“It was male human nature that the Son of God united to his divine person; it was a female human person who was chosen to be his mother. In no woman has human nature been raised to the dignity which it possesses in Jesus of Nazareth, but to no male person has there been given a dignity comparable to that which Mary enjoys as Theotokos, a dignity which in the words of the Eastern liturgy makes her ‘more honorable than the cherubim and beyond comparison more glorious than the seraphim.’ … The centrality of womanhood in the redemption is shown by the fact that the Incarnation itself waited for the courageous and obedient Fiat of Mary (Luke 1:38).”

Eric L. Mascall
Whatever Happened to the Human Mind

I saw something beautiful one day while walking down Breckenridge Lane. In a front yard not far from my home, a young mother was removing a layer of leftover leaves from the fall in preparation for planting spring flowers—an ordinary activity in the middle of an ordinary day.

What was extraordinary about this scene was what I saw beside this young woman.

A tow-haired boy, perhaps three or four years old, was attempting to assist her. His rake was man-sized, his movements were far from efficient, and he was leaving more leaves than he moved. Yet, as I passed this mother and child, I heard no criticisms. Instead, I heard a constant stream of encouragement: “Daddy will be so proud of your hard work! Can you try to get those leaves over there? You know, honey, it might work better if you turned the rake over.”

If this woman’s sole goal for the afternoon was leaf removal, her best bet would have been to plop her preschooler in front of a television to watch professionally-produced children’s programs that pretend to equip children with skills for life while leaching away their capacity for meaningful relationships. If this mother had chosen this option, she could have pursued the goal of planting spring flowers far more efficiently.

But this woman had a goal that was far bigger than any flower-bed.

This woman understood that her deeper purpose on this day was not to improve a yard but to shape a soul. She was teaching her child the value of work and partnership and family structures, in addition to the quite crucial skill of knowing which side of a rake is supposed to face the ground. She was an amateur, in the best and oldest sense of the word “amateur”: a person who engages in a particular activity because of love. She most likely possessed no transcripted credential in the fields of motherhood or leaf removal. But that was all for the best anyway because no credential could develop in a child what this mother was engraving in her son’s soul that afternoon.

:: In Praise of Inefficiency ::

So what does all of this have to do with family ministry?

Simply this: If you’re a church leader trying to train parents to embrace their role as disciple-makers in their children’s lives, you are likely to wonder at some point, “Wouldn’t it be more efficient for hired professionals to disciple children through church programs instead of expecting parents to participate in this process? No matter how many times I encourage and equip the moms and dads, some of them don’t even seem to be trying! Even the ones that try don’t always do a good job. Why constantly acknowledge the parents as primary disciple-makers when so many of them do it so poorly? This is so inefficient!”

If that’s the way you feel, you’re partly correct! If your goal is organizational efficiency, equipping parents to disciple their children may be an inefficient use of your time, and turning over children’s spiritual lives to professionals at church might make perfect sense.

But efficiency is not the goal of gospel-motivated ministry.

The crucified and risen Lord Jesus determines the shape and establishes the goal for his church, and it has been his Father’s good pleasure to constitute his church as a conglomeration of amateurs, not as a corporation managed by professionals (1 Cor 12:4–31). His Spirit does not give gifts for the purpose of making the church efficient. The Holy Spirit arranges gifts in the body according to his will in order to make his people holy (1 Cor 12:11).

The role of God-called leaders is to encourage and to equip their brothers and sisters in their communities of faith to serve as ministers and missionaries first within their own households, and then far beyond their households (Acts 2:39; Eph 4:11–13). These processes are not likely to be quick or efficient. Sometimes, it will feel as if professionalized programs would be an easier solution, but no church program can develop in a child what parents are able to engrave in their children’s souls day-by-day. And so, despite the apparent inefficiency of expecting parents to disciple their own children, family-equipping ministers persist in their passion for training fathers and mothers as the primary disciple-makers in their children’s lives.

:: Parents as Divinely-Designated Amateur Disciple-Makers ::

In the early twentieth century, a journalist named G.K. Chesterton offered these comments about the British and American jury system:

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained dancers because they dance better, specially
instructed laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on. … [Yet] our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

A similar statement might be made regarding the training of children to respond to the gospel day-by-day. Though professionals may certainly partner with parents in this task, such a serious undertaking is too significant to be relinquished to professionals, too profound to be befuddled by a focus on efficiency. The formation of a child’s faith is not a skill for specialists. It is a habit to be developed in the lives of divinely-designated amateurs, and these amateurs are known as “Dad” and “Mom.”

In my childhood, one of the most significant habits that shaped my soul was a single, simple pattern that required no special skills. Each night, my mother came into my room, sat on the side of my bed, and listened to me pray. What was significant about this wasn’t so much the praying, which was pretty much the same every night. It was the conversations about life that arose in the context of prayer—coupled with the fact that I had to face my mother every evening, regardless of what I might have done during the day.

At some point in early adolescence, I informed my mother that I could handle praying on my own from that point forward. I regretted my request even then, and I regret it even more now. In some inexplicable way, knowing that I would have to pray with my mother each night placed a limit on what I was willing to say and to do during the day.

Today, this pattern from my childhood marks the end of each day in the lives of each of my own children. A few months ago, when my teenager suggested that she might not need me to pray with her each night, my response ran something like this: “You know, I think you are totally able to pray on your own, and I want you to pray on your own as well. But, even though you don’t need my help to pray, I need the reminder every night that God gave you to me and that I’m responsible to guide you toward him. So, every night, I’ll still be here to pray with you, no matter what.” Since that moment, my daughter and I have had dozens of important night-time conversations that I might otherwise have missed. Is it always efficient or easy? No—but it is a right and good response to God’s work in our family.

To learn more about family-equipping ministry, go here.

Over the next several days, millions of Americans will endure the filing and, in some cases, the payment of taxes. Taxation has never been particularly popular among Americans, having once incited several dozen Bostonians to dress up as Mohawk braves and toss tea into a harbor. Several decades after this curious combination of costume party and hurling contest, a later band of Boston braves began pitching baseballs instead of tea crates and moved to Milwaukee before heading to Atlanta, where there are no harbors to fill with tea leaves but where there is a quite nice spot known as Turner Field in which to play baseball.

Even in the months that followed the tea incident in Boston, not every evangelical Englishman agreed that colonial taxes were unjust. “I am taxed; yet I am no slave,” John Wesley admonished fellow Christians in the colonies. “Nine in ten throughout England have no representative, no vote; yet … they enjoy both civil and religious liberty. … Who then is a slave? … See that negro, fainting under the load! … You and I, and the English in general, go where we will, and enjoy the fruit of our labors: this is liberty. The negro does not: this is slavery. Is not then all this outcry about liberty and slavery mere rant, and playing upon words?”

Despite feeling a distinctly American inclination to don war paint and drop a few 1040 forms into the nearest harbor, the vast majority of us will provide the government with the requested forms on or before the appointed date, recognizing that, when you pay your taxes, the government reciprocates by providing you with vital services, such as not putting you in prison.

And yet, other than avoiding the unpleasantness of penalties and prison, why should Christians pay their taxes? Or should they?

Believe it or not, in the days when Jesus walked the dusty roads of the Levant, taxes were even less popular than they are today, particularly among perigrini—the more-than-ninety-percent of imperial subjects who didn’t possess the privilege of Roman citizenship. Hatred for taxation ran especially hot in the regions of Galilee and Judea. In the decades that followed the death and resurrection of Jesus, taxation was one of the tensions that triggered a revolt against the Romans. No wonder, then, that some of the religious leaders selected taxes as the topic of choice to trip up Jesus in the New Testament Gospels (Matthew 22:15-22; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:19-26).

:: Why Some of What You Make Belongs to Caesar ::

“Is it lawful,” messengers from the religious leadership asked the teacher from Galilee, “for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (Luke 20:22). The taxes in question here were not the toll taxes paid to publicans like Levi and Zacchaeus (Luke 5:27; 19:2). The taxes in the messengers’ purview were poll taxes that people paid to Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor. These taxes, collected by governors on a regular basis, constantly reminded occupied nations that the Roman Empire ruled their lands. More than a century after the time of Jesus, a Christian orator named Tertullian referred to the poll tax as a sign of slavery.

The question from the messengers seemed tailor-made to cost Jesus either his connection with the crowds or his low profile with the Romans. If Jesus claimed that his people should pay the poll tax, his popularity among the populace could plummet. Plus, the religious leaders might accuse him of placing Caesar’s authority higher than God’s authority. If Jesus declared that it was not lawful for his people to pay taxes to Caesar, he might multiply his popularity among those who longed for a leader who would defy the Romans—but any such claim would immediately mark Jesus as a potential revolutionary, and the Romans would destroy him.

Jesus refused to answer the question directly. Instead, he asked to see a denarius. A denarius was the typical wage for a day of labor; the image and titles of the Roman emperor were struck on the face of every denarius. Face to face with the emperor’s image, Jesus declared simply, “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

Caesar’s domain was a dictatorship dedicated to false gods. “Some of the taxes given by New Testament Christians,” Russell Moore reminds us, “would have gone to pay for crucifixion stakes. Some would have gone to feed wild beasts for the bloody circuses. Some would have gone to buy incense to be burned in honor of the self-proclaimed [divinity] of the Caesar.” Throughout the Roman Empire, state-funded temples enshrined prostitution, prophetesses in drug-induced ecstasies, and sacrifices to demonic deities.

Yet no government—not even the Roman Empire—rises without God allowing that state to exist (Daniel 2:21; 4:17). And, part of what a human government can legitimately demand from its subjects is a portion of people’s income. The verb translated “give back” or “render” in Jesus’ reply implied payment of a debt (compare Luke 7:42; 10:35; 12:59; 19:8). What Jesus was declaring was that everyone in the Roman Empire—even those who followed God’s law above all other laws—owed the emperor the debt of honor signified by the payment of taxes (see also Romans 13:7; 1 Peter 2:17).

Years later, the apostle Paul would make much the same point when he wrote that “there is no authority except from God, and those that exist are instituted by God. So then, the one who resists the authority is opposing God’s command. … Therefore, you must submit, not only because of wrath, but also because of your conscience. And for this reason you pay taxes” (Romans 13:1-6). The denarii and drachmae in the people’s moneybags were minted by the Roman Empire. And so, Caesar had every right to demand a cut of this currency from the subjects who lived in his lands. To resist Caesar’s demand was to oppose God’s command. Christians submit in this manner not only to avoid penalties and prison sentences (“because of wrath”) but also to live out the gospel by doing what in right in God’s sight (“because of conscience”).

From the perspective of the Christian Scriptures, the only foundation for resisting the government is if the state’s delegates demand direct and personal disobedience to divine commands; even then, the paradigmatic pattern is to resist simply by persisting in obedience to God’s Word (Daniel 3:1-18; 6:1-13; Acts 4:19-20; 5:29). This is the pattern that undergirds the closing paragraph of the Manhattan Declaration, in which a broad range of representatives from the Christian tradition have declared together

we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo ­destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti­life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

Even in governments such as the United States where the people collectively comprise “Caesar,” this doesn’t mean that each individual constitutes his or her own regent, with the right to choose whether and when to render Caesar his due. The Constitution of the United States begins not with “me the people” but with “we the people”—the body politic represented by elected and appointed officials, who determine the size and shape of Caesar’s portion.

:: How All of Who You Are Belongs to God ::

Yet what about the second part of Jesus’ response? What did Jesus mean when he said to “give back … to God the things that are God’s”?

Just as Roman coins were marked with Caesar’s image, something must have been marked with God’s image.

But what?

What is it that was marked with God’s image?

Every human being is the image of God.

At the dawn of human history, God created Adam and Eve “in his own image” and “after his likeness” (Genesis 1:26-27; 5:2; 9:6), and it is this link between God and humanity that calls for every human life to be treated as sacred still today. When Jesus called the people to give Caesar his due, the coins in their purses bore lifeless representations of Caesar’s passing reign, but the people themselves were living images of the eternal God.

And yet, what does it mean, practically, to render ourselves to God?

In the simplest possible terms, it means joining with Jesus in fulfilling the mission that Adam and Eve failed to fulfill.

In the ancient near eastern context in which Moses wrote the accounts of humanity’s creation, to be made in God’s likeness was to be a son of God and to be created in God’s image was to live as a servant-king—as a vice-regent who serves others and who shapes his domain for the glory of a greater king.

The Garden of Eden was a botanical temple, designed as a context for the glory and worship of God. As the living image and likeness of God, the mission of our primeval parents was to extend the borders of Eden and to raise up more image-bearers until the garden covered the globe and God’s glory filled the earth like waters that fill the seas (Numbers 14:21; Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14). Adam and Eve failed in this mission, disdaining their fellowship with God and distorting their role as viceroys of Eden. So, God brought forth a new nation for his glory from a meandering descendant of Shem and a woman long past menopause. God raised up kings among Abraham’s descendants to exemplify his image and likeness. Yet, one by one, the kings of Israel followed in Adam’s footsteps, until—just as Adam was exiled from the garden temple—the people of Israel were exiled and their temple was torn to the ground.

But then, in the fullness of time, the very God who had planted a garden on the eastern edge of Eden slipped into human history through the birth canal of a Jewish peasant, and nothing would ever be the same again.

This child perfectly exemplified the image of God because he was not only the Son of God and the Servant King but also God in human flesh. It was he who told the men and women on the temple mount to render themselves to God as his image and likeness—which is to say, to join in God’s mission as sons of God and servant kings. Then, he did what no other king could do: having kept the law without flaw, he took the punishment for his people’s failure and rose in triumph over death. As people from every nation become heirs with Jesus through faith and participate anew in God’s image and likeness, the Spirit of Jesus is drawing them together even now into a new temple (Ephesians 2:19—3:21; 1 Peter 2:1-5). Through this temple, the glory of God is flooding the earth before our very eyes.

:: Rendering to Caesar, Whether and Why ::

The first part of Jesus’ reply dealt with whether God’s people should provide to Caesar the percentage of their income that Caesar’s representatives request. His reference to the image of God hinted at why.

Followers of Jesus pay taxes because this world matters. Yes, the corruption of our first parents has enslaved this world to “groaning,” to a yearning for redemption that no human pleasure can quell (Ecclesiastes 3:9-11; Romans 8:19-23). And still, this planet matters. The entire cosmos swirls and twirls in a celestial dance that proclaims the very glory of God; despite the manifold failures of human government, states and societies reflect God’s order and provide a context for the fulfillment of God’s mission. Paul saw the state as an evidence of divine order in a sin-disordered world even during the reign of Nero—an emperor who murdered his own mother and kicked his pregnant wife to death (Romans 13:3-5). Even imperfect governments curb human depravity, and this curbing of evil results in greater opportunities for God’s people to proclaim the gospel (1 Timothy 2:1-4) so that God’s glory flows over the globe like waters that fill the sea.

Paradoxically, followers of Jesus also pay taxes because this world is not the realm that matters most. None of the numbers on your 1040 form will last into eternity. National currencies, no less than kings and kingdoms (Psalm 75:2-8; Daniel 2:20-22), are tools that God raises up and tosses aside according to his will. It is, of course, foolish to pay more taxes than we rightly owe—but not because such payments violate our rights. It’s foolish because it leaves less to give away for the sake of a kingdom that will never fade. The cash in my wallet and the currency in my accounts are nothing more than ephemeral signposts of my placement in a world where the kingdom of Christ is not yet fully realized. The values on my payroll statements have no value in any domain that will outlast the moment when Jesus plants his feet on planet earth. Whether the currency is backed by gold or gravel or the government’s paper is irrelevant. In the New Jerusalem, the gravel will be gold, and the government will rest on the shoulders of a serpent-crushing King (Isaiah 9:6; Revelation 21:21). When I release my taxes to the government, I am not expressing confidence in the state’s competence to right the wrongs of this world. I am being reminded that this money is a tool that I can release without remorse because any values that are tied to these dollars and cents are indeed Caesar’s values—fleeting fragments of a kingdom that is passing away.

__________

Thoughts from the following three texts appear in some portions this post:

Beale, G.K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission. Downers Grove: IVP, 2004.

Gentry, Peter, and Stephen Wellum. Kingdom through Covenant. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.

Hamilton, James Merrill. God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment. Wheaton: Crossway, 2010.

One rule in our household is that, if a book is turned into a movie, everyone must read the book before watching the movie. Our oldest daughter was eight years old when C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was turned into a feature film. In the weeks leading up to the movie’s release, Hannah read nearly all of The Chronicles of Narnia. I rewarded her diligence by taking her and her friend Lacey to see the movie on the opening day.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan the lion offers his life in the place of a traitor. The White Witch and her minions mock and taunt the kingly lion; they strip off his mane and lash him to the Stone Table. Then, the White Witch plunges her knife into the lion. There, surrounded by the jeers and chants of his enemies, Aslan dies.

During the silence in the theater that followed the death of Aslan, I glanced sideways and glimpsed two wide-eyed girls clutching each other’s hands. Then, I watched Hannah lean to the side and heard her whisper these words to Lacey: “Don’t worry. I read the book. He doesn’t stay dead.”

“Don’t worry. I read the book. He doesn’t stay dead.”

That’s the message that we’re privileged to proclaim whenever we consider the death of Jesus: “Don’t worry. I read the book. He doesn’t stay dead.” God’s seeming silence on Saturday was only temporary, a fleeting moment when the cosmos holds its breath in anticipation.

Through the cross, the heel of the divine Son crushed the serpent’s skull; the cosmic vice-regency of an obedient Servant eclipsed Adam’s ancient revolt in Eden; in Jesus, a new exodus dawned—an exodus from which there can be no exile because the King himself has endured exile from his Father’s presence once and for all in place of the people he has purposed to save. Through the resurrection, God the Father publicly demonstrated this victory and vindicated the faithfulness of his Son.

And so, when it seems that the silence of Saturday may never end, don’t descend into despair. Read the book. He didn’t stay dead. Because he is alive, the moments when God seems distant are never the final word.

:: The Obscenity of the Cross in the Ancient World ::

With few exceptions, even the most skeptical scholars admit that Jesus was crucified—and with good reason. Not only Christian authors but also the Roman historian Tacitus mention the crucifixion of Jesus. It’s highly unlikely that first-century Christians would have fabricated such a shameful fate for the founder of their faith. In the first century A.D., crucifixion represented the darkest possible path to death.

It is almost impossible for contemporary people to comprehend the full obscenity of crucifixion in the ancient world. Beginning as early as the third century B.C., the very word “crucify” was a vulgarism that did not pass freely between the lips of cultured people. In one ancient document, a Roman prostitute hurled this insult—perhaps the lewdest curse in her vocabulary—at an uncouth patron: “Go get yourself crucified!” The Roman philosopher Seneca described what he witnessed at a crucifixion with these words: “I see the stakes there—not of one kind but of many. Some victims are placed head down; some have spikes driven through their genitals; others have their arms stretched out on the gibbet.”

That’s why first- and second-century Romans referred to the Christians’ worship of a crucified God as “foolishness,” “insanity,” and “idiocy.”

One of the earliest graphical depictions of such worship is a scrap of late second-century graffiti, uncovered near Rome in a palace where slaves trained to serve the imperial family. In this graffito, a man with the head of an ass dangles naked from a cross. At the foot of the cross, someone kneels, surrounded by these rough-scrawled words: Alexamenos sebete theon. “Alexamenos worships God.” Someone—perhaps a servant training to serve Caesar himself—was ridiculing a young man named Alexamenos because Alexamenos had embraced a new religion, a faith centered around a deity who suffered the punishment for humanity’s sin on a cross.

:: What Happened to the Corpses of the Crucified? ::

The shame of crucifixion ran deeper than the nakedness, the torture, and taunting. In most cases, crucified bodies were not even buried. Instead, in the days that followed the deaths of the crucified, the beaks of vultures and the teeth of wild dogs tore the corpses to shreds and scattered their remains across the countryside.

Roman crucifixion was state terrorism; its function was to deter resistance to revolt and the body was usually left on the cross to be consumed by wild beasts. … The norm was to let crucifieds rot on the cross or be cast aside for carrion.

According to some critics of the New Testament Gospels—John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar, for example—that’s what happened to Jesus too. Consumed by birds and beasts, the flesh of Jesus degenerated inside the stomachs of wild creatures and became dung that decayed in the sun in the alleys of Judea.

Not a pleasant thought, is it?

Not the end that you’d imagined for someone as celebrated as Jesus.

So what if it’s true?

These critics do have some archaeological and literary evidence that stands on their side. Not long after the birth of Jesus, the Roman general Varus crucified two thousand Jewish rebels at once. While besieging Jerusalem in A.D. 69 and 70, Titus the Roman general crucified Jewish captives in view of the denizens of Jerusalem. In each of these cases—and in many, many other instances of mass execution—the bodies seem to have remained on crosses. There, weather and wild creatures reduced their flesh to dust and dung. Suetonius wryly noted regarding a crucified man, “The carrion-birds will quickly take care of his burial.” “The vulture hurries,” the satirist Juvenal claimed, “from dead cattle to dead dogs to crosses.” The epitaph of a second-century murder victim includes this haunting clause: “My murderer was suspended from a tree, while still alive, for the benefit of beasts and birds.”

