the road of a new life. And since He is God, He can. We'll talk about how that can happen shortly.

So we see that the personality of Jesus is infinitely wise, loving, compassionate, truthful, and full of goodness. But if that is true, how can you reconcile that to the claims that He made? Jesus is commonly referred to in warm, glowing terms by people the world over who have no desire to embrace him as divine, as a “great moral teacher,” a “good man,” or “a revolutionary for social justice.” But if you try to limit Him to that category, you’ve got a huge problem. Jesus said things NOBODY, BUT NOBODY ever said! At least nobody who wasn’t either insane or just flat evil. And that’s what we’ll deal with next.

Hi. Sorry for being away so long. Too much work by my wife that demanded both computers, too much time away from home. I'll be back a lot more often, however, offering up some thoughts each day, or close to each day. Here's the next installment of Re-Intro. There will be some new things offered soon. Bye for now.

CHAPTER 4
JESUS: WHO IS HE? WHY IS HE SO IMPORTANT?
WHAT DOES IT MATTER
TO ME?

Charles Colson was the chief legal counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1969-1972. He was charged with the job of protecting the legal interests of the President from all types of lawsuits and advising him as to what actions he could take that would avoid criminality. That is, that's what his official job title stated. What he was actually was Nixon's "attack dog" during the years leading up to the end of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Due to either real and imagined espionage by anti-war organizations and major newspapers of internal White House activities, which the administration believed violated national security during a time of war, Colson took the job of rooting out those real and imagined enemies. Colson was ruthless, making enemies lists, spreading disinformation about political opponents, using the FBI and CIA to spy on and harass everything from Senators and movie stars to average housewives. Colson simply, by his own admission, went out of control, not seeing the difference between real spies and traitors and honest and decent citizens who opposed a controversial war which had been horribly mismanaged by previous Presidents and had been a nightmare for this one. Charles Colson was a man with no mercy, and no regard for the very law he had been sworn to uphold. It was said of him in those days in the White House, "Charles Colson would have destroyed his own grandmother." He was willing to destroy the lives of countless people, and ruin his own distinguished legal career in the cause of Richard Nixon, which was, with the later exception of Bill Clinton, one of the most corrupt Presidencies in American history.

That corruption culminated in the Watergate scandal where men hired by Nixon and Colson were caught attempting to plant wiretaps at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the unsuccessful coverup of that wrongdoing led to the impeachment and resignation of Nixon in disgrace, and the criminal conviction of dozens of White House officials, including Colson. He was imprisoned, disbarred from the practice of law, and his name and family permanently disgraced. By all accounts he should have been destroyed as a man, his family broken up, living in poverty and ruin, and his name a forgotten footnote in history.

Today, Charles Colson is one of the most respected men in Washington, and around the country. He is rich and successful. His legal licenses have been restored to him many years ago. He is an accomplished author. His marriage has endured all through these years, and his children have all been successful professionals with happy marriages. Colson is a happy and contented grandfather. And for his work in helping people in prison, discarded like he was, called International Prison Fellowship, which exists in dozens of nations around the world, he has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Templeton Award, given in Washington, D.C. each year for the man or woman who contributes the most for the spiritual life of America. Charles Colson has inspired countless thousands of young people to forego careers in business or finance to enter public service for the good of mankind. He has made peace, even friendships with those he once treated as enemies of the state. He has defied belief on the part of everyone who ever knew him, or thought they did.

What could have made such a change, such an about face, not only in his own character, but in the very consequences of his wrongdoing. For he entered prison back in 1974 with peace and hope, as he tells it, not with despair and humiliation. The change had already begun. What happened? The answer--from Colson, was one man--Jesus of Nazereth.

When he had left the White House, about a year before the Watergate scandal broke the news, and he was prosecuted, he went to work for a large corporation in the Northeast U.S. While he was outwardly successful and confident, he felt empty and hopeless inside, like nothing really mattered. A friend and co-worker challenged him to consider Christianity. Colson, an atheist at the time, scoffed at the idea of religion of any kind and told his friend so. But his friend persisted, and told him just to read the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus and decide whether the evidence to support Jesus' claim to be God was outweighed by the evidence against him. He also read C.S. Lewis book, Mere Christianity, showing the historical and logical reasons outside the Bible to support the faith, and especially the historical existence of the Bible in its present form. Then he took a vacation to his family home at the beautiful Martha's Vineyard resort island in Massachusetts. While there he would go to his favorite bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, take out the New Testament given him by his friend, a notepad like what he would use in his legal work, and he would read and record his thoughts.

Colson says that what he did with the notepad was, as he read, he divided his pages into half. One side he titled, "Reasons to believe Jesus is God." One the other side, "Reasons to believe Jesus was a fraud, mad, mistaken, or all of the above--but definitely not God." And he focused upon three facts: 1)A madman or a fraud would not say or do the kind of things Jesus did; 2) Jesus claimed to be God, and the only way of spiritual truth and life in God, and the only kind of man who would make such claims would be either Liar, Lunatic, or God Almighty; 3) the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is supported by internal logic within the New Testament text and from historical facts of that time.