The critics have a bone that could support their argument too—a heelbone with a spike in it, to be exact. Over the span of four centuries, the Romans crucified tens of thousands of murderers, revolutionaries, and persons who happened to be trapped on the wrong side of the political tides. Yet the only fragment that has been found from these thousands of cadavers is one single heelbone, still pierced by a spike. According to the inscription on the side of this man’s ossuary, the man’s name was John; he was Jewish.

And why have the remains from only one crucified body survived? Well, according to some skeptics like John Dominic Crossan, it’s because, in nearly all cases, weather and wild creatures dealt with the corpses of the crucified. Crossan declares,

We have found only one body from all the thousands crucified around Jerusalem in that single century. I keep thinking of all those other thousands of Jews crucified around Jerusalem in that terrible first century from among whom we have found only one skeleton and one nail. … I think I know what happened to their bodies, and I have no reason to think Jesus’ body did not join them.

So, according to this band of critics, the body of Jesus was never buried. Instead, his flesh became carrion for wild beasts.

And what of the resurrection? From Crossan’s perspective, the resurrection was mere fiction—nothing more than a hallucination that emerged from the disciples’ deep-seated hopes and dreams that they might see Jesus again.

If such critics have rightly reconstructed history, Good Friday was not good, and Resurrection Sunday was no triumph.

Jesus died, his corpse remained on the cross, and the resurrection was nothing more than a series of hallucinations and fabrications.

So what really happened to the body of Jesus?

Is there any historical foundation for believing that the body of Jesus was entombed in the way that the New Testament Gospels claim?

Or could it be that Crossan and other critics are correct?

I am convinced that the historical evidences provide little support for Crossan’s contention that the corpse of Jesus became carrion for dogs and birds. In fact, in the context of Jerusalem around A.D. 30, the best available evidence points in the precise opposite direction. Even if you disagree with me, please at least take a look with me at both sides of the evidence for the burial of Jesus’ crucified body.

:: The Religious Leaders Would Have Wanted the Body of Jesus Buried ::

In most areas of the Roman Empire, crucified bodies did become pickings for vultures and dogs—that much is certain.

But not always, and not everywhere.

In Judea—and especially around Jerusalem—there was a law that, from the perspective of the Jewish people, came from a higher source than Caesar. In this law, God commanded the Israelites: “If someone commits a capital crime for which he is executed and if you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree. You shall bury him the same day, for anyone hanged from a tree is condemned by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance” (Deuteronomy 21:22-23; see also Ezekiel 39:14-16).

The Temple Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran testifies to how seriously Jews took this command even during the times of exile and occupation: “You shall not allow bodies to remain on a tree overnight; most assuredly, you shall bury them, even on the very day of their death.” The Jewish book of Tobit—an entertaining little text, penned in the time-period that stands between the Old and New Testaments—identifies the burial of abandoned corpses as an act of supreme piety. Near the end of the first century A.D., the Jewish historian Josephus contrasted the Jewish perspective on crucified bodies to typical Roman practices. According to Josephus, “Jews are conscientious about their burial practices—so much so that even criminals sentenced to crucifixion are removed and buried before the sun sets!” In another writing, Josephus stated, “[Jews] must furnish fire, water, and food to anyone who asks, giving directions to the right road, never leaving a corpse unburied.” Later rabbis echoed this concern for the deceased. According to the rabbis, although the bodies of criminals might not immediately be placed with the bodies of their ancestors, even criminals had to be buried. After their flesh decomposed, the bones of criminals were placed in a family tomb.

Especially approaching a festival as important as Passover, the Jewish people and particularly the religious leaders would have wanted the body of Jesus removed from the cross. And, in the case of a figure as popular and potentially problematic as Jesus, it’s likely that someone would have been willing to bury him—even if that act rendered the person ceremonially unclean.

In this context, the request of Joseph of Arimathea makes complete sense (Mark 15:43-45). To be sure, Joseph wanted to honor the body of Jesus. But, from the perspective of Pontius Pilate and fellow members of the ruling council, here’s how his motive would have appeared: As a member of the ruling council, Joseph of Arimathea wanted the corpse removed before sundown to avoid any defilement in the land of Israel (Deuteronomy 21:23). A burial overseen by the Jewish ruling council also fits with Papyrus Cairo 10759—a fragmentary account of the life of Jesus that, though written several decades after the apostolic eyewitnesses, retains remnants of an ancient retelling of the resurrection narrative, independent of the New Testament Gospels.

Someone would have wanted to bury the body of Jesus—that much seems certain. Both the Roman authorities and the ruling council would have wanted to stifle any loyalty to this would-be Messiah as soon as possible. Furthermore, from a Jewish perspective, not to bury his body would have violated the law of God. So, the question isn’t whether anyone would have requested the body of Jesus—someone would have. The question is, “Would the Romans actually have granted such a request?” The answer to that question is clearly yes.

:: Pontius Pilate Would Have Handed Over the Body of Jesus for Burial ::

In times of rebellion and war, Romans were known to ignore the native practices of occupied nations. That’s why, when crushing the Jewish independence movement in A.D. 70, the Romans crucified thousands of Jews and left the corpses to rot on their crosses.

But Jesus wasn’t crucified in a time of war.

He was, in fact, crucified during a relatively peaceful period in the history of Judea.

And, in times of relative peace, Romans consistently respected the laws of occupied nations. “The Romans,” Josephus contended, “do not require … their subjects to violate their national laws.”

As part of this pattern of toleration for local peculiarities, Pontius Pilate would have granted the body of a deceased Jew to his own people—even if Roman law didn’t demand it. After all, hadn’t Herod Antipas given the body of John the Baptist to his disciples after he beheaded the popular prophet? During a potentially volatile religious festival, Pilate would have had an even greater reason to respect local customs. Pilate’s desperate determination to maintain peace during the Passover would probably have persuaded the governor to hand over the body of Jesus for burial.

But such concessions weren’t just Roman practice.

They were Roman law.

Here’s what Pandectae—a summary of the Roman legal code—declared about the bodies of crucified criminals:

The bodies of those who are condemned to death should not be refused their relatives; and [Caesar] Augustus the Divine, in the tenth book of his Vita, said that this rule had been observed.

At present, the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted; and sometimes it is not permitted, especially where persons have been convicted of high treason. … The bodies of persons who have been punished should be given to whoever requests them for the purpose of burial.

This fits perfectly with the description in the New Testament Gospels. Roman law required Pilate to provide the body of Jesus “to whoever” requested it “for the purpose of burial.” When Joseph of Arimathea requested the body of Jesus, Pilate verified that Jesus was dead—he had already dealt with Jesus once, and he didn’t want to deal with him again if he wasn’t quite dead and his followers somehow resuscitated him. Once a centurion confirmed that Jesus was dead, Pilate granted Joseph’s request.

“Roman legal practice,” Gerd Lüdemann claims in the book What Really Happened?: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection, “provided for someone who died on the cross to rot there or be consumed by vultures, jackals or other animals.” Despite the confident title of Lüdemann’s text, this was not “what really happened”; Roman legal practice explicitly provided for the precise opposite of this claim. Other than mass crucifixions during times of war or revolt, it was only when a Roman citizen was executed for high treason that burial was forbidden—a category that the crucifixion of Jesus certainly didn’t fit. Jesus of Nazareth was not a Roman citizen; his execution occurred not because he has conspired against Caesar but because because it was claimed that he had asserted kingship over the Jewish people, an act that could (at least from the Romans’ perspective) result in a revolt.

:: Why Were So Many Bodies Left on the Crosses? ::

So, why—if families could request an executed corpse—does Roman literature include so many references to the consumption of crucified corpses by birds and beasts? And why has only a single heelbone from one crucified man ever been found?

Don’t forget this crucial fact: Crucifixion constituted the supreme dishonor in the ancient world. The very word “crucify” remained unmentioned in polite company. Among Romans, suicide was to be preferred above a cross. As such, beyond the borders of the Jewish provinces, it would have been highly unusual for a family to reclaim the corpse of their crucified kin; families would have disowned this person because of the shame that the accused criminal’s actions had brought on their family’s name. These forsaken bodies—the vast majority of the victims of Roman crucifixion—remained on their crosses to be consumed. Thus their remains disintegrated into the dust of the Roman Empire. But the case of Jesus—a Jew, crucified near Jerusalem on the eve of a popular religious festival—doesn’t fit the typical pattern: The Jews would have wanted Jesus buried, and Roman practice called for Pontius Pilate to grant this request.

________

11QT64:11-13; 11QT48:10–14; 4Q524.

Craig Evans, “Jewish Burial Traditions and the Resurrection of Jesus”: http://www.craigevans.com

N. Haas, “Anthropological Observations on the Skeletal Remains from Giv‘at ha-Mivtar,” Israel Exploration Journal 20 (1970) 38–59.

Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross rev. ed. (Minneapolis, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1977).

Josephus, Antiquitates Judaica, 17:10; 18:5; The Jewish War, ed. H. St.-J. Thackeray, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927) 2:5; 4:5; 5:6-11; Contra Apionem, in The Life, Against Apion, ed. H. St.-J. Thackeray, in Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1926) 2:6, 29

Juvenal, Satires, 14:77-78.

S. R. Llewelyn, ed., New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 1.

Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:4-6.

Philo of Alexandria, In Flaccus, Philo, ed. F.H. Colson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941) 10:81-85

Seneca, De consolatione ad Marciam, in Volume II: Moral Essays, ed. John Basore, in Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1932) 20:3.

Cornelius Tacitus, Annales, 6:29; 15:44:

Tobit 1:18–20; 2:3–8; 4:3–4; 6:15; 14:10–13.

V. Tzaferis, “Crucifixion–The Archaeological Evidence: Remains of a Jewish Victim of Crucifixion Found in Jerusalem,” Biblical Archaeology Review 11 (January—February 1985): 44-53.

“By virtue of the believer’s union with Christ, he doth really possess all things. That we know plainly from Scripture.

“But it may be asked, how does he possess all things? What is he the better for it? How is a true Christian so much richer than other men?

“To answer this, I will tell you what I mean by ‘possessing all things’:

“I mean that God three in one, all that he is, and all that he has, and all that he does, all that he has made or done—the whole universe, bodies and spirits, earth and heaven, angels, men and devils, sun moon, stars, land and sea, fish and fowls, all the silver and gold, kings and potentates as well as mean men—are as much the Christian’s as the money in his pocket, the clothes he wears, or the house he dwells in, or the victuals he eats; yea, more properly his, more advantageously, more his than if he could command all those things mentioned to be just in all respects as he pleased at any time, by virtue of the union with Christ; because Christ, who certainly doth thus possess all things, is entirely his: so that he possesses it all, more than a wife the share of the best and dearest husband, more than the hand possesses what the head doth; it is all his.

“The universe is [his], only he has not the trouble of managing it; but Christ, to whom it is no trouble, manages it for him a thousand times as much to his advantage as he could himself, if he had the managing of all. Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most advantage to the Christian, every particle of air or every ray of the sun; so that he in the other world, when he comes to see it, shall sit and enjoy all of this vast inheritance with surprising, amazing joy.”

Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies.
Died on March 22, 1758

Mostly because they like to party and to pinch people who forgot to wear green, I guess.

But there are better reasons than parties and pinching to celebrate this saint!

Find out a few of them by watching this sample video from the Christian History Made Easy DVD series.

In a Touchstone book review of The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, A.W. Hunt skillfully summarizes agrarian writer Wendell Berry’s economic critique as well as possible pathways to wholeness:

“We now live under what Berry calls a ‘total economy,’ one where everything has a price. The market no longer serves the culture; rather the culture serves the market. …

“Berry is not anti-technology per se, but he believes that man was made to use tools rather than to be someone else’s tool. …

“Both Republicans and Democrats seem hopelessly given over to autonomous individualism: Democrats to sexual autonomy and Republicans to economic autonomy. Rod Dreher protests that neither party offers a credible solution to our current crisis because neither is able to address Berry’s penetrating question: ‘What are people for?’

“Since America cannot agree on a common good, Dreher suggests that traditionalists who long for community should consider the ‘Benedict Option’ as described in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. That is, they should start constructing ‘new forms of community to repair and redeem the moral imagination distorted by modern life.’ The homeschooling movement, the growth of local agriculture, and the renewed interest in craftsmanship are examples of ways in which new, creative minorities are bringing healing to the wounded.”

Perhaps you, like many others, are planning to read through the Bible this year. If you do, you’re likely to ask yourself at some point, “Weren’t there other Gospels and letters that didn’t make it into the Bible? Why am I reading these texts instead of those?”

So what about those other Gospels?

Well, from the first century forward, Christians viewed testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus as uniquely authoritative. The logic of this standard was simple: The people most likely to know the truth about Jesus were either eyewitnesses who had encountered Jesus personally or close associates of these witnesses. So, although Christians wrangled for some time about the authority of certain writings, it was something far greater than political machinations that drove these decisions. Their goal was to determine which books could be clearly connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus.

With this in mind, let’s look at a couple of real-life examples of texts that some early Christians treated as authoritative, with a particular focus on why these writings ended up on the churches’ cutting-room floor.

:: The Gospel of the Talking Cross ::

In 199 A.D., a pastor named Serapion became the lead pastor of the leading church in Syria, the church in Antioch. As the leading pastor in Antioch, Serapion was responsible not only for his own church but also for several smaller congregations in the area. One of these congregations gathered in the village of Rhossus.

Within a few months, Serapion heard rumors that the church in Rhossus was on the verge of a rift. So, Serapion found himself trudging the stony coastal road that took him north of Antioch, toward Rhossus.

When he arrived in Rhossus, he discovered that some church members had problems with a Gospel that was “inscribed with Peter’s name.” When he heard this, Serapion replied, “If that’s all that threatens to produce hard feelings among you, let it be read.” After all, if this retelling of Jesus’ ministry came from Simon Peter, surely it represented eyewitness testimony!

But the authority of this text wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as Serapion thought.

Some time later, someone brought the pastor a copy of this so-called Gospel of Peter. When Serapion read the codex for himself, he recognized he’d made a mistake. Sure, most of Gospel of Peter reflected the same stories as the other writings in the church’s book-chest. In fact, very little in the surviving manuscripts of Gospel of Peter directly contradicts anything in the New Testament Gospels. And yet, Serapion saw that this book was clearly not the product of Simon Peter’s preaching. There were hints in Gospel of Peter of the beginnings of a belief known as “Docetism” that hadn’t even emerged until a couple of decades after Peter’s death. This belief—named from the Greek word dokein (“to seem”)—claimed that Jesus wasn’t truly human; instead, Jesus only seemed human.

The oddest twist in Gospel of Peter is when Jesus erupts from the tomb. In the soldiers’ eyes, Jesus seems as tall as the sky, and, behind Jesus, they glimpse what looks like a massive cross. A voice thunders from heaven, “Have you proclaimed to those that are asleep?” To this, the cross replies, “Yes.”

After reading Gospel of Peter, Serapion dashed off a letter to the church in Rhossus, reversing his previous decision and declaring, “I am hurrying to see you; expect to see me shortly. … Most things [in this Gospel] are from the Savior’s right word, but some things are false—and these we will point out for you.”

So, why did Serapion of Antioch reject Gospel of Peter? Serapion had in his possession the testimony of eyewitnesses “in the writings handed down to us.” These writings most likely included the letters of Paul and one or more of the four New Testament Gospels—documents that strong and unbroken oral histories had long linked them to eyewitnesses or close associates of eyewitnesses. Faced with a writing that claimed to come from Simon Peter, Serapion compared its teachings with these “writings handed down to us” and found inconsistencies between Gospel of Peter and “the Savior’s right word.” As a result, Serapion reached the logical conclusion that Simon Peter—an eyewitness of Jesus, according to the testimony Paul’s letters, the earliest Gospels, and even texts outside the New Testament—couldn’t have been the source of the so-called Gospel of Peter. Serapion’s goal was the same as other believers scattered throughout the world: He wanted to preserve eyewitness testimony about Jesus. When he examined Gospel of Peter, his conclusion was that, because this disputed document was inconsistent with undisputed eyewitness testimonies, Gospel of Peter didn’t reliably represent eyewitness testimony.

As it turns out, Serapion was correct: The language and thought-patterns in Gospel of Peter have convinced most contemporary scholars that the book was written in the first half of the second century—a generation after Peter’s death, at a time when the Docetist heresy was spreading.

Despite Serapion’s rejection of the book, Gospel of Peter remained popular reading among Christians for several centuries. In fact, more ancient fragments remain from Gospel of Peter than from the Gospel According to Mark. Still, only the scantest evidence exists to suggest that, except for those few months in the church at Rhossus, Gospel of Peter was ever considered an authoritative account of Jesus’ life.

:: How Love for Paul Cost an Elder His Ordination ::

About the same time that Serapion was examining Gospel of Peter, an argument about baptism erupted in a congregation in North Africa. A few church members appealed to a writing known as Acts of Paul—a document that some Christians seem to have accepted as authoritative. Acts of Paul is a fascinating text. According to this document, being a Christian includes not only faith in Jesus but also abstinence from sexual relations. Plus, partway through Acts of Paul, the apostle Paul baptizes a lion.

It was an elder named Tertullian of Carthage who related some of the reasons why Acts of Paul never became an authoritative text. When Tertullian heard that some church members were appealing to Acts of Paul, he seems to have did some research into the book’s origins. In the process, he dug up several facts that cast doubt on the book’s dependability.

What Tertullian discovered was that the author of Acts of Paul was neither an apostle nor acquainted with any apostles. The author had served as an elder in a church in Asia a half-century after Paul’s martyrdom. When questioned, the elder admitted that he had concocted the stories “out of love for Paul.” Once churches in the area learned that these stories were fictional, they forced the elder to step down from his position. This rightly led Tertullian to reject Acts of Paul as “a writing that circulates falsely under Paul’s name.”

What interests me most about the events surrounding is how much early Christians wanted to make certain that their authoritative writings represented historical truth. It truly mattered to these men and women that historical facts formed the foundations of their sacred books. If second-century Christians weren’t concerned with preserving eyewitness truth, why did this elder—who most likely wanted nothing more than to honor Paul’s memory with a few super-fantastic tales—end up shamed and stripped of his ordination?

:: Who Chose the Books? ::

So what do these texts tell us about why certain ancient texts became authoritative among Christians? Even among the earliest Christians, testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of the risen Lord was uniquely authoritative. That’s why the supposed “lost Scriptures” were lost—or, more precisely, why they were not preserved with the writings that appear in your New Testament today.

Not only Gospel of Peter but also other post-apostolic accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus—Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of the Savior, Gospel of Truth, and several others—emerged in the second and third centuries, long after the last apostles died. It’s true that some portions of Gospel of Peter as well as Gospel of Thomas—another second-century Gospel that’s falsely ascribed to an apostle—probably stem from very early testimony about Jesus. But these few first-century traditions have been heavily mingled with second-century additions that had no foundation in any eyewitness testimony.

In most cases, early Christians knew that these documents came too late to represent eyewitness testimony about Jesus. So, the primary preservers of these later texts were sects—such as the Gnostics—that focused more on mystical interpretations of Jesus’ teachings than on the historical events of Jesus’ life.

:: Why You Shouldn’t Shoot the Canon Quite Yet ::

I don’t want to leave you with the false impression that Christians quickly and easily settled every debate about their sacred writings. Prior to the fifth century, when different congregations listed the writings that they treated as authoritative testimony about Jesus, the results were rarely identical.

Yet, before you become too concerned with what might be different if early Christians had concluded that your favorite book of the New Testament didn’t qualify, consider carefully the overwhelming degree of agreement between every early listing of authoritative texts.

At least as early as the second century A.D., there were at least nineteen texts that were never questioned—and these are writings that reflect the most essential truths about Jesus. From the very beginning, Christians embraced the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, and at least one letter from John. Even if this score or so of books had been the only documents that represented eyewitness testimony about Jesus, every vital truth of Christian faith would remain completely intact.

Arguments about a few writings—including the letters of Peter, John’s second and third letters, the letters of James and Jude, and Revelation—did persist beyond the second century. By the closing years of the fourth century, Christians were arriving at widespread agreement concerning twenty-seven books—writings that were based on eyewitness testimony about Jesus. The letter of Athanasius in 367 A.D. reflected this consensus.

Many years did pass between the days of the apostles and the time when Christians agreed concerning every New Testament text. And, yet, a definite standard directed this process—a conviction that these writings must be rooted in reliable, eyewitness testimony. What’s more, despite continuing disagreements about a few writings, strong agreement on twenty or so texts existed at least as early as the second century. As a result, there’s every reason to believe that the testimony you find in your New Testament came from men and women who personally followed Jesus and who passed on their experiences to generations yet to come.
_________

For references to quotations and for more information on the authenticity of the New Testament texts, see my book Misquoting Truth.

Tomorrow, many of you will begin reading through the Bible in a year. Before you do, I want to plant a question in your mind: Why these books? Why spend the year reading through these ancient texts and not some other documents? What’s so important about these books that owe their human origins to a tribe of middle-eastern sheep herders and to a movement of martyrs who looked to a crucified Messiah for their inspiration?

Perhaps your first answer is that these books were inspired by God—and you’re correct! But how did the earliest Christians discern which texts were inspired?

Suppose that you became a Christian in the second century A.D. You’ve heard the story of a divine being who died on a cross and rose from the dead. Through baptism, you’ve openly identified yourself with his followers. Now, you want to learn more about this deity. Yet you quickly realize that some people who call themselves “Christians” understand Jesus very differently from the Christians in your congregation. In fact, one nearby group that claims the name “Christian” also says that Jesus wasn’t actually a human being—he was a spirit that only seemed human!

How would you decide who was right?

As a twenty-first century Christian, the most reasonable reply seems to be, “Read your New Testament!” The problem is, most Christians in the second century couldn’t read. Even if you were one of the privileged few that possessed the capacity to read and write, you wouldn’t personally own a Bible. Your only “Bible” would have been found in an armarion—a specially-constructed cabinet with niched shelves for scrolls and codices—that stayed in the house where your congregation most often gathered. The armarion would likely have sheltered a copy of the Greek Old Testament and perhaps a couple dozen other sacred scrolls or codices.

But it’s possible that not all of these texts would have been identical to the twenty-seven books that you find in New Testaments today.

To be sure, the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s letters, and probably John’s first letter would have had a place in the armarion. But the cabinet could lack a few writings that your New Testament includes—the letter to the Hebrews and maybe the second epistle that’s ascribed to Peter, for example, or a couple of John’s letters. A quirky allegory entitled The Shepherd might have made an appearance in some areas. You might even find a letter or two from a Roman pastor named Clement. The New Testament canon—that’s the twenty-seven texts that you find in your New Testament today—wasn’t yet clear to Christians everywhere.

Do you sense the dilemma that faced first- and second-century Christians? How could they maintain the faith of the first Christians in the shadow of so many competing claims? And how did they decide on the texts that we call the New Testament canon today?

:: Circular Reasoning and Skeptical Spins ::

It isn’t helpful simply to reason circularly, as some Christian apologists have done, and to claim that “God chose the books” or that “the Scriptures say they’re inspired.” Any writer can claim inspiration! And the question isn’t whether God had any part in choosing the books; the question is, “By what human means did these texts come to be viewed as authoritative?”

Equally unhelpful are conspiracy theorists and skeptical scholars who claim that no definite set of texts existed until the fourth or fifth centuries A.D. Agnostic professor Bart Ehrman claims:

We are able to pinpoint the first time that any Christian of record listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament as the books of the New Testament—neither more nor fewer. Surprising as it may seem, this Christian was writing in the second half of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years after the books of the New Testament had themselves been written. The author was the powerful bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius. In the year 367 A.D., Athanasius wrote his annual pastoral letter to the Egyptian churches under his jurisdiction, and in it he included advice concerning which books should be read as Scripture in the churches. He lists our twenty-seven books, excluding all others. This is the first surviving instance of anyone affirming our set of books as the New Testament. And even Athanasius did not settle the matter.

Unfortunately, this summary spins the facts and leaves readers with several impressions that aren’t quite accurate—impressions such as that, until the late fourth century, there was no consensus at all about which Christian writings were authoritative, and that the church’s standard even then was the word of a powerful bishop.

So what’s the complete story? When and how did Christians agree on which writings were authoritative in their congregations? And was there any standard for these discussions beyond the decree of a respected leader?

:: The Standard of Who Saw It Firsthand ::

The primary standard for deciding which books were authoritative emerged long before the fourth century—and this standard was not the word of a powerful bishop. Hints of this standard can, in fact, be found in first-century Christian writings.

Long before Athanasius was even born, testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of the risen Lord was uniquely authoritative among early Christians. From the perspective of Jesus and the first Christians, the entire Old Testament testified to Jesus. Teachings that could be traced to Jesus through eyewitness testimony held the same authority as the Old Testament and as Jesus himself.

Even while the New Testament books were being written in the first century A.D., the words of people who had actually seen the risen Lord Jesus—especially the words and writings of the apostles—carried special authority in the churches (see Acts 1:21-26; 15:6—16:5; 1 Corinthians 4—5; 9:1-12; Galatians 1:1-12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26-27). After the apostles’ deaths, Christians continued to value the testimony of eyewitnesses and their associates. In the first decade of the second century, Papias of Hierapolis put it this way:

I did not … take pleasure in those who spoke much, but in those who … recited the commandments given by the Lord. … So, if anyone who had served the elders came, I asked about their sayings in detail—what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s followers.

About the same time, a church leader named Polycarp cited the words of the apostle Paul as “Scripture.”

A generation later, when someone in the Roman church wondered which Christian writings should be considered authoritative, this emphasis on the eyewitnesses persisted. After listing the books that he viewed as authoritative, here’s what one Christian leader wrote regarding a popular book known as The Shepherd that was circulating in the churches:

Hermas composed The Shepherd quite recently—in our times, in the city of Rome, while his brother Pius the overseer served as overseer of the city of Rome. So, while it should indeed be read, it cannot be read publicly for the people of the church—it is counted neither among the prophets (for their number has been completed) nor among the apostles (for it is after their time).

Notice carefully this second-century writer’s reasons for not allowing The Shepherd of Hermas to serve as an authoritative text in the churches: This writing could not be added to the Old Testament prophets because the time of the Hebrew prophets had passed (“their number has been completed”), and—with the deaths of the apostles—the time of the apostolic eyewitnesses had also ended (“it is after their time”). This teacher didn’t forbid believers to read The Shepherd; he simply pointed out that the book should not serve as an authoritative text for Christian congregations (“it cannot be read publicly for the people of the church”).

Later church leaders such as Tertullian of Carthage and Serapion of Antioch echoed these sorts of standards, with Serapion clearly stating, “We, brothers and sisters, receive Peter and the rest of the apostles as we would receive Christ himself. But those writings that are falsely ascribed with their names, we carefully reject, knowing that no such writings have ever been handed down to us.” Again, Christians rooted their standard for determining which writings were authoritative in the testimony of eyewitnesses.

So, from the first century onward, Christians viewed testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus as uniquely authoritative. The logic of this standard was simple: The people most likely to know the truth about Jesus were either eyewitnesses who had encountered Jesus personally or close associates of these witnesses. So, although Christians wrangled for some time about the authority of certain writings, it was something far greater than political machinations that drove these decisions. Their goal was to determine which books could be clearly connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus.

_________

For references to quotations and for more information on the authenticity of the New Testament texts, see my book Misquoting Truth.

Denny Burk has developed a very useful plan for reading through the Greek New Testament in one year. Plodding through entire books—even ones like the letter to the Hebrews, where the Greek is a struggle for almost anyone—is the best way by far to keep up and to sharpen your language skills.

To download Denny’s plan, go here.

To learn more about how Greek manuscripts have been collated and analyzed to produce modern Greek New Testaments, go here.

Today, St. Nicholas is mostly known as a paunchy old geezer who spends one night each year breaking into people’s houses and stealing cookies before escaping to an Arctic hideaway where elves do his work for him.

Kind of creepy when you think about it.

The good news is that none of this was what the real St. Nicholas—a church leader named Nicholas of Myra—was known for. He was best known in his own day as a defender of the biblical truth that Jesus was fully God and fully man.

According to some reports, Nicholas of Myra may even have been present when more than three hundred church leaders gathered in the village of Nicaea to deal with a false teacher named Arius of Alexandria. There, the church leaders clearly rejected a popular claim that there had been a point when the Son of God had not existed.

And, according to one version of the events, Santa Claus may even have voted against Arius’s claims with something a bit stronger than his voice.

Learn more about Nicholas of Myra and the Council of Nicaea by watching this: “The Real St. Nicholas”

Someone sent me the picture at the top but I can no longer recall or locate the original source. If anyone knows the source, please let me know so that I can give appropriate credit.

The Gospel According to Luke provides the most comprehensive and most familiar account of the birth of Jesus—and, perhaps most significant of all, it’s the account that appears in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

If you’re interested in learning more about Luke’s Gospel than Linus Van Pelt is able to tell you, Matt Smethurst has posted an interview with premier New Testament scholar Tom Schreiner, who will be offering a seminary course on the Gospel According to Luke coordinated with The Gospel Coalition National Conference, April 8-10, 2013, in Orlando.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

What’s unique about Luke’s Gospel? … One striking feature of Luke is that it has a sequel, so that readers are invited to read Luke-Acts together. Also, certain themes stand out: the Holy Spirit, the importance of prayer, Luke’s concern for the disenfranchised (women, the poor, tax collectors, and sinners), the danger of riches, and the inclusion of the Gentiles. Moreover, Luke has unforgettable parables that are not found elsewhere: for example, the good Samaritan (10:35-37); the two lost sons (15:11-32); the unjust steward (16:1-9); and the Pharisee and the tax collector (18:9-14).

What major biblical themes are uniquely picked up and developed—or perhaps even brought to a climax—in Luke’s Gospel? … The promises of God, the Old Testament Scriptures, are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Luke’s way of saying this is that the kingdom has come in Christ. The kingdom has been inaugurated through his ministry and death and resurrection, even though it has not been consummated. The promise of worldwide blessing given to Abraham isn’t fulfilled in Luke, but from the beginning of the Gospel it is clear that such promises will be fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and the Gospel ends with the call to proclaim the gospel to all peoples. Luke teaches that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the Son of Man, and the Lord. God’s promises for Israel are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The new covenant is fulfilled in his death, so that forgiveness of sins is now ours through Jesus Christ.

To read the rest of the interview, visit The Gospel Coalition website.

For more information on Tom Schreiner’s Southern Seminary course coordinated with The Gospel Coalition National Conference, visit this informational page. If you are interested in the requirements for the course, download the syllabus here.

And, if you happen to want to listen to Linus recite Luke’s version of the Christmas story in A Charlie Brown Christmas, here it is too:

It’s an accusation that’s been around a long time.

Even in ancient times, critics of Christianity noticed some parallels between Christian beliefs and pre-Christian myths. In the late second century, a pagan philosopher named Celsus charged, “The Christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, of the Auge and Antiope in fabricating this story of virgin birth!” In more recent times, skeptical scholars such as Marvin Meyer and Robert Price have claimed close connections between the resurrection of Jesus and the myths of dying and rising deities that marked many pagan mystery religions.

In the simplest possible terms, here’s what these critics contend: The most marvelous claims in the Gospels—a miraculous birth, for example, as well as the idea of a deity who dies and rises again—are paralleled in pagan religions that predate Christianity; therefore, early Christians must have fabricated these miracles based on their knowledge of pre-Christian religions.

To be sure, there are some surface-level similarities between ancient myths and certain events in the Gospels. Long before the first century A.D., the myths of Egyptians deities such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Horus included tales of death and rebirth. The Persians venerated Mithras, a deity who (according to some recent claims) was born of a virgin and who died and rose Fain. Sacramental bread and the fruit of the vine make appearances in a few mystery cults as well.

So why should anyone see Jesus as being distinct from the pagan gods? Could it be that the New Testament stories of Jesus represent the fictive myth of an ancient mystery cult that’s survived for two thousand years? Or is there something different about the accounts of Jesus’ time on planet earth?

:: The Pagan Parallels Aren’t Particularly Parallel ::

In the first place, it’s important to be aware that most of these supposed pagan parallels aren’t nearly as parallel as the skeptics suppose. When the actual sources behind the pagan myths are closely examined, the supposed parallels have little in common with the New Testament narratives.

For example, there are dying and rising gods in some earlier religions—but these deities died and arose each year, certainly not the same pattern as Jesus’s once-for-all sacrifice for the sake of others. And the pagan myths of miraculous births are closer to divine impregnation—a mortal woman conceives a child as a result of sexual relations with a god—than to the virginal conception described in the Gospel According to Matthew and Luke.

To exemplify how these supposed parallels aren’t nearly as parallel as the critics claim, let’s take a look at one particular mystery-cult myth that’s often presented as a predecessor to the New Testament, the myth of Mithras.

So what of Mithras’ miraculous birth? In the ancient sources that describe the birth of Mithras, Mithras was birthed from solid stone, and he got stuck on the way out. Some nearby persons in a field pulled him from the stone, which left a cave behind him. Yet some writers continue to connect this birth to the birth of Jesus in a stable with shepherds arriving soon afterward. A few critics even refer to this birth of Mithras as a “virgin birth”! I guess that birth from a rock is sort of a virgin birth. But how can you tell if a rock is a virgin, anyway? And how precisely do rocks lose their virginity? Parallels of this sort are too vague and too dissimilar to support the claim that Christians borrowed their beliefs from pagans of previous generations.

James Tabor, a professor at University of North Carolina, doesn’t believe in the virginal conception of Jesus, and he denies that Jesus could have risen from the dead. Yet even he sees how radically the birth of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels differs from the supposed pagan parallels:

When you read the accounts of Mary’s unsuspected pregnancy, what is particularly notable … is an underlying tone of realism that runs through the narratives. These seem to be real people, living in real times and places. In contrast the birth stories in Greco-Roman literature have a decidedly legendary flavor to them. For example, in Plutarch’s account of the birth of Alexander the Great, mother Olympias got pregnant from a snake; it was announced by a bolt of lightning that sealed her womb so that her husband Philip could not have sex with her. Granted, both Matthew and Luke include dreams and visions of angels but the core story itself—that of a man who discovers that his bride-to-be is pregnant and knows he is not the father—has a realistic and thoroughly human quality to it. The narrative, despite its miraculous elements, “rings true.”

:: Supposed Parallels and Significant Problems When Comparing Jesus and Mithras ::

Supposed parallel: Mithras had twelve followers.
Significant problem: One piece of ancient artwork depicts Mithras surrounded by twelve faces, but there is no evidence that these were “disciples” of Mithras. In fact, Mithras had only two companions, Albederan and Antares.

Supposed parallel: Mithras was identified as a lion and a lamb.
Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence for the connection of Mithras to a lamb. Mithras was identified as a lion. However that imagery for a royal ruler existed among the Israelites (Genesis 49:9) several centuries prior to the emergence of any Mithraic myth; the New Testament writers were using familiar Jewish imagery when they depicted Jesus as a lion.

Supposed parallel: Mithras initiated a meal in which the terminology of “body and blood” were used.
Significant problem: The earliest evidence of such terminology in the context of Mithraism is from the mid-second century—nearly one hundred years after the Gospels were written. In this instance, it is far more likely that Mithraism borrowed from Christian practice.

Supposed parallel: Mithras sacrificed himself for the sake of others.
Significant problem: Mithras is frequently depicted in the act of sacrificing a bull—but Mithras himself never becomes the sacrifice.

Supposed parallel: Mithras rose from the dead on the third day; his followers celebrated his resurrection each year.
Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence from the pre-Christian era for a resurrection of Mithras on the third day. Because of his association with the sun, it is possible that followers of Mithras celebrated a renewal or rebirth each year.

Supposed parallel: The resurrection of Mithras was celebrated on Sunday.
Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence from the pre-Christian era for a celebration of a resurrection of Mithras on the first day of the week, though the followers of Mithras—and of other sun-related deities—did worship their gods on Sunday. The reason for the emphasis on “the first day of the week” in the New Testament Gospels was, however, more closely tied to the fact that, in Genesis 1, God’s work of creation began on the first day. The implication was that, through the resurrection of Jesus, God was initiating a new beginning, a re-creation of his world.

:: Claims of Parallels in Pagan Sources Confuse the Historical Claims of the New Testament with Later Christian Practices ::

What’s more, proponents of these parallels consistently conflate later Christian traditions with what’s found in the Gospels. It’s true, for example, that pagan festivals occurred around the time when Christians later celebrated Christmas—but the New Testament documents never suggest a date for the birth of Jesus in the first place! The identification of a date to celebrate Christmas occurred centuries after the time of Jesus; Christians probably arrived at a date near the winter solstice because of an early tradition that Jesus was conceived on the same date that he died, and nine months after Passover landed the birth of Jesus in late December. In any case, since the New Testament makes no claims regarding the date of Jesus’ birth, the celebration of Christmas is irrelevant when it comes to a discussion of whether the New Testament description of Jesus’ birth is rooted in real historical events.

The same holds true when it comes to connections between pagan fertility festivals and later Easter celebrations. The term “Easter” comes from “Ishtar,” a Sumerian goddess who died, arose, and ascended, and several familiar Easter motifs originated in pagan fertility cults. Yet, except for a mistranslation in Acts 12:4 in the King James Version, no New Testament text even mentions Easter! The pagan roots of later Easter imagery have nothing to do with the historicity of the Gospels.

Likewise, later Christian art incorporated both Egyptian and Mithraic motifs, especially when depicting Jesus and his mother. Yet later imitations of pagan themes among Christian painters has nothing to do with whether the events in the New Testament actually occurred. It simply means that Christians artists could have been a bit more creative when choosing sources for their inspiration.

:: What If Some Pagan Parallels Did Exist? ::

Let’s suppose for a moment, though, that some patterns that were present in the life of Jesus could be pinpointed in some previous religion. Would this weaken the historical foundations of the Christian faith, as critics claim?

Not necessarily.

The real question isn’t, “Are there similarities between the New Testament’s descriptions of Jesus and some previous religious practices?” Perhaps there are—although I must admit that every ancient parallel I’ve examined has turned out to be vague and weak when examined in its original context.

The crucial question is, “Did the events described in the New Testament actually occur?”—and the answer to this question doesn’t depend on parallels in pagan practices.

Parallels in other ancient religions neither prove nor disprove the authenticity of the New Testament documents. They simply demonstrate the common expectations of people in the first century A.D. Even if some clear parallel did exist between the story of Jesus and previous religious expectations, this wouldn’t warrant the belief that the apostle Paul or the authors of the New Testament Gospels “borrowed” these tenets from other faiths. It would mean that, when God dropped in on the human race, he chose to reveal himself in ways that the people in that particular culture could comprehend. If that’s indeed the case, it would merely mean that the myths of dying gods and miraculous births are rooted in longings that run deeper than human imagination; although the pagan religions twisted and distorted these motifs, they are rooted in a God-given yearning for redemption through sacrifice that makes the world right and new. C.S. Lewis addressed this possibility with these words:

In the New Testament, the thing really happens. The Dying God really appears—as a historical Person, living in a definite place and time. … The old myth of the Dying God … comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We must not be nervous about “parallels” [in other religions] … : they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.

When it comes to parallels between the New Testament story of Jesus and the myths of pagan gods, the supposed connections are not sufficiently parallel to claim that Christian faith is borrowed. Even if some parallels were indisputable, the parallels merely mean that God worked out his plan in a manner that matched the context within which “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:18).

So what should you do the next time someone pulls out a pagan parallel?

(1) Locate the primary source. With the rarest of exceptions, the primary sources—that is to say, the actual ancient texts that describe the pagan practices—do not include any real parallels to the New Testament.

(2) Determine whether the supposed parallel precedes or succeeds the New Testament. Every text in the New Testament was in circulation no later than the late first century A.D. If the pagan parallel is from a text that was written later than the first century A.D., the New Testament writers obviously couldn’t have borrowed their information from that text.

(3) Determine whether the supposed pagan parallel connects to the New Testament or to later Christian traditions. Connections between pagan practices and later patterns in Christian worship or holiday celebrations may be interesting—but these links have nothing to do with whether the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus are historically accurate.

__________

R. Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (New York: Oxford, 2006) 209-210.

M. Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras (New York: Routledge, 2000) 68-165.

C.S. Lewis, “Answers to Questions on Christianity” and “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970) 58, 66.

Origen of Alexandria, “Contra Celsum,” ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graecae 11 (Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857-1866) 37.

T. Snyder, Myth Conceptions (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995).

Once upon a time, there was a season in the church year known as “Advent.” The word comes to us from the Latin for “coming.” The purpose of the season was to look toward the coming of Christ to earth; it was a season that focused on waiting.

As early as the fourth century A.D., Christians fasted during this season and ended their fasts with celebrations either of the arrival of the wise men or of the baptism of Jesus. For many Christians today, the most familiar sign of Advent is the lighting of candles—two purple candles, followed by a pink and then another purple—on each of the four Sundays leading up to Christmas.

Advent has fallen on hard times, though. In the Protestant and free-church traditions, the loss is understandable, though no less lamentable; Baptists in particular tend to be quite suspicious of anything with origins in ancient or medieval tradition. When I instituted Advent celebrations as a pastor in a Baptist church, I was asked more times than I care to recall, “Don’t Catholics do that?”—as if that automatically prohibited us from considering such a practice.

Yet, even in congregations that more consciously echo the ancient rhythms of the church’s life, the meaning of Advent seems in danger of being misplaced. By the closing week of November, any sense of waiting has been eclipsed by the crèche in the lobby, the tannenbaum in the hall, and the list of Christmas parties in the church newsletter.

:: The Awkward Intrusion of Advent ::

Why this loss of Advent as a distinct season of the Christian year?

Perhaps it’s because, for believers no less than non-believers, our calendars are dominated not by the venerable rhythms of redemption but by the swifter currents of consumerism and efficiency. The microwave saves us from waiting for soup to simmer on the stove, credit cards redeem us from waiting on a paycheck to make our purchases, and this backward extension of the Christmas season liberates us from having to deal with the awkward lull of Advent. And so, before the last unpurchased Halloween costume has made it back to the warehouse, halls and malls are decked with plastic holly and crimson ribbon. Thanksgiving provides a pre-Christmas test run on basting turkeys and tolerating relatives—but the primary function of Thanksgiving increasingly seems to be to supply a convenient time to gather for that orgy of consumption and consumer debt known as Black Friday.

Why this Advent-free leap from All Hallow’s Eve to Christmas Eve?