And so, as have multitudes of intelligent men and women over the centuries, Charles Colson, in a rational, calculatedly, deliberative fashion, determined that Jesus of Nazareth is God--the One who made the entire universe and devised the laws of physics necessary to keep it all together. The One who died on a Cross for his wrongdoing--his sins. Once that choice was made, there was no turning back. Scandal, arrest, prosecution, prison, disbarment, family upheaval, humiliation, the desertion of old friends, starting over after being released from prison, none of it could turn him back. And according to Charles Colson, his journey has been one of joy, peace, deep emotional satisfaction, and the happiness of seeing his life restored. And not only his family or professional life--his life--his very soul, restored to wholeness, self-respect, and respect for his fellowman. How can a rational decision about the claims of a religious figure from so long ago have such an incredible effect upon a highly educated, cultured, sophisticated, even cynical and ruthless man as this?

The person of Jesus of Nazareth has had such an effect on mankind as to be unquestioned as the man who has had a greater effect on life on earth than any other individual. A famous quotation expresses it best:

He was a man who was born….the Son of a peasant woman….

While still a young man the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him, another betrayed him…. His captors gambled for his only piece of property, and that was his coat…. And when he died, he was taken away and laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

He had none of the attributes and achievements that would normally be associated with success. He never traveled, or had a college education, he never wrote a book. He never traveled more than a hundred and twenty miles from the place where he was born….

More than twenty wide centuries have passed since his birth, and today he is the centerpiece of man's column of progress. It is just to say that all the kings that ever ruled, all the judges that ever reigned, all the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the cities ever built, all the universities that ever existed, all the discoveries ever made, all the wide achievements of man upon this entire earth all taken together have not affected the life of the human race as did this One Solitary Life.


Does this man have such a right to such a place. Men have done both extreme horrors and incredible acts of virtue, all because of, or in reaction to, the very mention of His Name. He claims not only the right to be called God--but your God, too. And he wants you to at least take the time to consider Him, whether He should be your God. He claims that one day you will face him, at the end of your life, and He claims that He will one day judge you for the life you lived, and He will, based on how you responded to Him, send you either to a real and literal Hell or to an equally real and literal Heaven.

Why would he claim such an awesome position? Is he mad, evil, …. or right?

Let's consider the evidence, and you decide.

JESUS: THE CASE FOR HIM

First of all, you start with the proof that Jesus of Nazereth existed. And we return to the proof that the Bible, as we have it, is, at least in it the parts of it that do not deal with miraculous activities, the most highly accurate historical document of ancient times.

It may seem incredible to believe, but there are still a few people who doubt that Jesus was an actual historical character. The truth is, the evidence is irrefutable that Jesus of Nazereth was a real man, that he was born and lived from about 3 B.C. to about 32 A.D., that he was a carpenter by trade, that there was a controversy as to the background of his birth, that he was an itinerant preacher or rabbi, that he was executed for sedition against the Roman Empire, and that his most significant followers were the 12 men who were chosen by him to spread his teachings and the claims about himself to the world. No less than five major historians verify the historical existence of Jesus: Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Josephus.

Josephus, the Jewish historian that wrote the comprehensive history of the Jewish people, Antiquities, and The Jewish War, the account of the Roman-Jewish war of 66-73 A.D. that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the famous stand at Masada, writes a brief account of the life and person of Jesus that was startling. That is especially so coming from a Jewish historian who had surrendered to and deserted to the Romans, who history has inconclusive evidence that he ever became a Christian.

The quotation is up to considerable debate as to its validity, but in light of the fact that he and other historians acknowledged his followers also lived and propagated his message, especially Saul ben Hillel, whom the world knows as St. Paul, lends tremendous doubt that immediately from the time of his death such a huge number of people would collaborate in building a completely fictitious character and call him God.

An extraordinary fact is also related about Jesus by the Jewish people who rejected Him. The Babylonian Talmud, which was a collection of commentaries, rules, imposed practices, and detailed histories by leading Jewish rabbis from both before and long after the earthly life of Jesus, refers to the life of Jesus. Moses Maimonides, considered by many historians as the greatest Jewish thinker in post-Biblical history, who lived in Spain in the 11th century A.D., refers to the recitations in the Talmud about Jesus as factual. Both make statements about Jesus that are extraordinary coming from those who rejected Him as the Son of God. They both acknowledge that he was a gifted teacher, and, incredibly, admit that he did many wondrous miracles of healing. They said that Jesus was condemned as a “sorcerer” and executed as being in league with the devil. But what is amazing is that they, his enemies and detractors for centuries, never claimed his miracles were frauds, they admit they actually happened! If His enemies admit to the miracles as true, and Maimonides said that opinion was the position of all the Jewish leaders, then what are any of us going to do with the corroborated fact that He had supernatural power?

The truth is, as said by Arnold Toynbee, the famous English historian (who was not a Christian), there is more evidence to support the existence of Jesus of Nazareth than to support the historical existence of George Washington.

So let's go to the real heart of the issue of Jesus of Nazareth, who was a very real man making very tall claims: Who was He? Or perhaps, Who is He?