Perhaps because Christmas is about celebration, and celebrations can be re-construed to move products off the shelves. Advent is about waiting, and waiting contributes little to the gross domestic product.

In a religious milieu that has fixated itself on using Jesus to provide seekers with their most convenient lives here and now, Advent is a particularly awkward intrusion. Advent links our hearts with those of ancient prophets who pined for a long-promised Messiah but who passed away long before his arrival. In the process, Advent reminds us that we too are waiting.

Even on this side of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, there is brokenness in our world that no cart full of Black Friday bargains can fix; there is hunger in our souls that no plateful of pumpkin custard can fill; there is twistedness in our hearts that no terrestrial hand can touch. “The whole creation,” the apostle Paul declared, “has been groaning together for redemption.”

In Advent, Christians embrace the groaning and recognize it not as hopeless whimpering over the paucity of the present moment but as expectant yearning for a divine banquet that Jesus is preparing for us even now. In Advent, the church admits, as poet R.S. Thomas has put it, that “the meaning is in the waiting.” And what we await is a final Advent that is yet to come. Just as the ancient Israelites waited for the coming of the Messiah in flesh, we await the consummation of the good news through the Messiah’s return in glory. In Advent, believers confess that the infant who drew his first ragged breath between a virgin’s knees has yet to speak his final word.

:: Celebrating the Waiting ::

I am not contending that lighting a few pink and purple candles will somehow, in and of themselves, trigger a renaissance of patience or a yearning for the presence of Christ. Neither am I suggesting that everyone should dismantle their yuletide trees and mute every carol until Christmas morning. But I know that I need this yearly reminder of the meaningfulness of waiting—and I do not believe that I am alone.

Left to myself, I turn too quickly from the God of the gospel and kiss the feet of the gods of efficiency and convenience—false gods that proclaim waiting a waste, a “killing of time.” Advent reminds me that time is far too precious to be killed, even when that time is spent waiting. Advent is a proclamation of the sufficiency of Christ through the discipline of waiting.

So, this Advent season, consider how your family might celebrate the discipline of waiting. Set aside a few moments each evening to consider biblical texts that tell about the first and second comings of Jesus. Or select a book for the month—maybe a novel that guides your family to glimpse both the beauty and the brokenness of God’s creation—then turn off the television each night and take time to read to one another. Or work together to list some ways that the world is broken; then, even as you long for the return of Jesus to make the world right, recognize that God’s work in the world is already underway. God is making the world new even now through the power of the resurrection among his people; so, plan a family activity that joins in God’s redeeming work by setting something right or relieving human suffering in your neighborhood. Whatever you do, let it be a reminder that, because God has promised to make the world new and has vouchsafed this promise through an empty tomb, no moment of waiting is meaningless. Every passing instant is pregnant with wonder and beauty and glory.

When I recall that there is meaning even in times of waiting, the question that occupies my mind as I stand in line at the supermarket is not whether I’ve chosen the quickest line but how I might invest this waiting in something weightier than my own to-do list.

When I sit in traffic, I am not merely anticipating a shift of color from red to green; I am awaiting the coming of Christ, and there is meaning in this waiting.

When I walk hand-in-hand with a dawdling child who stands in awe of common robins and random twigs, there is every reason to join this child in worship, for there is holiness in her waiting.

Malcolm Muggeridge once suggested that “all happenings, great and small, are parables by which God speaks. The art of life is to get the message.” Advent reminds us to listen for the message that God is speaking, even in the waiting.
________

If you need some music to help your family to celebrate Advent, download “Advent Songs.”

Video courtesy of Christianity.com

So now that you’ve spent thirty days looking at the history of Christianity, what’s next? What books or videos can provide you with deeper understanding of how God has worked throughout the past two thousand years?

Well, not surprisingly, I’m a bit partial to a certain book and video series known as Christian History Made Easy.

Beyond that, there are myriads of fascinating biographies, histories, and primary source materials to help you learn more—and, in this video, my colleague Owen Strachan highlights some of the best of them.

30 Days through Church History: Day 30

With this video, the thirty days of church history are finished! If you’ve completed all thirty days, congratulations!

Video courtesy of Christianity.com

For more on how Christians have thought about the end of time throughout history, take a look at this book and video series: Rose Guide to End Times Prophecies and Four Views of the End Times.

30 Days through Church History: Day 29

To learn more about William Wilberforce and the end of the British slave trade, read this introduction from Eric Metaxas or this summary from C. Ben Mitchell.

30 Days through Church History: Day 24

“Christians must avoid having their judgment controlled by political enthusiasms, being especially careful of this when the political ideology to which they are drawn appears just, reasonable, and friendly to the faith. This is not a prescription against patriotism, nor does it mean that all political persuasions are created equal—far from it—but that the church of Jesus Christ stands above and apart from every earthly institution and association in such a way that its members are continually responsible to discern, and to separate, what belongs to God and to Caesar. The idea of division between church and state was not invented by [Thomas] Jefferson for the Danbury Baptists, but taught by Christ to Peter; the question for Christians is its nature not its existence.

“This is painful for those who love their native lands, and are thankful for them, but who in all times and places are called upon to acknowledge the priority of their citizenship in heaven. They must subordinate what state interest teaches them about their enemies—and other things—to the harder precepts enjoined upon them by their Master.”

—S.M. Hutchens
Touchstone (November/December 2010)

:: Defenestration and Divine Election in Seventeeth-Century Europe ::

By the opening years of the seventeenth century, the Reformation had turned European Christianity into a conglomeration of conflicting sects. The Roman Catholic Council of Trent drew a firm line between Catholics and Protestants by declaring that Roman Catholic tradition represents the final authority when it comes to interpreting the Bible.

In 1618, a war between Protestants and Catholics broke out when some Protestants tossed two Catholic ambassadors out a second-story window. Fortunately, the ambassadors survived. Unfortunately, they survived because they landed in a heap of horse manure. Historians have named this foul-smelling event the “Defenestration of Prague,” which proves once and for all that historians have no sense of humor when it comes to naming events.

The Defenestration of Prague—or, as I prefer to call it, “The Great Stinky Second-Story Window Tossing”—was how the Thirty Years’ War began, though they didn’t call it the Thirty Years’ War then because they didn’t know how long it was going to last. In Central Europe alone, at least ten million people died during this conflict. Not a joyous occurrence, no matter how humorously the war began.

The year 1618 also marked a moment of theological conflict among Protestants in Holland. This conflict involved no windows and no excrement. In fact, by the early twentieth century, this conflict would be summarized by a flower—a tulip, to be exact. The conflict had to do with election. No, not a first-Tuesday-in-November democratic election. This conflict concerned divine election.

:: Dutch Difficulties from Dirck to Dort ::

According to Scripture, every Christian is “elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father” (1 Peter 1:2). This election isn’t based on any human choice but solely on God’s gracious predetermination (Romans 9:11)—or at least that’s what a long line of Christians throughout history have believed when it comes to divine election. Not everyone has accepted this viewpoint, of course—but a clear series of Christian thinkers stretching from the ancient church through the Middle Ages and particularly among the Reformers embraced this perspective.

In the late 1500s, a Dutch thinker named Dirck Cornhert—yes, seriously, that was his name!—came up with a radical suggestion for dealing with doctrinal differences: Until God sends a new apostle to tell Christians exactly what to believe, Protestants and Catholics should lay aside their distinctive doctrines and join together into one theology-free church.

One summary of faith that Cornhert specifically rejected was the Heidelberg Catechism, a statement that happened to be quite important to the Dutch Reformed churches. Not surprisingly, this recommendation didn’t go over well in Holland.

A young professor named Jakob Hermanszoon was enlisted to defend the teachings found in the Heidelberg Catechism, particularly the parts that had to do with election. But Hermanszoon lost the debate before it even began! As he studied for the debate, he became convinced that the Reformers had been wrong about the whole issue of election.

According to Hermanszoon, God has placed in every person just enough goodness and grace—he called it “prevenient grace”—to choose whether or not to trust Jesus. As a result, God’s election wasn’t really God’s choice at all; God simply noticed ahead of time who would choose him and then chose them back.

Hermanszoon died in 1609, but his followers continued to develop his ideas. His followers became known as “Arminians” because, whenever they called themselves “Hermanszoonians,” everyone around them politely replied, “Gesundheit.” (Okay, so I made that part up. Actually, the Latin form of the Dutch “Hermanszoon” is “Arminius” which is a lot easier to say than “Hermanszoon”—and that’s why, if you’ve heard of Hermanszoon before, it was probably under his Latinized name “Jacob Arminius.”)

Soon after Hermanszoon’s death, his followers published a document known as the “Remonstrance.” The Remonstrance spelled out five particular points where the Arminians disagreed with the theologians of the Reformation.

These five points resulted in a conflict that threatened to tear apart the Reformed churches of Holland. A Dutch prince tried to end the conflict by inviting Reformed pastors throughout Europe to gather in the city of Dort to draft a declaration of their beliefs. In 1618 and 1619, the Synod of Dort responded to the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance with five points of their own. Their five responses became known as “the Canons of Dort.”

:: The First Point: Election ::

What the Arminians said in the Remonstrance: “God, by an eternal, unchangeable purpose in Jesus Christ … before the foundation of the world, … determined … to save … those who … shall believe on this his Son Jesus, and shall persevere in this faith and obedience of faith, through this grace, even to the end.” God’s election was conditional, based on foreseen human faith and perseverance.

How the Reformed responded in the Canons: “Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, … God chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people. … This election took place, not on the basis of foreseen faith … but rather for the purpose of faith.” God’s election was unconditional; God chose not because he foresaw faith but because he planned to give faith as a gift.

Key Scripture texts: John 6:44; 15:16; Romans 9:10-16

:: The Second Point: Atonement ::

What the Arminians said in the Remonstrance: “Jesus Christ …died for all men and for every man, so that he has obtained for them all … redemption, and the forgiveness of sins; yet that no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins, except the believer.” Jesus purchased redemption for every person. If anyone refuses to believe in Jesus, their refusal thwarts God’s work of redemption their life.

How the Reformed responded in the Canons: “This death of God’s Son is … more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world. … It was God’s will that Christ through the blood of the cross … should effectively redeem from every people, tribe, nation, and language all those and only those who were chosen from eternity to salvation and given to him by the Father.” The death of Jesus secured the salvation of all whom God in his grace chose before time.

Key Scripture texts: Job 42:1-2; John 10:14-15, 28; 1 John 2:2

:: The Third Point: Human Nature ::

What the Arminians said in the Remonstrance: “Man … of and by himself can neither think, will, nor do anything that is truly good; … it is needful that he be born again of God in Christ, through his Holy Spirit.” Although fallen human beings cannot in themselves do good, God has placed “prevenient grace” in all people, so they can believe and be born again.

How the Reformed responded in the Canons: “All people are conceived in sin and are born children of wrath, … neither willing nor able to return to God.” Humans are, by nature, spiritually dead; humanity’s fallenness is so great that no sinner desires to trust in Jesus until he or she is made alive through the work of God’s Spirit.

Key Scripture texts: Psalm 14:2-3; 53:2-3; Romans 3:10-12; Ephesians 2:1-3

:: The Fourth Point: Operation of Grace ::

What the Arminians said in the Remonstrance: “As respects the mode of the operation of this grace, it is not irresistible.” Regeneration is God’s immediate response when a sinner chooses Jesus; sinners can resist, reject, and thwart God’s attempts to save them.

How the Reformed responded in the Canons: “Regeneration … is an entirely supernatural work. … All those in whose hearts God works in this marvelous way are certainly, unfailingly, and effectively reborn and do actually believe.” Though people do resist the Holy Spirit up to the time when God brings about new life in them, God transforms the person at the time of the new birth—or regeneration—in such a way that the sinner desires to trust Jesus and, as a result, freely chooses faith.

Key Scripture texts: John 6:37, 44; Ephesians 2:4-6

:: The Fifth Point: Perseverance ::

What the Arminians said in the Remonstrance: “Those who are incorporated into Christ, … Jesus Christ assists them … and, if only they are ready for the conflict, and desire his help, and are not inactive, keeps them from falling. … Whether they are capable … of forsaking again the first beginnings of their life in Christ, … that must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scriptures.” Perseverance depends on the will and work of the believer; it is uncertain whether a believer can forfeit his or her salvation.

How the Reformed responded in the Canons: “God … does not take the Holy Spirit from his own completely, even when they fall grievously. Neither does God let them fall down so far that they forfeit the grace of adoption and the state of justification. … God preserves, continues, and completes this work by the hearing and reading of the gospel, by meditation on it, by its exhortations, threats, and promises.” Perseverance depends on God’s will and work; God works in the lives of Christians so that they persevere in faith to the end.

Key Scripture texts: John 10:27-28; Romans 8:29-39

Of course, the Synod of Dort didn’t settle this issue once and for all. To this day, Christians discuss and sometimes divide over the issues that the Arminians raised in the Remonstrance. Over time, the Canons of Dort became known as “the five points of Calvinism”—even though they didn’t emerge until decades after John Calvin was dead. Despite such difficulties, the five points do provide a helpful summary of the Reformed perspective on how and why sinners trust Jesus.

:: Troubled by TULIP? A Proposal for PROOF ::

What has been far less helpful for healthy discussions of Calvinism is a five-point acrostic that emerged in the early 1900s. This acrostic rearranges and renames the Canons of Dort to spell the word “TULIP.” In this reformulation, the five points become:

* Total depravity
* Unconditional election or universal sovereignty
* Limited atonement
* Irresistible grace
* Perseverance of the saints

TULIP has only been around for a century or so, and I certainly understand the appeal of the acrostic. It’s a Dutch flower, after all, and it makes the five points quite easy to recall. And yet, this memory device has grown to dominate discussions of Reformed theology in ways that have rarely been fruitful.

“Total depravity,” for example, gives the impression that unsaved people are as bad as they can be, which isn’t at all what any Reformed theologian has claimed; plus, “total depravity” sounds like some sort of cable television show that no Christian should be watching in the first place. The “L” in the TULIP doesn’t catch the qualification in the Canons of Dort that the death of Jesus was “more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world.”

So here’s a proposal for a different memory device—one that’s truer to Reformed theology and far more helpful for discussions of Calvinism:


Daniel Montgomery and I are currently working on a book that unpacks this vision for theology.

In the meantime, here are some devotional guides on the five points as well as a children’s book that works through these doctrines of divine grace.

30 Days through Church History: Day 21

The first wave of Reformers never quite escaped the idea that the church and the government ought somehow to be linked with one another.

This arrangement had been around ever since the fourth century A.D., and it wasn’t easy—even for Scripture-saturated, gospel-loving preachers like Luther and Calvin—to see any other way to sustain society. In Calvin’s Geneva in 1553, a theologian named Michael Servetus was burned at the stake for his denial of the Trinity. Now, in all fairness, Servetus would have been executed anywhere else in Europe as well! Rejection of the Trinity was a capital crime, and the Roman Catholic Church had already put a price on Servetus’ head. Perhaps more significant, Calvin himself spent many hours with Servetus during and after the trial, urging Servetus to avoid execution by embracing the truth that one God exists in three persons. At the same time, Calvin remained the captive of an age that assumed the state’s right to enforce theological orthodoxy.

:: “Baptize Me With True Christian Baptism” ::

A couple of years after Luther nailed his theses to the door in Wittenberg, a priest named Huldrych Zwingli began preaching a message of reform in Zurich, independent of any direct influence from Luther. It was in Zwingli’s Zurich that a movement arose with the radical idea that no government should enforce theological orthodoxy.

But it didn’t start with a political discussion.

It started with a Bible study.

A young Swiss scholar named Felix Manz had been well-trained in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. While Martin Luther was translating the Bible into German, Felix Manz was gathering a small group of students in Zurich for a weekly study of Scripture in the original languages. As they studied, Felix and his “Swiss Brothers” came to a radical and unexpected conclusion: The New Testament never explicitly commanded infant baptism.

In January, 1525, one Swiss Brother—convinced that his baptism as an infant had not been valid—said to one of his friends, “Baptize me with true Christian baptism, upon my faith.” Water was poured over his head in the name of the threefold God. One by one, all the Swiss Brothers, including Felix, received believers’ baptism. Their revolutionary act would rob their of their livelihoods and earn them the epithet “Again-Baptizers,” or “Anabaptists.” That very night, the Zurich city council banished the Swiss Brothers.

:: The First Protestant Martyr ::

Most of the Swiss Brothers fled to nearby villages—but, even there, they found no welcome. Felix Manz was seized and sentenced to life in prison. After five months in a dungeon, he escaped. He was recaptured in October, 1526. The Zurich city council sentenced Manz to death. Their charge against him? “He wanted to gather those who wanted to accept Christ … and unite with them through baptism.”

In a mockery of his beliefs, it was by water that Felix Manz died. The executioner tied Manz’s arms behind his back and shoved him into an icy river. Manz died singing, “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum.” “Into your hands, Lord, I commit my spirit.”

Felix Manz was the first non-Catholic Christian to be martyred by fellow Protestants. He was far from the last. Widespread persecution of Anabaptist pastors led to a loss of biblical scholars in the movement; this loss opened the door for leaders whose agendas were shaped by personal charisma and apocalyptic claims instead of Scripture. In 1535, one rogue band of Anabaptists took over the city of Munster in the German province of Westphalia. The end result was a brutal massacre.

To learn more about the Munster massacre, watch this video, beginning around 2 minutes 45 seconds:

:: From Munster to the Mennonites ::

After the Munster massacre, both Protestant and Roman Catholic princes worked to destroy the Anabaptist movement. Even Luther and Calvin urged rulers to destroy the Anabaptists. “It is far better that two or three burn now,” Calvin wrote, “than to have thousands perish in Hell.”

It wasn’t until a former Roman Catholic priest named Menno Simons emerged as an Anabaptist leader that the Anabaptists returned to their roots. Menno began to emphasize anew the earlier Anabaptist commitment to the sufficiency of the Scriptures for faith and practice, the rejection of every form of violence, the baptism of believers only, and the freedom of Christians to practice their faith without interference from the government. So profound was the influence of Menno Simons that, after his death, many Anabaptists became known as “Mennonites.”

30 Days through Church History: Day 20

Courtesy of DesiringGod.org

Martin Luther wasn’t the only lawyer who became a leader in the Reformation.

In 1534 another lawyer traveled along another rutted road. His life had been shaken in much the same way that Luther’s had been—though not by a storm that drove him to call out to a saint. This lawyer was a Renaissance humanist fleeing the University of Paris.

His name?

John Calvin.

A few months earlier Calvin had helped a friend write a speech. They peppered the address with quotes from Luther and Erasmus. The speech angered the French government and forced Calvin to flee. Soon afterward, Calvin became a Protestant and a Christian.

Calvin fled first to Noyon, France, his home-town. From Noyon, Calvin turned toward Switzerland. There, he wrote the first comprehensive summary of Reformation theology, Institutes of the Christian Religion.

After the Institutes were published, Calvin headed for the Protestant city of Strasbourg, Switzerland. On the way, a military conflict forced him to veer east, taking a detour through Geneva. He intended to stay in Geneva for one night, concealed by the alias “Charles d’Espeville.”

That one night stretched into a lifetime.

A preacher named Farel had already promoted Protestant ideas in Geneva. One of Calvin’s companions told Farel that “Charles d’Espeville” was actually the well-known author of the Institutes. That evening, Farel confronted Calvin at the inn.

“Stay here!” Farel begged, “Geneva needs someone with your gifts.”

“But I need a rest,” Calvin countered.

Farel exploded, “May God curse your rest and the calm you seek for study, if you leave behind such a great need!”

Calvin chose to stay. John Calvin’s central task in Geneva was preaching. For years, he prepared and preached ten different sermons every two weeks. Less than one year after his arrival in Geneva, the city council agreed to Calvin’s vision for the Reformation.

After a series of religious and political quarrels, the Geneva city council forced Calvin to leave the city. Calvin found refuge in Strasbourg, his original destination. There, Calvin cared for French Protestants (“Huguenots”) who, like Calvin, had fled because of persecution. Finally, he had found the life of study that he had anticipated so long ago. Then, in 1539, Geneva needed someone to debate a Roman Catholic thinker. The city council swallowed its pride and asked Calvin to return.

Even after he returned, Calvin’s primary role remained unchanged; he was still foremost and most frequently a preacher. When Calvin returned to the pulpit after his exile, everyone in Geneva expected a sermon filled with severe rebuke—but Calvin did not preach the expected spiteful message. Instead, he began to preach precisely where he had stopped three years earlier, without a trace of harshness or anger.

30 Days through Church History: Day 19

Video courtesy of Rose Publishing

While Martin and Katie Luther were turning Wittenberg into a launching-point for the reformation in Germany, King Henry VIII was launching a very different reformation in England. To learn more about Henry VIII, William Tyndale, and the English Reformation, watch this video; then, listen to this fascinating lecture from my colleague Michael A.G. Haykin: “The Cost of Living Dangerously.”

30 Days through Church History: Day 18

“The all-embracing slogan of the Reformed faith is this: the work of grace in the sinner is a mirror for the glory of God.”

—Geerhardus Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1980) 248.

For me, this video, entitled “The Insanity of Luther,” from R.C. Sproul is far more than a history lecture.

I first watched this lecture in an earlier iteration, on VHS tape at a church in rural Kansas in the summer of 1992. A few months after that, a seven-year theological tribulation began in my life in which I drifted in a more liberal direction before eventually finding my theological home where it had always been, deeply rooted in historical orthodoxy.

God used this lecture in 1992 to spark in me a passion for church history. Over several years, R.C. Sproul, through countless audio and video tapes, fed me the theological meat that I had missed in the first two decades of my life. Even in the times when I questioned the content encoded in those miles of magnetic tape, Sproul’s teaching rooted my thinking in history, and God worked through this to prevent me from straying too far from orthodoxy. If you aren’t already familiar with R.C. Sproul and Ligonier Ministries, consider this your invitation to drink deeply from this rich and refreshing theological well.

To watch “The Insanity of Luther,” go here.

30 Days through Church History: Day 17

30 Days through Church History: Day 16 Bonus

In the midst of these tragedies, God raised up fresh voices—John Wycliffe in England, for example, and Jan Hus in Bohemia—to turn people’s minds to the truth of the Scriptures and the beauty of the gospel. God also worked through these tragedies for the good of his people and the world.

The tragic fall of Constantinople caused eastern scholars to flee westward with precious Greek manuscripts, including manuscripts of the New Testament. A renaissance of interest in ancient literature was already underway in Europe. Now, with access to these Greek manuscripts, scholars in Roman Catholic universities could interpret the New Testament not only in Latin but also in Greek—the language in which the New Testament was originally written!

Around this same time, a man named Johannes Gutenberg invented the first commercially-viable printing press that used movable metal type. This invention would make reading materials accessible to millions more people than ever before.

In an era of difficulty and tragedy, preachers such as Wycliffe and Hus packed a powder keg. The renaissance of interest in ancient languages coupled with increased access to literature wove a fuse. On October 31, 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther lit that fuse and rocked the world.

To gain a “God’s-eye view” of the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, read this article.

To learn about the fall of Constantinople in 1453, take a look at this video.

30 Days through Church History: Day 16 Bonus
You are more than halfway finished!

Don’t aim your machine in the direction of fourteenth-century Europe.

A move in the direction of the fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries might land you in the middle of any one of several societal catastrophes. Here are just a few of them:

(1) The papacy does the splits: In 1309, a French pope moved to Avignon, near the French border. For 72 years, popes lived it up in Avignon. Bishops openly sold positions of leadership in the churches. Friars freely hawked indulgences—payments that were intended to show authentic sorrow for sin but which, in practice, were perceived as purchases to reduce time in purgatory. When the papacy returned to Rome, the situation still didn’t improve. Some of the cardinal bishops went back to Avignon and elected a second pope. In 1409, cardinals from Avignon and Rome gathered in the village of Pisa, in a cathedral where a nearby tower was already beginning to lean. Their council decreed, “The Church’s oneness does not depend on or come from the Pope’s oneness.” In other words, the church did not need one pope to make a unified decision; a church council can make unified decisions that are binding on the church. The Council of Pisa rejected both the French and the Italian popes and elected a new Roman bishop. Unfortunately, the two previous popes refused to be dismissed. Two popes had been a problem, but now there were three! Each pope excommunicated the other popes’ followers. It wasn’t until 1414 at the Council of Constance—which also executed Jan Hus and had John Wycliffe’s bones exhumed and burned—that the Roman Catholic Church one again had one pope.

(2) A Hundred Years’ War: In 1337 King Edward III of England claimed that he was the rightful ruler of France. Not surprisingly, this did not go over well with the French. Thus began the Hundred Years’ War—which actually lasted 116 years, suggesting that no mathematicians were involved in the naming of the conflict. More than three million French and English died during this century of conflict. Two of the best-known battles in the Hundred Years’ War were the Battle of Agincourt—remembered primarily as the climax of William Shakespeare’s play Henry V—and the victory of Joan of Arc at Orleans.

(3) The Black Death: Fleas on rats brought the bubonic plague to Europe, where at least one-third—perhaps as many as two-thirds—of the population of Europe died in the mid-fourteenth century. Here’s a video summary of what happened during the years of the Black Death:

30 Days through Church History: Day 16

You’ve probably heard the quotation at least a few times, most likely in a sermon encouraging people to live their faith in the world.

“‘Preach the gospel at all times,’ Francis of Assisi said. ‘If necessary, use words.’”

It’s a heartwarming sentiment with two flaws.

First off, St. Francis never said it; second, even if St. Francis spoke these words, they aren’t true.

Mark Galli puts the historical myth to rest in an article that reads, in part,

Ed Stetzer summarizes the problem with the sentiment itself in an article entitled “Preach the Gospel and, Since It’s Necessary, Use Words.”

30 Days through Church History: Day 15 Bonus

In the early seventh century, an Arabian merchant named Muhammad claimed an angel had entrusted him with a message from the one true God. Muhammad began to rail against the idol-worship that he saw around him. At first, no one minded his message. Then, around 622, angry idol-peddlers forced Muhammad to flee Mecca.

When Muhammad returned to Mecca, he came to conquer, and he brought an army with him. His followers became known as Muslims (from Arabic, “those who submit”); their beliefs and practices were called Islam (“submission”). After Muhammad’s death, his followers conquered Arabia, Syria, and North Africa. In 638 the city of Jerusalem fell to the Muslims. By the early eighth century, Muslim troops had invaded Europe, conquering Portugal and Spain before being stopped by King Charles the Hammer at the Battle of Tours. Even after the Battle of Tours, warfare continued for centuries in Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy.

When a Muslim army of Seljuk Turks neared Constantinople in the eleventh century, the Eastern emperor begged for help from Christians in the west. At this same time, the Muslim occupants of the roads leading to Jerusalem were charging vast tariffs and harassing Christian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land.

:: The First Crusade ::

In 1095, Pope Urban II reacted to this state of affairs by proclaiming these words in a field near Clermont, France:

According to one report, the crowd responded by chanting, “God wills it!” Lords and fools, ruffians and serfs joined together, sewing cloth crosses on their tunics. Their campaign would be, as they saw it, both a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and a holy war against Arabs and Turks.

The First Crusade was underway.

Four years later, a Crusader army reached Jerusalem and conquered the city. Muslim blood flowed ankle-deep on the Temple Mount. Newborns were thrown against walls. Crusaders torched a synagogue, burning the Jews inside alive.

Both Western and Eastern Christians had well-founded reasons to fear the advance of Islam in the eleventh century. At the same time, none of these reasons can justify the slaughter of any people-group in the name of Jesus Christ. To this day, the First Crusade remains a blot on Christian efforts to witness to Muslims and Jews.

:: What the Crusades Accomplished ::

First Crusade (1095-1099): Crusaders conquered Jerusalem.

Second Crusade (1147-1149): Crusaders recovered Portugal.

Third Crusade (1187-1192): Muslims retook Jerusalem in 1187. King Richard the Lionhearted responded by setting out with two other kings to take back the Holy Land. He succeeded only in negotiating free access to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims. The Robin Hood legends are set in this era, during Richard’s absence from England.

Fourth Crusade (1202-1204): Western Crusaders on the way to the city of Zara became entangled in a political conflict in Constantinople. On Good Friday, in the year 1204, the Crusaders pillaged the capital of the Eastern Empire and murdered thousands of Eastern Christians. Tensions already existed between churches connected to the Eastern Empire and western churches that looked to the bishop of Rome for leadership. In the tenth century, the two communions had clashed over the addition of a word to the Nicene Creed. In the eleventh century, a representative from the bishop of Rome had condemned and excommunicated Christians in eastern churches. The horrors of the Fourth Crusade became the final straw that forever shattered Christianity into two parts: the Roman Catholic Church in the west, and the Eastern Orthodox Church in the east.

To learn more about the beginnings of Islam as well as the icon controversy, watch this video.

To learn more about the Crusades, read this interview with Rodney Stark.

To learn more about the church’s split into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, read these two articles: “The Great Divorce” and “Innocent’s Corrupted Crusade.”

30 Days through Church History: Day 15

By the end of the fifth century, the western half of the Roman Empire was crumbling into a conglomeration of barbarian kingdoms.

The city of Rome remained central for churches in communion with the Roman church, but Rome wasn’t nearly so central for the new barbarian rulers rising in the west. Over time, a partnership would emerge between these kingdoms and the church; it was this partnership that would hold western society together through the Middle Ages. Over and over, the rulers of these western kingdoms would clash with the bishops of Rome—known by this time as “popes,” from the Latin for “father”—over whether the church or the state would be the stronger partner.

:: What Happened to the Western Roman Empire? ::

So what exactly caused the western half of the ancient empire to fall apart? Historians have been arguing about this question for centuries; I neither pretend nor intend to solve this issue in a single blog post. But it is an important issue to understand; so, I’ll simply set forth four of the primary theories:

(1) Decay due to disease. In the centuries before the fall of the empire, Romans experienced several waves of smallpox and other diseases. These diseases spread through communal bathhouses, urban brothels, and water sources. Barbarians were nomads who drank ale and didn’t frequent bathhouses or brothels, so they grew stronger while Romans grew weaker.

(2)Decline because the Romans began to rely on hired barbarian soldiers to defend the empire. This was part of Edward Gibbon’s view—though he also blamed Christianity for contributing to a decline in civic loyalty.

(3) Collapse because the empire was facing too many simultaneous challenges. Economic and environmental challenges combined with disease and increased reliance on barbarian mercenaries—taken together, all of these factors were simply too much for the ancient empire to survive.

(4) Change due to migration of barbarians into the empire. Henri Pirenne and Peter Brown have argued that the empire didn’t really fall at all. The southward migration of the barbarians was part of a gradual societal shift from an empire centralized in Rome to a variegated collection of tribal kingdoms.

:: What Was Happening in the East? ::

The Eastern Roman Empire—centered in Constantinople and known to later generations as “the Byzantine Empire”—fared far better than the west, at least from a political perspective. In fact, the city of Constantinople remained the capital of the Eastern Empire for nearly one thousand years after Rome fell.

:: How Did God Use the Changes in the Empire to Preserve His Truth? ::

In the ninth century A.D., four hundred years or so after the fall of the Western Empire, a prince in the land of Moravia asked the emperor of the Eastern Empire to send missionaries to his people. The prince’s motives were primarily political: he needed the support of the Eastern Empire, so he asked the Eastern emperor for missionaries. Yet God worked through two Eastern missionaries named Cyril and Methodius to preserve his Word in ways that bore fruit far beyond the borders of Moravia. Watch this video to find out how!

30 Days through Church History: Day 14

Mostly because they like to party and to pinch people who forgot to wear green, I guess.

But there are better reasons than parties and pinching to celebrate this saint!

Find out a few of them by watching this sample video from the Christian History Made Easy DVD series.

30 Days through Church History: Day 13

It was in a garden in Italy that Augustine heard the voice of a child, singing a bit of rhyme, “Take up and read, take up and read.” When Augustine took up a nearby copy of the New Testament to read, the first verses to catch his eye were from Paul’s letter to the Romans, 13:11-14. Broken by the message of this text, Augustine finally recognized Jesus as Lord not only of the world but also of his own life. The year was 386.

Nine years later, Augustine was declared overseer of the church in the city of Hippo (modern Annaba, Algeria). In this role, he became a prolific defender of orthodox Christianity against false teachers such as the British monk Pelagius. Talents and personality traits that had once driven Augustine to seek his own glory became the very tools through which God worked to strengthen the faith of his people in the fifth century and beyond.

When the city of Rome was sacked in the year 410, many Roman citizens blamed Christianity. After all, the eternal city had never fallen during the days when Romans worshiped pagan gods! In The City of God—perhaps Augustine’s most important work, one that has shaped centuries of Christian political thought—the overseer of Hippo guided his readers to understand why no earthly empire, not even the Roman Empire, can last forever.

It is almost impossible to overstate Augustine’s impact on the history of Christian thought. In an outstanding article on the continuing relevance of Augustine, Nick Needham writes:

A. N. Whitehead once quipped that the history of Western philosophy was simply a series of footnotes to Plato. By a pardonable exaggeration, one might say that the history of Western theology is simply a series of footnotes to Augustine. The fifth-century African father towers mightily over the succeeding centuries…. We are sometimes fond of saying that we stand on the shoulders of the great Christians who went before us. In the case of Augustine, I suspect most of us may feel less a dwarf on his shoulders than an ant on his ankle.

Here are a few of my favorite words and ideas from the pen of Augustine…
* …his account of how he and his friends stole pears that they neither needed nor desired, simply for the thrill of the theft: Confessions 2:4-8.
* …his account of his conversion: Confessions 8:7-12.
* …his contrast between the City of God and the Earthly City or City of Man, summarized here by James K.A. Smith.
* …his unrelenting emphasis on the grace of God, summarized here by Tom Nettles.

And here is a whimsical and enjoyable, albeit amateur, video summary of the life of Augustine:

30 Days through Church History: Day 12

Video courtesy of Christianity.com

It’s one thing to live as a Christian in a world where your faith is persecuted and oppressed. Life may be hard but the boundaries between belief and unbelief are fairly clear. It’s quite another to remain faithful when the name “Christian” is not persecuted but praised and even endowed with power!

Some Christians responded to the new state of affairs brought about by Constantine’s profession of faith by retreating to monastic communities in the deserts of Egypt and North Africa. While some church members were on the move to the African deserts, barbarian tribes in Europe were on the move as well. Tribes migrating from northern Europe were quickly changing the western half of the Roman Empire—especially after the fateful winter of 406 (or 405), when the Rhine River froze and allowed a massive band of barbarians to cross the empire’s ancient border.

Throughout this era, councils of church overseers gathered to respond to theological conflicts that arose in their churches. Some of these church councils were “ecumenical”—a term that, at this time, simply meant that the council represented churches throughout the Roman Empire.

The first four ecumenical councils wrestled specifically with how Jesus was both God and man, one person with two natures. The church councils didn’t create these beliefs about Jesus; what they were striving for was a clear articulation of what the apostles had taught centuries earlier about the nature of Jesus.

:: First Ecumenical Council ::

Where? Nicaea (modern Iznik, Turkey)
When? 325
What was the problem? Arianism, the belief that Jesus was created and not eternally divine
Conclusion? Jesus is fully and eternally God, equal with the Father and Spirit in power and glory

:: Second Ecumenical Council ::

Where? Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey)
When? 381
What was the problem? Apollinarianism, the belief that Jesus had no human mind, only a divine mind, and was thus not fully human
Conclusion? Jesus was fully human

:: Third Ecumenical Council ::

Where? Ephesus (near modern Selcuk, Turkey)
When? 431
What was the problem? Nestorianism, the belief that Jesus was two separate persons—one human and one divine—with one body
Conclusion? Jesus was one person, not two; Mary carried in her womb not merely a human Messiah but the incarnate God

:: Fourth Ecumenical Council ::

Where? Chalcedon (part of modern Istanbul, Turkey)
When? 451
What was the problem? Eutychianism, the belief that Jesus had only one nature, a mixture of human and divine
Conclusion? Jesus possessed two natures, one human and one divine

To learn more about these christological conflicts, watch this video that summarizes the primary beliefs about Jesus from the church’s first five centuries: What are some of the ancient heresies about Jesus Christ?

30 Days through Church History: Day 11

Kind of creepy when you think about it.

The good news is that none of this was what the real St. Nicholas—a church leader named Nicholas of Myra—was known for.

The story of the real St. Nicholas won’t make any sense until you understand what was happening in the Roman Empire in the late third and early fourth centuries. So, before learning more about Nicholas of Myra, let’s take a quick look at three emperors, a Great Persecution, and a vision of a cross.

:: Two Emperors and a Great Persecution ::

In 284, Diocletian became emperor of the Roman Empire. Early in his reign, Emperor Diocletian had a great idea: How about figuring out a way to transition from one emperor to the next without murdering the existing emperor? (If I ever become an emperor, I think I might just make this idea part of my party platform too.)

To accomplish this feat, Diocletian organized the empire into two parts, east and west. Each half had its own emperor and junior emperor so that the supreme emperor could retire and be replaced by some means other than violent death. This was a promising move on Diocletian’s part. There was something else promising about Diocletian as well: His wife and daughter were Christians, so many Christians thought that Diocletian’s reign would bring centuries of persecution to an end.

The Christians couldn’t have been more wrong.

Diocletian’s junior emperor was a man named Galerius, and Galerius was convinced that Christians were dangerous. After a fire in the imperial palace, Galerius goaded Diocletian into blaming and persecuting Christians. The result was the most violent outbreak of persecution that Christians had ever seen.

To gain a glimpse of what happened during those years of tribulation, read this account from the Great Persecution, written by an ancient Christian historian who lived during this time of terror: “Of Those in Egypt”

When Diocletian retired, Galerius continued his violent rampage against the churches. Then, in the year 311, a grotesque illness struck Galerius. Perhaps hoping for healing from the Christian God, Galerius legalized Christianity. Five days later, Galerius died. The new ruler who emerged in the ensuing chaos was a young man named Constantine.

:: Constantine’s Vision and Arius’s Heresy ::

The night before a decisive battle for the city of Rome, Constantine allegedly had a vision that included a cross and the words “In this, conquer.” He chalked a Christian symbol on his soldiers’ shields, credited the God of the Christians for his victory, and began favoring Christians. One year later, in a decree that would become known as “the Edict of Milan,” Constantine reiterated Galerius’s legalization of Christianity.

A few years later, when an Alexandrian elder named Arius caused division in the churches by claiming that Jesus was a created being, the emperor became even more involved in the business of the churches. Emperor Constantine convened the first church-wide council in the little village of Nicaea. More than three hundred Christian leaders from throughout the empire gathered at Nicaea to consider Arius’s claims.

Even though Constantine’s primary concern was not doctrinal purity but imperial unity, the church leaders at Nicaea rejected Arius’s false teachings with a beautiful, biblical summary of the church’s beliefs about Jesus; this summary would become known as the Creed of Nicaea. A later council—the Council of Constantinople—would develop this creed into the Nicene Creed that’s still recited today by millions of Christians throughout the world.

Historians disagree when it comes to Constantine’s conversion. Some see him as a courageous convert to the Christian faith. Others think that Constantine never actually understood the gospel and, because Constantine shackled Christianity to the power of the state, he damaged the church’s witness for the next thousand years plus.

My take is somewhere between these two perspectives, but I’m a lot closer to the second perspective than to the first. Constantine wasn’t simply claiming Jesus for political reasons—his acceptance of Christianity was too risky to be a well-calculated political move. At the same time, even though Constantine seems to have sincere in what he claimed, he was not a Christian by any definition of “Christian” that I can possibly articulate from the New Testament, and his impact on Christian history has been far more negative than positive.

To learn more about Constantine, take a look at this article: Constantine the Great.

:: Black Dwarf, Santa Claus, and the Brawl at Nicaea ::

One man who was known to have been at the Council of Nicaea was a short dark-skinned deacon named Athanasius. After the council, Athanasius became the leading pastor in Alexandria, Egypt, as well as one of the most important fourth-century defenders of Nicene orthodoxy.

Learn more about “the Black Dwarf” by reading this article: Athanasius of Alexandria.

According to some reports, another famous church leader attended the Council of Nicaea too: Nicholas of Myra. That’s right, Santa Claus may well have been present when more than three hundred church leaders rejected the claim of Arius that “there was a point when the Son did not exist”!

And he may even have voted against Arius’s claims with something a bit stronger than his voice.

Learn more about Nicholas of Myra and the Council of Nicaea by watching this: “The Real St. Nicholas”

30 Days through Church History: Day 10

Video courtesy of Christianity.com

To learn more about how Christians determined which texts were true and authoritative, read these articles: Who Decided Which Books Belong in My Bible? and Why No Baptized Lions or Talking Crosses Made It Into Your Bible.

30 Days through Church History: Day 8

Video courtesy of Christianity.com

To learn even more about the Gnostics and other challenges to second-century Christians, read these four brief articles from Ligonier Ministries:
* Montanism
* Gnosticism
* Marcion’s Challenge
* Irenaeus of Lyons

30 Days through Church History: Day 7

By the end of the first century, Roman persecutions were dogging God’s people from the outside, and false teachings from people who claimed to be Christians were hounding the church from within. The Ebionites said that Jesus was a human Messiah but not the divine Lord. Most Gnostics, on the other hand, depicted Jesus as a spiritual being who had only seemed human. To make matters worse, most of the apostles and eyewitnesses of the risen Jesus had passed away, so it was becoming increasingly difficult to determine which traditions about Jesus were true.

Faced with such challenging circumstances, Christians asked several crucial questions: Which writings should be seen as authoritative? How was Jesus fully God and fully man? What are the necessary beliefs that every Christian must embrace?

These were not heady debates, limited to Bible colleges or theological seminaries. These were deeply practical struggles in local churches among men and women whose goal was to maintain the truth about Jesus at a time when proclaiming the gospel could cost Christians their lives.

Three primary responses to these challenges were:

(1) careful consideration of which texts were authoritative for Christians,

(2) a confession of faith that developed into the summary that we know today as “the Apostles’ Creed,” and

(3) bishops who became responsible for the theological integrity of churches in entire regions.

To gain a clearer perspective on this era, work through pages 18 through 24 in this sample session from the Christian History Made Easy DVD curriculum: Session 2: Defending the Truth.

30 Days through Church History: Day 6

You’re one-fifth of the way finished!

Near the northwest corner of the Dead Sea, there is a long-deserted settlement known as Qumran. Here, it appears that a discontented Jewish sect maintained a thriving religious community in the second century B.C. and again in the first century A.D.

At one point, this community’s library contained more than a thousand sacred scrolls. Some scrolls were copies of Old Testament texts. Others provided explanations and applications of the Hebrew Scriptures. Still others preserved rules for the Qumran community.

The Qumran community rules contain some of the more entertaining lines in the Dead Sea Scrolls—well, at least they entertain me.

In the Qumran community, waving at someone with your left hand led to ten days of punishment. Spitting, snorting at something that wasn’t supposed to be funny, or accidentally mooning someone warranted thirty days of penance. For streaking, the penance lasted six months (1QS, 7; 4Q258). Evidently, once you joined the Qumran community, you kept your jokes to yourself, your saliva in your mouth, your left hand in your pocket, and your loincloth securely tied.

In any case, when the Roman army ravaged the province of Judea around A.D. 70, the Qumran community sealed their sacred texts in jars and hid them in nearby caves. Most likely, the community planned to return to the caves to recover their scrolls—but, as far as we know, none of them ever made it home.

There, the scrolls remained hidden until 1947, when a young shepherd named Muhammad edh-Dhib lost his sheep and didn’t know where to find them.

According to the story that was related later, Muhammad tossed a rock into a cave, perhaps to determine whether some of his animals had found shelter in the shadowed interior. What he hoped to hear was the bleating of a stone-struck sheep—but that wasn’t what he heard at all. What the shepherd heard instead was the shattering of pottery. For nearly two millennia, sealed jars had preserved the ancient rolls of parchment that quickly became known as “the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

But what do these documents have to do with Jesus and the first Christians? Find out in this video:

Video courtesy of Christianity.com

30 Days through Church History: Day 5

When Jesus walked along the dusty roads of Judea and Galilee, the Jewish people had a temple in Jerusalem. But today, there isn’t one.

So what happened to this temple?

First, a bit of background: The temple in the time of Jesus was the second Jewish temple. The Babylonians had burned the first temple in 586 B.C. It was seventy years or so after the destruction of the first temple that a second temple was rebuilt and dedicated (Ezra 1; 4—5).

Five hundred years after the dedication of the second temple, King Herod the Great began renovating this structure. The renovations continued even after Herod died and expanded this temple into one of the grandest and most magnificent structures in the Roman Empire. At the time when Jesus ran salespeople and moneychangers out of the temple courts, renovations had been going on for forty-six years (John 2:20).

(A sidenote for those fans of Indiana Jones who may be wondering about the fate of the ark of the covenant: This temple apparently lacked an ark; according to the Jewish historian Josephus, when a Roman general entered the holy of holies, nothing was there, Bellum Judaicum, 5:5:5; 7:5:5-6.)

But what happened to the second temple?

In A.D. 70, the Romans destroyed this temple.

In A.D. 66, Vespasian—once exiled by the Emperor Nero for drowsing during one of the emperor’s interminable poetry recitals—responded to a Jewish rebellion by beginning his campaign in Galilee. He worked his way south, fighting alongside his son Titus. This campaign would eventually bring father and son to the gates of Jerusalem; later, these events would contribute to turning Vespasian and Titus into emperors of the Roman Empire.

To understand more about what happened in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, read this article from Christian History magazine “Not One Stone Left Upon Another.”

To gain a glimpse of Vespasian’s campaign in Galilee that led up to the fall of Jerusalem, you might want to take a look at these two videos—but please be cautioned that there is quite a bit of brutality and some vulgarity in them:

30 Days through Church History: Day 4

You’ve at least heard the saying. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself at some point when someone was fooling around in the face of an impending crisis.

“Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”

But did he?

No, not even a chance.

In the first place, fiddles as we know them weren’t even invented until the Renaissance, though other bowed and stringed instruments are mentioned at least as early as the ninth century. Instrumental technicalities aside, the accusation wasn’t that Nero played a hoe-down and “biled them cabbage down” while Rome went up in flames; it was that he donned a stage costume and sang “The Sack of Ilium” accompanied by his lyre while ten of Rome’s fourteen districts burned. But that claim was false as well. Nero was thirty-five miles away in Antium when the fire began; the most likely cause of the fire was an accident in an oil warehouse.

Watch the last twenty minutes of this video—start watching around nine minutes and eight seconds—to find out why the fire mattered and how it affected Christians in the city of Rome.

30 Days through Church History: Day 3

Congratulations! You’re already one-tenth of the way to the end!

Video courtesy of Christianity.com

To dig deeper into ancient historians’ references to Jesus, take a look at this chapter from Gary Habermas.

30 Days through Church History: Day 2

Why does it matter if Christians know the history of their faith?

Well, imagine trying to sustain a marriage with total amnesia, never fully aware of all the past experiences that you and your spouse have shared. Sure, it’s possible sustain such a relationship—and many people whose husbands or wives suffer from dementia valiantly do so—but there will always be a dimension missing when one person in a relationship doesn’t remember the past events that you have experienced together.

It’s sort of like that with church history and the Christian life.

Sure, you can live the Christian life without ever knowing the history behind your faith, but there will always be a dimension that’s missing. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, there is an amazing story that you share with Christian brothers and sisters throughout the world and throughout the past two thousand years. The more that you know about the past that you share, the better you will be able to live alongside this “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). History matters because it’s the story of how God has worked among his people in his world.

To find out more about why church history matters, watch the first nine minutes of this video.


30 Days through Church History: Day 1

Have you ever wanted to gain an overview of church history, so that you can understand where all the divisions and denominations came from? But it’s not like you have hours each day that are free to fill with reading! If that’s the case, here’s an idea: check in here every day for thirty days. Beginning tomorrow morning, I will be posting a video or an activity each morning that will take around thirty minutes to finish. If you simply follow along with these activities, at the end of the thirty days, you’ll understand most of the most important people and movements in the history of Christianity.

Here’s where it gets even better: everyone who posts any comment on any of the thirty posts will be entered into a drawing to receive a free Christian History Made Easy DVD curriculum kit—a $129.99 retail value.

The thirty-day tour begins on October 16!

The winner of the Family Ministry Library from the last Free Resource Friday was Mike Leake, for a pingback from MikeLeake.net on the blog post entitled Why Choosing Your Favorite Team Should Be Nothing Like Choosing a Church.

This month’s free resource Friday winner will be chosen on November 15, and the prize will be the complete Christian History Made Easy DVD curriculum kit, valued at more than $120!

So how do you win this time? On October 15, TimothyPaulJones.com will kick off a thirty-day whirlwind tour of church history. At any time during those thirty days, simply comment on one of the thirty church history posts, letting me know that you completed that day’s study. At the end of the thirty days, one winner will be selected. The more times you post, the more chances you have to win.

The Major League Baseball season is drawing to a close once again. My favorite team launched the season with the most hopeful of slogans: “This is our time.” But “our time” quickly faded into “next time” for Kansas City, and the Royals spent most of the season locked in a contest with the Minnesota Twins for the uncoveted title “There Is At Least One Team in the American League Worse Than Us.”

It’s around this time each year that I find myself asking once again, “How exactly was it that I ended up a Kansas City Royals fan?” The last time the Royals were serious contenders for a pennant, Ronald Reagan was residing on Pennsylvania Avenue, the Berlin Wall was still intact, and grunge hadn’t yet made it past the Seattle city limits.

Goodness knows, I’ve tried to stop rooting for a losing team. During my years of earning graduate degrees, I stopped following baseball altogether. Upon my return, I realized that—though Kansas City had fared no better without me than with me—not even decades in the cellar of season-end standings had managed to dethrone the Royals from first place in my sporting allegiances.

:: Why Keep Choosing a Losing Team? ::

I am clearly not the only person who persists in prioritizing a particular team even when that team never earns a place in the postseason. After all, someone, somewhere, purchases the kitsch and clothing that memorabilia manufacturers imprint with the logos of Indians and Mariners, Pirates and Cubs.

So why is it that human beings select certain teams and stick with them even when these franchises have no reasonable chance at a championship?

At least three patterns seem to drive this irrational rationality of persistent loyalty—and these patterns may help us to think a bit more carefully about how we try to grow our churches.

(1) Commonalities: They Come From a Place Where People Are More Like Me: I am a Midwesterner. Tea with more than a touch of sugar is a travesty to my taste buds, and seeing saltwater has always meant at least two days of travel. As a result, I’m pretty much incapable of cheering for a team from any state that seceded from the Union or from any city west of the Great Plains or east of the Great Lakes. I don’t think I’m alone in my affinity for teams from locations near past or present places of residence. With the fewest of exceptions, fans of the Braves have roots south of the Mason-Dixon Line, New Englanders aren’t rooting for the Mariners, and folks that hope the Indians do better next year don’t live near a coastline.

(2) Memories: The Power of Past Recollections: In a box in my basement, there are three white-and-blue shirts that I wore as a three-year-old, each one emblazoned with a face and faux signature. My Grandma Lu was the source of these t-shirts that are inked with the likenesses of George Brett, Hal McRae, and Frank White. Grandma Lu lived most of her life in Kansas City; my parents met one another in Kansas City; I earned my master’s degree in Kansas City; I remember games at Kauffman Stadium with my parents, my sister and her husband, my wife and oldest daughter. Despite a disappointing record from the Royals over the past two decades, ties to Kansas City are threaded through some of my deepest and most cherished memories. When I root for someone from Kansas City, I’m not merely hoping for a certain team to triumph; I am also remembering, and many of these memories are tinged with white and blue.

(3) Affinities: Random Preferences and Prejudices, Quibbles and Quirks: For certain fans, the designated-hitter rule is such a deal-breaker that they’re incapable of sporting the logo of any American League team. Others select and reject teams because they’re excited or annoyed by particular players. For me, long-term rootedness in a particular place matters deeply, so a skip from one city to another permanently besmirches a team’s reputation. And, of course, everyone in his or her right mind recognizes that the Yankees have always been insufferably arrogant and deserve to be beaten at every possible turn. Such are the less-conscious quibbles and quirks by which we choose between teams that might otherwise have been equal in our allegiances.

In thinking through this, it has occurred to me that some of these patterns also explain what pulls many people to churches. According to a Gallup poll a few years ago, three of the top reasons why Americans attend church are a sense of fellowship, family traditions, and how the experience at church personally inspires them—reasons similar in many ways to the patterns of affinity, memory, and commonality that drive fans to persist in their faithfulness to particular teams.

Being tied to a church by familial memories could be a positive pattern, as long as family traditions don’t compete with the church’s commitment to the Great Commission. When it comes to using affinities and commonalities to attract people to church, however, I’m not so certain that these patterns are in any way positive. And yet, intentionally or not, this is how we aim people toward particular congregations at times: “Lots of children about the same age as your kids go there; you should try it.” “The music there is amazing!” “That campus might be a bit too traditional for your taste.” “You probably wouldn’t feel comfortable there anyway—that church is mostly college students.”

:: The Problem With Choosing a Church the Same Way You Choose a Team ::

When choosing which team to cheer in the postseason, looking to one’s own commonalities, memories, and affinities is perfectly harmless. And yet, when these phenomena form the foundations for trying to grow a community of faith, the results fall far short of God’s design. Appealing to people’s commonalities, memories, and affinities tends to turn churches into conglomerations of spectators centered on their own similarities instead of divinely-diversified communities of gospel-driven servants.

Suppose I encourage people to attend my church because the church matches their pre-existing affinities or because the people in the congregation are a lot like them. This mentality meshes well with a form of the “homogeneous unit principle” that dominated church growth literature for many years. This principle urged churches to avoid mingling “diverse social and cultural elements” because culturally-diverse congregations made it impossible “to maintain a sense of community.”* This principle isn’t new, of course. In the first century A.D., when ex-idol-worshipers showed up to worship alongside Jewish believers in the Messiah, churches in Ephesus and Rome cooked up their own versions of the homogeneous unit principle—but the apostle Paul vehemently rejected the notion of congregations organized along social fault lines. According to Paul, the death of Jesus so thoroughly shattered the walls between diverse social structures that pork-eaters and Sabbath-keepers could now worship and serve together as one body (Ephesians 2:11-18). In the process, Paul unmasked this form of the homogeneous unit principle for what it really is: a repudiation of the power of the gospel.

The church’s capacity for community originates not in human homogeneity but in the work of God’s Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:1-3). And yet, let’s be honest about ourselves and our churches: this divinely-ordained capacity for diversity is far from the reality experienced in most American churches. In fact, even with the regional affinities that attract baseball fans to particular franchises, the spectatorship at a typical professional ballgame reflects greater racial and socioeconomic diversity than the membership in most evangelical churches. Nevertheless, if the world is ever to glimpse the peacemaking power of the gospel, it must be recognized that homogeneous units are not God’s plan for the growth of his church. Part of the beautiful foolishness of the cross is the fact that those who rub shoulders in the shadow of the cross are people that the world would never dream of mingling together (1 Corinthians 1:18-29).

Regional commonality, familial memory, and personal affinity can be—like sports—wondrous expressions of the common grace that surges beneath the surface of every centimeter of God’s creation. These patterns may even, at times, provide starting-points for the proclamation of the gospel. But the church is the outpost of a kingdom that is at once more particular and more diverse than anything the world could ever conjure. The church is called to grow into a multi-hued fellowship from every side of the tracks that points explicitly and unmistakably toward the cross and empty tomb formerly occupied by King Jesus. He is the head of the church, and his affinities alone are the ones that must shape the church’s identity and constitution (Ephesians 1:22-23; 4:11-16). In him, there are no season-end laments about “next time” because he has already triumphed once and for all, and his triumph purchased particular people “from every tribe and every language, every people and every nation” (Revelation 5:9). To this people, he has provided “hope that does not disappoint” (Romans 5:5). Through this people, God is forming a new family, a family brought together not by shared memories or preferences or similarities but by adoption on the basis the blood of Jesus Christ.

So don’t point people toward a fellowship based on anything so shallow and fleeting as human affinities and similarities. Such commonalities may be useful at the ballpark but they are disastrous as a basis for unity in the body of Christ. Point people instead to their universal need for divine rescue, for the rescue that removes us from the domain of darkness and binds us in the fellowship that will outlast every human connection and family tie.

________

* C. Peter Wagner, in Win Arn and Donald McGavran, How to Grow a Church (Glendale: Regal, 1973) 47-48. The homogeneous unit principle—which Donald McGavran championed as a strategy to assist in contextualizing gospel presentations and to utilize human similarities as bridges to begin gospel conversations—became in C. Peter Wagner’s work a prescriptive foundation for church planting. While I am not in complete agreement with McGavran’s formulation of this principle, McGavran’s work was not without its merits and has been helpful in many contexts. The form of this principle that I critique here owes far more to Wagner’s reappropriation than to McGavran’s initial formulation.

Earlier this week, I mentioned that the news of the fragment known as Gospel of Jesus’s Wife will end “quite possibly with the revelation that the fragment was a forgery in the first place.”

My rationale for this suspicion was and is insufficient to advance any sort of argument. I am no expert in Coptic paleography. However, when assisting with research at a Bible museum, I have studied third- and fourth-century fragments in Greek. And, while writing Misquoting Truth, I spent months poring over high-resolution scans of ancient fragments and codices.

Compared to these many papyri, the ink on Gospel of Jesus’s Wife strikes me as having an odd, washed-out quality and breadth that I have never seen in any authentic fragment or codex. The scholar presenting Gospel of Jesus’s Wife attributed this pattern to a scribe with a dull quill. Yet it seems there ought to be other manuscripts and fragments that exhibit this phenomenon—and perhaps there are some that I simply haven’t seen, and maybe this has more to do with the photographs of Gospel of Jesus’s Wife than with the fragment itself. Still, it didn’t look right to me, and it still doesn’t—but this oddity is far from sufficient to question the fragment’s authenticity.

Since that time, Denny Burk has pointed out a brief paper from Francis Watson at University of Durham, subtitled “How a Fake Gospel-Fragment Was Composed.”

Most significant in this paper is that the line “cannot be my disciple” in Gospel of Jesus’s Wife begins halfway through a word in precisely the same place that the same word is broken in the single surviving manuscript of Gospel of Thomas. This pattern strongly suggests that a forger was been working from a modern printing of the extant text of Gospel of Thomas.

Read Watson’s paper here.

The winner of the last Free Resource Friday was Phil Sallee! Phil’s comment was randomly selected to win the complete Christian History Made Easy DVD series. Congratulations, Phil! You should receive your DVD series next week.

For this Free Resource Friday, you can win three books that can form the core of your family ministry library, with a total retail value of $65.00!

Here’s how you can win: Mention any post found anywhere on TimothyPaulJones.com on your blog or social media site—that includes your Facebook or Twitter page!—before October 5, 2012.

Leave a comment below with a link to your site that shows where you mentioned a post from TimothyPaulJones.com. (When asked, please be certain to list an email address that you check frequently!) The more posts from TimothyPaulJones.com that you mention, the more likely you will be to win. One randomly-selected participant will win these family ministry books:

* Family Ministry Field Guide: How Your Church Can Equip Parents to Raise Disciples

* Perspectives on Your Child’s Education

So search for a post on this blog that you like, link it or mention it on your page, leave a comment below, and win a family ministry library!

“It is an embarrassing insight into human nature that the more fantastic the scenario, the more sensational is the promotion it receives and the more intense the faddish interest it attracts,” biblical scholar Raymond Brown wrote nearly two decades ago. “People who would never bother reading a responsible analysis of the traditions about how Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead are fascinated by the report of some ‘new insight’ to the effect he was not crucified or did not die, especially if his subsequent career involved running off with Mary Magdalene to India.”

This week, this embarrassing aspect of human nature has been on full display once again on television screens and news headlines. A scholar from Harvard University has presented a fragment of papyrus, allegedly copied about three centuries after the days when Jesus walked on the earth, that includes this clause: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’” The news media reacted as if the five Coptic words underlying this clause had suddenly reset the entire field of biblical studies.

Public Radio International suggested that this fragment might “challenge hundreds of years of religious belief” by re-igniting “a centuries-old debate about the role of women in the Christian faith.” (Never mind that the fragment tells us little, if anything, about the role of women in Christian faith or that this debate isn’t exactly in need of re-ignition—it’s remained fairly well-ignited for a long time.) According to Bloomberg Business Week, “evidence pointing to whether Jesus was married or had a female disciple could have ripple effects in current debates over the role of women.” (Never mind that the New Testament is filled with examples of female disciples and that their existence has never been in question.) The Washington Post claimed the papyrus had renewed debates “about scholarship focused on Jesus’s marital status and the veracity of early church documents.” (What the text has to do with the truthfulness of early Christian texts, I am not sure; what it has to do with the marital status of the historical Jesus is, as it turns out, practically nothing.)

Dr. Karen King—the scholar presenting this fragment at International Congress on Coptic Studies—did admit, to her credit, that the fragment “does not … provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married.” At the same time, her decision to name the fragment “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” didn’t exactly lend itself to reasonable discussion and consideration.

Other scholars have already raised legitimate and pressing questions about the fragment’s authenticity as well as pointing out the irregularities in how the research was publicized. All of this kerfuffle will soon die down, quite possibly with the revelation that the fragment was a forgery in the first place.

And yet, the publicity may have raised a legitimate question or two in the minds of Christians and others—questions such as, “Why do Christians assume that Jesus wasn’t married? And would it matter if he was?” With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at the earliest historical traditions about the Messiah’s marital status.

:: What Early Christians Had to Say About the Singleness of Jesus ::

Dr. King has presented the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” as evidence that arguments over the singleness of Jesus were a pressing issue among second-century Christians. The fragment provides “direct evidence,” according to King, “that claims about Jesus’s marital status first arose over a century after the death of Jesus in the context of intra-Christian controversies over sexuality, marriage, and discipleship.” In other words, second-century Christians were arguing about issues related to sex and marriage. In the midst of these arguments, some Christians claimed Jesus was married while others said he wasn’t.

The second- and third-century sources do not, however, support this supposition. In the first place, while certainly possible, it’s far from certain whether the fourth-century fragment known as The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife was translated from any second-century text. More likely than not, this fragment is a modern forgery. Even if we assume for a moment that the fragment is authentic, Coptic texts of this sort did not emerge in the context of “intra-Christian controversies” but from breakaway Gnostic sects, groups that had already rejected the testimony of apostolic eyewitnesses. The primary concern of the Gnostics would not have been whether Jesus was actually married but how they might portray Jesus in a way that would illustrate their own myths and rituals.

Yet what of the earliest Christian mentions of Jesus and marriage? Do they suggest intense “intra-Christian controversies” that resulted in competing “claims about Jesus’s marital status”?

Not really.

In fact, in the first Christian references to Jesus’s marital status, I find no hint of competing claims about whether Jesus was married or single.

The earliest Christian writer to refer explicitly to the singleness of Jesus seems to have been Clement of Alexandria. Clement was a theologian who began teaching in Alexandria around A.D. 180. In the closing years of the second century, Clement wrote against false teachers who had declared marriage taboo; these false teachers had claimed that “marriage is the same as sexual immorality.” While arguing against these heretics, Clement commented that Jesus “did not marry” (Stromata 3:6:49).

About the same time that Clement was writing against false teachers who regarded marriage as immoral, a lawyer named Tertullian became a Christian and quickly turned his rhetorical skills toward defending the Christian faith. In a treatise urging monogamy for Christians, Tertullian of Carthage mentioned that Jesus, a lifelong celibate, had made God’s kingdom accessible even to those who—like Jesus—never engaged in sexual relations (“… ipso domino spadonibus aperiente regna caelorum ut, et ipso spadone, quem spectans et apostolus…,” De Monogamia 3). Later in the same treatise, Tertullian termed Jesus “entirely unmarried” and “voluntarily celibate in flesh” (“innuptus in totum…spado occurrit in carne,” 5).

What is noteworthy in all of these references is the fact that neither author feels compelled to defend the singleness of Jesus. Both Clement and Tertullian, in treatises focused on other subjects, mention this status in an offhanded manner, as if both they and their readers assume the singleness of Jesus.

:: What About Jesus and Mary? ::

The only potential evidences of alternative perspectives on Jesus’ marital status turn out to provide little, if any, real evidence at all.

The Gospel of Mary—a text that probably originated in a Gnostic context around the time of Tertullian, long after every eyewitness of Jesus had passed away—merely mentions that Jesus “loved [Mary] more” than he loved other women (10).

The Gospel of Philip seems to have been written a little later, in the first half of the third century. The Gospel of Philip describes a “bridal chamber” initiation ritual by which spiritual mysteries were passed from one person to another in a Gnostic sect known as the Valentinians (The Gospel of Philip 67). As such, much of the language in the book is metaphorical in the first place. According to this text, Jesus “was kissing” Mary Magdalene (63-64). A small hole appears in the manuscript after the word translated “kissing.” As such, it’s impossible to know where or how Jesus supposedly kissed Mary. In a culture where kissing served as a common greeting (Acts 20:37; Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26; 1 Peter 5:14), kissing would have suggested close friendship—not necessarily or even primarily a marital connection. The Gospel of Philip also calls Mary Magdalene the “companion” with whom Jesus was “joined” (59). The term translated “companion” is a Coptic loanword from the Greek word koinonos. In some cases, the word could suggest a spouse. Far more often, the word denoted a fellow participant in a shared goal. Paul had koinonos connections with Titus, Philemon, and the entire church at Corinth (2 Corinthians 1:7; 8:23; Philemon 1:17), and Simon Peter called himself a koinonos in God’s glory (1 Peter 5:1). (For further examples of the functions of koinonos in the New Testament, see Matthew 23:30; Luke 5:10; 1 Corinthians 10:18, 20; Hebrews 10:33; and, 2 Peter 1:4.)

Most important of all, texts such as The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Philip—and most likely The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, in the event that the fragment turns out not to be a forgery—originated among Gnostic sects that were far more concerned with describing arcane myths and rituals than with preserving any historical information about Jesus.

:: “The Lord…Already Had a Bride” ::

Despite multiple media melees over the past few years that have implied otherwise, there is simply no reliable historical evidence to support the supposition that Jesus was married. The earliest references to Jesus’s marital status assume his singleness, and the writers seem unaware that anyone might think otherwise. Suggestions that Jesus had an earthly wife originated in historically-suspect sources, written a century or more after Jesus walked the earth.

There is, I would add, one more historical hint that Jesus was single. This evidence dates even earlier than the writings of Clement and Tertullian. The evidence simply this: The consistent testimony from the first century forward was that the church was to be considered the bride of Christ.

The apostle Paul made this point in the mid-first century (Ephesians 5:24-33).

In his description of the end of the age, the apostle John likewise depicted the church as the bride of Christ (Revelation 21:2).

In the earliest surviving Christian sermon—preached in the early-to-mid-second century—the pastor proclaimed, “‘God made man male and female.’ The male is Christ, and the female is the church” (2 Clement).

Clement of Alexandria himself gave this as the primary reason for Jesus’s lifelong virginity: “The Lord…already had a bride, the church”—and these are only a few of many such references from the first centuries of Christian faith.

So what do all these metaphors have to do with the marital status of the historical Jesus?

If Jesus had been married, it seems that these references to the church as his bride would have—at the very least—required some further explanation. Perhaps a reference to his “spiritual bride” and his “earthly bride,” or some other shade of distinction offered to distinguish the church’s relationship to Jesus. Yet these statements, some of which can be traced back to eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, are made with the assumption that the church is Christ’s bride and he has no other bride, whether spiritual or terrestrial. This is admittedly a suggestion from silence, but—given the consistent metaphorical references to the bride of Christ in early Christian documents—this silence regarding any earthly marriage is significant.

:: Why the Singleness of Jesus Makes the Most Sense ::

Several years ago, The Da Vinci Codebreaker—a book I cowrote with my friend Jim Garlow—hit the bestseller lists about the same time that Sony Pictures released the movie The Da Vinci Code. As a result, dozens of television and radio stations interviewed one or both of us in the space of a few weeks. At some point during that flurry of interviews, one interviewer asked me, “Why are you so against the idea that Jesus was married?”

“I’m not,” I replied after a second or two of reflection. “If I woke up tomorrow morning and saw that archaeologists had exhumed incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was married, it wouldn’t destroy my faith. Jesus would still be the crucified and risen Lord. But, as I examine the historical evidence, I find absolutely no substantial evidence to suggest that Jesus was married. And I find even less evidence of some sort of church-wide cover-up. I’m not against the idea that Jesus was married. What I’m against is the weak historical basis of such a supposition.”

The idea of a married Messiah wasn’t rejected among the earliest Christians because such a revelation would cause the Christian faith to fall apart—it might cause theologians to rethink the way they frame some doctrines, but no essential belief in the Christian faith hinges on the singleness of Jesus. A married Jesus wasn’t rejected because early Christians wanted to degrade the gift of sexuality—with few exceptions, they didn’t. The marriage of Jesus didn’t become part of the church’s story of Jesus for a single reason: In all the eyewitness testimonies to the life of Jesus and later reflections on his life, no reliable proof exists for such a marriage. The announcement of a so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” has done nothing to change that fact.
________

For further reflections on Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, see here and here.

Today, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Larry Weidman on the program “Matter At Hand” on WGRC near South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Larry and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith. Please pray for me, that the gospel will be multiplied and Jesus will be magnified in everything that is said.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Larry and I will be discussing.

September 17, 2012

So what were the factors that prevented these parents from having the time for intentional spiritual formation in their households?

For a significant minority of parents, it was children’s sports and school activities that trumped time together as a family when it came to scheduling priorities. Nearly one-third of parents agreed that they were willing “to do whatever it takes” for their children to succeed in certain sports or school activities.

And what if the resulting schedule was so hectic that it prevented the family from eating even a single meal together during the week?

As long as the payoff at the end included academic or athletic successes for their child, these parents stated that they were willing to pay the price.

:: More Than a Gift for This Life ::

This pattern suggests that a significant number of parents in our ministries have allowed their priorities to be shaped by the dominant culture—a culture wherein the primary goal of parenting is to produce children who become happy, well-paid adults. Parents perceive accomplishments in sports and schooling as their children’s pathway to present popularity and future financial success. As a result, athletics and academics define these parents’ designs for their children’s lives.

These fathers and mothers see their children as gifts to be treasured—and this is good. In God’s design, children are a blessing and a gift (Gen. 1:28; Ps. 127:3–5). And yet, seen in light of the whole story of God, children are far more than a gift for this life.

If children were nothing more than a gift for this life, a single-minded focus on children’s happiness and success might make sense. As long as the family’s frenetic schedule secures a spot for the child in a top-tier university, forfeiting intentional spiritual formation for the sake of competitive sports leagues and advanced-placement classes would be understandable—if children were a gift for this life only. Perhaps working round-the-clock would be plausible provided that your children’s friends are visibly impressed with the house you can barely afford. If children were a gift for this life only, maybe it would make sense to raise children with calendars that are full but souls that are empty, captives of the deadly delusion that their value depends on what they accomplish here and now.

But children are far more than a gift for this life.

Children are bearers of the gospel to generations yet unborn. In God’s good design, your children and mine will raise children who will in turn beget more children. How we mold our children’s souls while they reside in our households will shape the lives of children who have yet to draw their first gasp of air (Ps. 78:6–7).

Your children and mine are also eternal beings whose days will long outlast the rise and fall of all the kingdoms of the earth. They and their children and their children’s children will flit ever so briefly across the face of this earth before being swept away into eternity (James 4:14). If our children become our brothers and sisters in Christ, their days upon this earth are preparatory for glory that will never end (Dan. 12:3; 2 Cor. 4:17—5:4; 2 Pet. 1:10–11). That’s why our primary purpose for these children must not be anything as mean and miserable as success. Our purpose should be—as Richard Ross has been saying for years—to leverage our children’s lives to advance God’s kingdom so that every tribe, every nation, and every people-group gains the opportunity to respond in faith to the rightful King of kings.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the world world and to lose his soul?” Jesus asked his first followers (Mark 8:36).

When it comes to our children, we might ask a similar question: What does it profit your child to gain a baseball scholarship and yet never experience consistent prayer and devotional times with his parents? What will it profit my child to succeed as a ballet dancer and yet never know the rhythms of a home where we are willing to release any dream at any moment if we become too busy to disciple one another? What will it profit the children all around us in our churches to be accepted into the finest colleges and yet never leverage their lives for the sake of proclaiming the gospel to the nations? What will it profit pastors to lead the largest churches with the greatest discipleship programs if they don’t disciple their own households?

There is no profit in such endeavors—no real or lasting profit, anyway—but the costs are painful, infinite, and eternal.

:: How Success Becomes an Idol ::

In the beginning, God infused humanity with a yearning for eternity (Ecc. 3:11). If the scope of our vision for our lives or our children’s lives shrinks any smaller than eternity, our thirst for the infinite will drive us to try to fill the emptiness with a multitude of lesser goals and lower gods—including the fleeting happiness and success of our children. When happiness and success become the controlling framework for life, parents expect their children to have, to do, and to be more than anyone else, and they are willing to sacrifice family relationships and discipleship to achieve this objective. The result is—in the words of Walt Mueller—“a culture of childhood royalty” that treats children like princes and princesses instead of potential or actual brothers and sisters in Christ.

I am not suggesting that successes in academics or athletics or vocation somehow stand outside God’s good plan. Learning and play are joys that God himself wove into the very fabric of creation. Although cursed in the fall, work was also part of God’s good design before the fall (Gen. 2:15; 3:17–23).

And yet, whenever any activity—however good it may be—becomes amplified to the point that no time remains for family members to disciple one another, a divinely-designed joy has been distorted into a hell-spawned idol. God calls us—just as he called our father Abraham—to be willing to release every longing for our child’s pleasure and success for the sake of obedience to God’s Word (Gen. 22:2–18). In this, what God asks of us is no less than what he himself has already done in Jesus Christ: “He . . . did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32).

:: Doing Less So That Parents Can Do More ::

Of course, most parents in churches typically do believe, at least on the surface, that their children’s existence will persist past this life. The problem is that this tenet of faith doesn’t always make its way into their daily practices of prioritizing household commitments. Parents mentally accept the fact that their children will exist forever, but they do not live in light of this truth. When this truth works its way into daily life, parents begin to weigh their family’s priorities and schedules in light of the gospel. Until that happens and until the gospel drives even our scheduling priorities, families will continue to default to the values of the culture around them, and parents will remain too busy to engage in intentional discipleship with their children.

So how can your ministry help parents rethink their family’s priorities in light of the gospel?

A critical look at your own ministry calendar is probably the best place to start.

The cluttered family calendars that hang from refrigerator doors in members’ homes mimic patterns that are modeled each week in the church bulletin. Both tend to be excessively busy—and sometimes because of a similar fixation on visible success. Parents seek success for their children in the form of higher S.A.T. scores or athletic victories; church leaders add more activities to make members happier and to improve the numbers on their annual church profiles. The idolatry is the same; only the paperwork is different.

When ministry calendars become too crowded, weekly Bible studies and committee meetings and youth groups compete with seasonal activities and monthly events. Eventually, families become so busy doing church that no time remains for them to be the church in their homes and communities. If your church is planning for parents to disciple children, your ministry may need to do less so that parents have time to do more. After all, if active church members invest half their evenings each week (or more) enabling their church’s addiction to programs, where will they find the time to form the spiritual lives of their children? And when will they mentor children whose parents aren’t yet believers?

Not only parents but also church ministries must be challenged to reevaluate every time commitment in light of God’s plan for the homes of his people. Once a vision for equipping families works its way through every part of your congregation, family ministry is likely to require a shift that may be a bit uncomfortable if your congregation is convinced that growth occurs only through programs on the church campus. This shift entails doing less so that parents can do more—streamlining, combining, and even cutting activities so that families become free to join God’s mission in their households and communities.

If you’re working toward a bachelor’s or master’s degree, you can earn course credit while taking the trip of a lifetime with some of the top scholars in the world. And, if you happen to be in a degree program that requires on-campus hours, these expeditions count as face-to-face course credit—because you won’t get much more face-to-face with a professor than you will when you spend an entire trip with him!

The times and locations for this year’s Southern Seminary Expeditions?

* New Year’s 2013 in Israel, studying New Testament and history with Tom Schreiner and Greg Wills.

* The March for Life on the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade in Washington, D.C., looking at ethics and political science with Russell Moore.

* Spring in New England in May 2013, learning the history of American Christianity with Greg Wills, Owen Strachan, and Michael A.G. Haykin.

* Summer in the United Kingdom in July 2013, studying history, apologetics, and family ministry with Michael A.G. Haykin, Dan DeWitt, Joe Crider, and me.

Sound good?

To learn more, go to Southern Seminary Events and look for Southern Seminary Expeditions.

Accused by a member of Parliament of always repeating “the same old story,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once retorted, “Of course, it’s the same old story! Truth usually is the same old story.” Whatever one may think of Margaret Thatcher’s politics, her words carry with them a reminder that can transform the lives of the families in our churches.

Believers in Jesus Christ are, after all, people who live every moment of life in “the same old story” of God’s work in human history. It is through this story that God forms, transforms, and reforms every part of our lives—including our family lives.

At the center of this same old story stands a singular act: In Jesus Christ, God personally intersected human history and redeemed a particular portion of humanity at a particular time in a particular place. Yet this central act of redemption does not stand alone. It is bordered by God’s good creation and humanity’s fall into sin on the one hand and by the consummation of God’s kingdom on the other. This is the story that Christians have repeated to one another and to the world ever since Jesus vanished through the eastern sky, leaving his first followers gap-mouthed on a hill outside Jerusalem (Acts 1:9–12).

So what does this story have to do with the families in your church?

Everything!

If the story line of creation, fall, redemption and consummation fails to frame every aspect of our lives—including our family lives—we are prone, like the Israelites of old, to chase after other story lines and, ultimately, after other gods.

Unfortunately, in many churches, the story line that’s driven ministry to families has not been creation, fall, redemption, and consummation.Instead, the motivating narrative for family ministry has been a desire to gain numbers for the church or perhaps a longing to turn children into successful and mostly moral adults. Family ministry rooted in such transient whims will never have a lasting impact. Lasting impact must find its foundation in a far richer and deeper plot line: the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. It’s in this divine story line that we glimpse the truth about who children are, who parents are, and how they should relate to one another. With that in mind, let’s take a close look at how God can work through this same old story to transform the lives of families.

:: Cosmos Shaped by a Word, Paradise Shattered by a Choice ::

The plot is a familiar one—a creation filled with goodness, a serpent filled with lies, a woman gazing at forbidden fruit, the man silent by her side. A choice was made, a hand extended, and suddenly all that had been so good was contorted into sin, sorrow, and death. No one on earth today has ever stood in the spot where our primeval parents took their first taste of cosmic treason. Yet our souls still bear the scars of that ancient exile from Eden.

There is both good news and bad news for families in these primal acts in God’s story line. The good news is that families and children are not byproducts of humanity’s sin. The divine design for marriage and parenthood preceded the fall (Gen 1:28). Even now, by raising children, men and women exercise divinely ordained dominion over God’s creation. This is pleasing to God (Gen 1:26–28; 8:17; 9:1–7; Ps 127:3–5; Mark 10:5–9). Parents provide for their families and nurture their offspring. This too is part of God’s good plan (Matt 7:11; 1 Tim 5:8). Parents train their children to avoid what is evil. Appropriate discipline is also godly and good (Prov 13:24; 19:18; 29:17; Heb 12:5–9).

But there is bad news for families as well: Because of the extent of humanity’s fall, meeting children’s needs and bettering children’s behaviors will never be enough. At best, parental patterns of provision and discipline prepare children to know the kindness of a heavenly Father, to sense the depth of their own sin, and to recognize their need for the gospel. At worst, these patterns train children to be satisfied with regulating outward actions and with pursuing gains that cannot persist past the end of time.

:: Redemption Accomplished, Consummation Guaranteed ::

Viewed from the vantage of creation and fall, children are gifts to be treasured and sinners to be trained. And yet, no amount of training can ever raise a child to the level of God’s perfect standard. Every order of creation, including parenthood, has been subjected to frustration with the gap between the glory of God’s creation and the fact of humanity’s fallenness (Rom. 8:20–22). And so, as Jesus dangled from the splintered beam of a Roman cross on that fateful afternoon, God himself bridged the gap between his perfection and humanity’s imperfection (2 Cor. 5:21). The death of Jesus brought about redemption in the present; his resurrection guaranteed the consummation of God’s kingdom in the future.

:: Remembering Who Your Children Really Are ::

This truth introduces a radical new dimension to family life. To embrace God’s redemption is to be adopted as God’s heir, gaining a new identity that transcends every earthly status (Rom 8:15–17; Gal 3:28–29; 4:3–7; Eph 1:5; 2:13–22). What this means for followers of Jesus is that our children are far more than our children; they are also potential or actual brothers and sisters in the body of the Messiah.

Husbands and wives, parents and children, women and men, orphans and widows, the plumber’s apprentice and the president of the multinational corporation, the addict struggling in recovery and the teetotalling grandmother in the front pew—all of us who are in Christ are brothers and sisters, “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17; see also Gal 4:7; Heb 2:11; Jas 2:5; 1 Pet 3:7).

Seen from this perspective, my relationship with my children takes on a very different meaning. These daughters whom I adore will remain my children for this life only. I am the father of Hannah and Skylar until death, but—seeing and rejoicing that God has opened their hearts to the gospel—I will remain their brother for all eternity. Put another way, if your children stand beside you in the glories of heaven, they will not stand beside you as your children (Luke 20:34–48) but as your blood-redeemed brothers and sisters, fellow heirs of God’s kingdom. Remember the words of Jesus? “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt 12:50). Paul echoed this perspective when he directed Timothy to encourage “younger men as brothers” and “younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Tim 5:1–2).

Does this mean that once a child becomes a brother or sister in Christ, the relationship of parents to children somehow passes away? Of course not! The gospel doesn’t cancel roles that are rooted in God’s creation. Jesus and Paul freely appealed to the order of God’s creation as a guide for Christian community (Matt. 19:4–6; Mark 10:5–9; Acts 17:24–26; 1 Cor. 11:8–9; 1 Tim. 2:13–15). Paul called children in the redeemed community to respect their parents (Eph. 6:1; Col. 3:20; 1 Tim. 5:4). Meaningful labor was present before the fall and persisted in God’s plan even after the fall (Gen. 2:1–15; 2 Thess. 3:6–12). Far from negating the order of God’s creation, the gospel adds a deeper and richer dimension to the patterns in the first act of God’s story.

:: Glimpsing a Dimension Deeper Than Creation and Fall ::

What does this truth mean for the day-to-day lives of parents in our churches? As a parent, I am responsible to provide for daughters and to prepare them for life; as an elder brother, I am called to lay down my life for them (1 John 3:16). As a parent, I help Hannah and Skylar to see their own sin; as their brother, I am willing to confess my sin (Jas 5:16). As a parent, I speak truth into their lives; as a brother, I speak the truth patiently, ever seeking the peace of Christ (Jas 4:11; 5:7–9; Matt 5:22–25; 1 Cor 1:10). As a parent, I discipline my daughters to consider the consequences of poor choices; as a brother, I disciple, instruct, and encourage them to pursue what is pure and good (Rom 15:14; 1 Tim 5:1–2). As a parent, I help these two girls recognize the right path; as a brother, I pray for them and seek to restore them when they veer onto the wrong path (Matt 18:21–22; Gal 6:1; Jas 5:19–20; 1 John 5:16).

Because I fully expected that Hannah would one day embrace the gospel, I began developing the habits of a brother long before our first conversation about what it means to follow Jesus. Because I see that Skylar is moving toward becoming a follower of Jesus, I do the same with her here and now. I did all of this imperfectly; I still do. I fall far short of living as a parent, spouse, and fellow heir within my family—and so will you. The central point is not that you or the members of your church will perform these deeds perfectly. It is, instead, that family members embrace the gospel more fully and begin to view one another in a renewed way, as brothers and sisters participating together in the “grace of life” (1 Pet 3:7).

Children are wonderful gifts from God—but they are far more than that. Viewed from an eternal perspective, every child in a household is also a potential or actual brother or sister in Christ. Until we learn to see our children from the perspective of “the same old story,” we fail to see who our children really are.

You can win a free Christian History Made Easy DVD Complete Kit, a $129.00 retail value! Simply leave a thoughtful and helpful comment anywhere on my blog before September 21, 2012. (Be certain to list an email address that you check frequently!) The more comments you make, the more likely you will be to win. One participant will win DVD Complete Kit, including:

* Leader pack, including the DVD with twelve 30-minute video sessions and PDF files for promotional posters, fliers, handouts, bulletin inserts, and banners for you to print.

* One printed leader guide and PDF of the leader guide.

* One printed participant guide with session outlines, discussion questions, definitions, and time lines.

* One copy of the award-winning Christian History Made Easy book. This full-color, 224-page book tells additional stories that shaped Christian history.

* One CD-ROM containing the lavishly illustrated Christian History Made Easy PowerPoint presentation to give the leader optional material such as additional images and information to go deeper into the study of church history.

Today, at 10:45 a.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Steve Davis on the program “Christianity in a Changing Culture” on WCTS in the Twin Cities. Steve and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith. Please pray for me, that the gospel will be multiplied and Jesus will be magnified in everything that is said.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Steve and I will be discussing.

September 6, 2012

I heard clapping in the worship center and breathed a sigh of relief. I was waiting in the senior pastor’s office for the final tally of ballots, and the applause suggested the vote had gone positively.

After six years as a pastor of a small rural church, perhaps my life had grown too predictable. For reasons that weren’t readily apparent at the time, God was moving me from the pastorate to youth ministry. It wasn’t quite the move that I had anticipated as I completed degrees in biblical studies and ministry, theology and divinity—but it was, without any doubt, God’s direction.

A few months later, I found myself waiting for the results of a vote in this mid-sized exurban congregation. When I heard the applause, I rightly assumed that the position was now mine. My predecessor in this position had attracted sixty or more students each Wednesday evening and more than one hundred students each year for camp. Attendance on Wednesday nights had dropped into the twenties after the previous minister’s departure—but everyone in the congregation seemed certain that as soon as they called a new youth minister, the numbers would race back to their previous peak and beyond.

When I walked out of the office, a host of smiling church members greeted me; a decade removed from that moment, I can recall the words of only one well-wisher. The reason I remember his words is because they came back to haunt me many times in the months that followed. The words came from an older man known as Buck who walked with a limp and spoke with a smile.

“So glad to have you here, Brother Timothy,” he said as he gripped my hand. “I know, with that guitar of yours, you’re going to keep these youth here in our church—and bring in a lot more too. They’re the church of the future, you know.” With that, he hobbled down the long hallway, shaking hands with everyone he met.

Buck was one of the most godly and faithful men in that congregation. To this day, I still cherish Buck’s contributions to the church and to my ministry. And yet, in that moment, Buck was wrong. He had, with the best of intentions, bought into a vision for youth ministry that has driven untold numbers of student ministers to the brink of burnout and beyond. This false vision runs something like this: The purpose of student ministry is to gain and retain youth by entertaining them until the time comes for them to serve the church as an adult.

When that false vision becomes the focus, the standard for success becomes attendance and retention, and the central agenda becomes finding the right ministers and methods to attract the highest numbers. The result of such a focus tends to be a frenetic and unsustainable search for the latest hints and methods from the fastest-growing ministries. Driven by this false standard for success, ministers become the ecclesial equivalents of the philosophers of Athens who were known to search incessantly for “something new” (Acts 17:21).

I must admit, however, that Buck’s words felt good to me at that particular moment: I and my trusty six-string were like a congregational life insurance policy that would retain a rising generation of youth for the church’s future.

I quickly discovered that a loud guitar and a hunger for numbers simply weren’t enough.

:: Chasing the Wrong Goal ::

On my first Wednesday evening, I received my first hint that this task might be more difficult than I’d imagined. After a couple of games, I gathered the students for some high-energy worship songs, followed by a few slower choruses. At the end of the musical set, I leaned my guitar against an amplifier, lifted my Bible over my head, and asked, “Okay, how many of you brought your Bibles?”

At first, no one responded.

And that’s when he said it.

He was a senior in high school and five-year veteran of this particular youth group.

“This is youth group—we don’t do Bibles here,” he said. “We’re here to have fun.”

Over the next few weeks, I persisted in my focus, and I discovered that this senior wasn’t alone in his motivations for attending youth events. Numbers plunged into the low double digits. Parents complained to the pastor that their children weren’t having enough fun. Church members—unaware that the previous minister’s weekly youth group had frequently consisted of an hour of games and horseplay with a devotional tacked at the end—wondered why youth attendance on Wednesdays hadn’t spiraled into the seventies and beyond.

I spent most of that first year torn between the conflicting expectations of the pastor, parents, students, and my own conscience. The pastor wanted greater numbers of youth and peace with the parents of these youth. The youth wanted a constant string of entertaining events. The parents wanted entertaining events too—but they also expected these activities, in some inexplicable way, to result in their students’ spiritual growth. From the perspective of some parents, I was the person that the church had hired for the tasks of discipling and entertaining their children.

What I did not recognize at the time was that the primary problem was not the students’ desire to be entertained—that was merely a symptom. The problem was a model of ministry that I was embracing even as I tried to move the ministry in a discipleship-focused direction. This ministry model positions a professional minister at the center of the ministry and makes gaining and retaining students the goal. In the case of student ministry, it turns youth group into a holding pattern for the church’s future instead of calling students to live as servants of the gospel in their community of faith here and now.

But what if this ministry model is flawed at the very core?

What if gaining and retaining numbers isn’t the right goal in the first place?

And what if the center of the ministry isn’t supposed to be the efforts of a pastor or professional minister?

:: Why Not Focus on Retention? ::

Sometimes, when a ministry makes much of Jesus and the gospel, the results do include numeric gains or stellar retention rates. Seven weeks after Jesus erupted alive from a garden tomb, three thousand women and men confessed Jesus as the risen Lord, and the congregation still kept growing (Acts 2:41–47). Before long, well over five thousand names could be found on the church rolls (Acts 4:4). Even after two church members dropped dead while trying to bamboozle the apostle Peter, new believers still swarmed into the community (Acts 5:1–14). The earliest Christians rightly thanked God and recognized this growth as a glorious and wonderful outpouring of God’s grace (Acts 2:47). And yet, gospel-centered proclamation of Jesus Christ doesn’t always result in visible growth.

Sometimes, it’s possible to make much of Jesus with negligible results, at least as far as any human eye can see. The same Word of God that yields manifold fruit in one heart may be rejected as repulsive in another (Luke 8:4–18). The results of proclaiming God’s truth could even include outcomes that seem negative from the perspective of retention rates (1 John 2:19). Furthermore, it is possible to attract and even to retain a multitude of followers for all the wrong reasons (2 Peter 2:1–2).

Yes, growth is part of God’s good design for his cosmos (Genesis 1:11–12; 2:9) and for his church (1 Corinthians 3:6–7; Ephesians 2:21; 4:15–16; Colossians 2:18–19; 2 Thessalonians 1:3). And yes, the proclamation of God’s Word does result in growth and in the fulfillment of God’s purposes (Isaiah 55:10–11), but this growth may take place in ways that are difficult to quantify in ratios of attrition and retention. Growth often unfolds less like a series of figures on a ledger sheet and more like seeds sprouting in the soil or like yeast seeping through a lump of dough (Luke 13:18–21). Godly growth is sometimes slow, often hidden, and frequently frustrates our dreams and designs. But it is always centered on Jesus and the gospel.

:: The Impact of Gospel-Motivated Ministry ::

All of this has profound implications for why and how a church ministers to families. If the congregation’s motive for forming a family ministry is to find a programmatic panacea to solve a perceived problem of losing young adults, the strategy will have failed before family ministry even begins—even if every church member applauds the new program as a resounding success. Such a congregation has bought into the soul-draining delusion that growth depends not on the Word of God but on implementing the right programs to respond to each problem.

This sort of family ministry results, at first, in a rapid flurry of family-friendly activities. Then, as soon as new problems and new programs come along, the family events fade into the background as the newest quick-fix takes center stage. Such patterns reflect much of the pragmatic consumerism of Western culture and little of gospel-centered community. According to the apostle Paul, the pagans of past cultures “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (Romans 1:23). In our own way, we too trade the glory of God for the short-lived pleasures of lesser gods. Whereas the pagans exchanged divine glory for images of terrestrial beauty, we tend to substitute one more curriculum, one more series of steps to success, one more problem-solving program that eclipses the gospel.

Gospel-motivated family ministry is not a program to fix a congregation’s retention problems. It cannot be reduced to a series of conferences or activities or seminars. The kind of family ministry is a movement that equips Christian households to function as outposts of God’s kingdom mission in the world. Families become contexts where Christian community is consistently practiced with the goal of sharing the good news of God’s victory far beyond our families. The gospel is rehearsed in families and reinforced at church so that God’s truth can be revealed to the world.
________

For more on gospel-motivated family ministry, try this resource.

Today, at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Gino Geraci on Crosswalk from KRKS in Denver, Colorado. Gino and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Gino and I will be discussing.

Click here to listen.

September 4, 2012

“So, tell me,” I ask, “why do you want to transition your church toward family ministry?”

“Well,” the pastor begins “nine out of every ten kids are dropping out of church after they graduate, aren’t they? Evidently, what we’re doing right now isn’t working.”

“Mm-hmm,” the children’s director agrees. “Eighty-eight percent is what they said at the conference a few weeks ago. We just want to do so much better than that.”

“Is your church actually losing that many?” I ask.

Both of them look at each other before shrugging.

“I—I don’t really know,” the pastor replies. “I mean, most of them, we don’t see after they graduate. Sometimes that’s because they’re involved in another church or they’ve plugged into a college fellowship, I guess. Sometimes they move away. I don’t think the church has ever actually done a survey or anything like that. It just seems to me that a lot of them do drop out.”

The children’s director nods and continues, “What we thought is that, if we had some programs to teach parents how to grow their kids spiritually, we could stop the dropouts before they happen.”

“I want to help your church,” I say to them. “And I will do everything that I can to help you. But first, I’m going to ask you to rethink your reasons for considering these changes. The problem that you think is the problem is probably not the problem at all.”

:: The Infamous Evangelical Dropout Rate ::

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had conversations of this sort with hundreds of church leaders. The denominations have differed, the locations have spanned the globe, and the churches themselves have ranged from minute rural chapels to suburban mega-churches. Yet the script inevitably runs something like this: Eighty percent, maybe even ninety percent, of students are dropping out of church after high school! Can you help us launch a family ministry program to fix this problem?

In these statements, ministers and church members are simply aping the conventional wisdom that they’ve heard at conferences and read in Christian books. According to these widely-proclaimed assumptions, one of the most pressing ministry problems is the high percentage of students whose church involvement can’t seem to persist more than a year past the pomp and circumstance of their high school processionals. A recent Internet search revealed nearly a quarter-million references to the infamous evangelical dropout statistic.

This shocking dropout statistic represents a starting point for all sorts of demands for modifications in ministry practices—including the launch of family ministry programs. The logic throughout most of these references runs something like this: The standard for youth ministry effectiveness is retention of students beyond high school, and an overwhelming percentage of students are dropping out after high school. Therefore, current strategies for youth and children’s ministries are clearly not successful. If only churches could come up with more effective ministry practices, they could fix the dropout rate and become more effective.

One author, in a self-proclaimed manifesto for the future of youth ministry, puts it this way:

Kids are dropping out of church after youth group at staggering rates. . . . There are flaws in many of our assumptions and methods. . . . While our thinking was correct—for its time—the world of teenagers has changed. . . . When you’re in a poor, rural country and see a horse-drawn wagon rolling down a dirt road, you think nothing of it. . . . But when you’re driving through Pennsylvania Dutch country and see a horse-drawn buggy rolling down a nice, paved road and holding up traffic, it seems as though something doesn’t fit. . . . Youth ministry today is the latter horse-drawn buggy.

In other words, the dropout rate demonstrates a flaw in our present practices, and our present practices are flawed because we haven’t kept up with the times. If only we can come up with ministry methods that fit more effectively within the culture, we can fix the dropout rate—until, of course, the cultural gales gust in some other direction, and the latest trend turns into one more horse-drawn buggy.

As I have consulted with these congregations, here’s what I have found in many churches: Congregational leaders see family ministry as a quick counterbalance for dropout numbers that they’ve heard at a conference. They perceive partnering with parents as a fix for the problem of a faith that can’t seem to last past the freshman year of college.

:: Is the Sky Really Falling? ::

Perhaps you’ve read about the crisis too. Maybe you heard a speaker mention the dropout statistic at a recent conference. Perhaps that’s even why you are reading this post: You’re convinced that better partnerships between your ministry and the parents might provide the perfect solution to dismal retention rates. If so, I want to make a suggestion that may seem a bit radical at first: The dropout rate is not a sufficient reason to reorient your ministry practices.

Allow me to unpack why I’m making such a claim: First, it’s uncertain whether the rate of attrition that looms so large in our ecclesial anxiety closet even exists. And furthermore, even if a high dropout rate does exist, attrition rates represent an inadequate means for assessing ministry failure or success. To understand what I’m suggesting, let’s first take a closer look at the numbers behind the infamous evangelical dropout statistic.

:: Gut Feelings Aren’t Good Statistics ::

In the first place, when did conference speakers first begin to claim that the vast majority of youth were exiting the church before their sophomore year of college? And was their research reliable?

The first references to the dropout statistic come from the late 1990s. That’s when a well-meaning speaker reported a post-youth group attrition rate of 90 percent.

And how did he obtain this number?

The speaker’s information was based on the “gut feelings” that he gathered and averaged from a roomful of youth ministers.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with asking a few people how they feel about an issue. Yet the communal hunch of a single group rarely results in a reliable statistic. In this case, an informal averaging of personal recollections resulted in a wildly overstated percentage that received tremendous publicity. As a result, over the past couple of decades, many youth ministries have leaped from one bandwagon to another, driven by the unsubstantiated estimates of a few youth pastors. Another popular percentage—88 percent—has been traced back to the estimates of two youth ministry experts, based on their own experiences.

So, why do the dropout percentages represent an insufficient reason to reorient your ministry toward an emphasis on family ministry? In the first place, it’s because many of these dropout numbers—particularly the nine-out-of-ten ratio—have little basis in fact. This infamous evangelical attrition rate does not rightly describe the present reality, and it probably never described any past reality.

Later claims escalated the hysteria. A popular book published in 1997 claimed that only four percent of young people surveyed at that time were born-again Christians. As a result, the author claimed, “According to present trends, we are about to lose eternally the second largest generation.” Never mind that the survey spanned only three states and included information from a mere 211 youth (to be fair, at least this author did admit his methodology); later leaders trumpeted this supposed trend as a harbinger of impending doom unless churches changed their ministry methods.

Throughout the early twenty-first century, news of dismal retention and evangelism rates among young adults continued to spread until nearly every youth and children’s minister heard how his or her ministry was destined to fail. And yet, very few of these claims were true. Even the handful of claims that were true were often misconstrued by the time they reached the pews.

So how many church-involved students actually do drop out in the months following their graduation ceremonies? The answer to this question depends largely on how you define church involvement. When involvement in a faith-community is defined as attendance in the past seven days, the young adult dropout rate is around 38 percent. When church involvement is defined as two months of attendance at any time during the teenage years, about 61 percent of young adults disengage from church after high school. When a research sample mixes frequent attendees with twice-a-month attendees, the dropout rate rises to 70 percent.

To be sure, even the moderated attrition patterns that I have reported here are not a cause for celebration. Yet the real dropout numbers vary widely, and they are affected by a range of factors that’s far broader than family ministry. This much seems clear, though: The real numbers are far removed from the spurious statistics that have been spouted from the platforms of far too many ministry conferences.

:: How Bad News Became Big News ::

It’s easy to point accusing fingers at the sources behind these statistics—but the problem isn’t really the numbers themselves. These numbers arose from well-intended attempts to assess the effectiveness of church ministries. In some cases, even though the statistics were misapplied, the people who first promoted the numbers honestly reported their sources and methods.

The more problematic question is, “Why were we so willing to wallow in the worst possibilities, even when those possibilities were not well-founded?”

It’s partly because bad news quickly becomes big news. There’s something in our fallen nature that relishes the discovery of a hidden crisis. Once we think we’ve discovered a crisis, we rarely keep the news to ourselves. Bad news gets repeated and, with each retelling, it tends to get stretched a bit as well. That’s why God warned his people in the Old Testament, “Do not go about spreading slander” (Leviticus 19:16). God knows our human tendency to turn bad news into big news and then to exaggerate that news so it seems even bigger. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Rodney Stark and Byron Johnson provided a clear example of this phenomenon: “The national news media yawned over the Baylor Survey’s findings that the number of American atheists has remained steady at 4% since 1944, and that church membership has reached an all-time high. But when a study by the Barna Research Group claimed that young people under 30 are deserting the church in droves, it made headlines and newscasts across the nation.” Well-researched good news was ignored while the bad news quickly became a feature in major newspapers throughout North America.

The tendency to turn bad news into big news does not, however, completely explain how rapidly these numbers spread through evangelical churches. I suggest there was another reason as well: Ever since the 1950s, a fun-and-games approach had dominated many youth ministries. In the 1990s, a new generation of youth ministers was emerging. For these ministers, youth ministry was not a stepping-stone to something greater. These men and women were theologically-trained leaders who had responded to a divine calling to disciple youth. This rising tide of leaders found themselves frustrated with the assumption that still persisted in many churches—an assumption that a youth minister’s role was primarily to retain adolescents by entertaining them. The news that youth ministry had failed to keep students connected to the church resonated with these young leaders’ existing feelings of frustration. And so, news of a nine-out-of-ten dropout rate became a fixture in nearly every discussion of youth ministry.

In the end, this widespread frustration in the field of youth ministry did yield a few positive results. Among many youth ministers, frustration fueled the development of ministry strategies that were healthier than the fun-and-games approaches they had inherited. The results included family ministry models and approaches to youth ministry that emphasized discipleship, community, and the cultivation of intergenerational relationships.

:: Why Jesus Wasn’t Worried About Retention Rates ::

The infamous nine-out-of-ten dropout statistic was a false alarm. Most likely, your congregation loses far fewer than that, and about half of the dropouts return within a few years.

But let’s suppose for just a moment that your ministry actually does have an abysmal attrition rate.

What if your church really is losing nine out of ten attendees when they graduate from high school? Should retention become one of your primary goals?

Here’s another way of asking the same question: Is ongoing church involvement really the truest metric of a ministry’s success?

During his days on the dusty roads of Judea and Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth seemed to have been notoriously unconcerned about retention and attrition rates. At one point, “a large crowd” of well over five thousand was so wild about Jesus that they pursued him all around the Sea of Galilee (John 6:1-25). In contemporary terms, Jesus was well on his way to leading a mega church. Then, after one particular teaching session, the numbers of paparazzi took a nosedive from several thousand to a single dozen—an attrition rate of well over ninety-nine percent!

And what did Jesus say to the handful who remained?

“Okay, guys, what can I do to improve my retention rates? If I don’t come up with a new ministry model, my Father will be so displeased with me! Let’s brainstorm a bit to figure this out.”

Not even close.

“Do you want to go away as well?” was what Jesus asked as thousands of former followers filed away; then he added, “Did I not choose you, the Twelve? And yet one of you is a devil” (John 6:67, 70). A couple of years later, one Passover eve in the Garden of Gethsemane, even the dodgy dozen deserted their Lord, and the divine dropout rate veered toward one hundred percent (Mark 14:50–52; John 16:32).

At this rate, Jesus would likely have failed as a student minister. Yet, in all of this, the service of God the Son infinitely and perfectly pleased God the Father. Jesus remained the beloved one in whom the Father was well pleased (Mark 1:11; John 10:17). Even in the moments when his closest companions abandoned and denied him—in some sense, especially in those moments when “he was despised and rejected by men”—Jesus was fully fulfilling his Father’s will (Isaiah 53:3-11). It was our sin that spiked Jesus to the cross, not his attrition rates.

So what’s the problem with allowing retention rates to become the central focus in a ministry model? Simply this: It turns the visible growth and maintenance of a local congregation into the primary focus instead of Jesus and the gospel. When retention rates determine how we envision a church’s future, we have made too much of our own visions and dreams for the community of faith and too little of the One in whom we place our faith. Ministry leaders become visionary idealists seeking numeric gains rather than shepherds seeking to join in God’s mission and to equip God’s flock. In the process, we lose sight of the true vitality and value of the very community that we were planning to preserve.

Please don’t misread my point: The local, gathered community of faith is important. Jesus loves the church, and he gave his life to “present the church to himself in splendor” (Ephesians 5:25–27). Whenever anyone drops out of active involvement in Christian community, the congregation is correct to be concerned! Yet neither numeric retention nor expansion should, in themselves, constitute the points of focus for reshaping a church’s practices. Jesus is the paradigm for the growth of God’s people (Philippians 2:5; Hebrews 12:2). The church is the body of Christ, and the church’s value and identity flow from the all-surpassing glory of Jesus (Ephesians 4:12–16; Colossians 1:24–27; 3:1–4). “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this,” German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote. “We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”

The goal of the gospel is not a human ideal of retaining members in a visible community; the goal is to call people to Jesus. And so, the crucial question is not, “How many participants have we retained?” but “Who has glimpsed the truth of Jesus and the gospel in what we are doing?” Retention rates aren’t the launching pad or the endpoint of God’s plan; Jesus is (Revelation 22:13).
________

Portions of this post excerpted from the following sources: Perspectives on Family Ministry, Family Ministry Field Guide, and “Debunking the Dropout Myth.”

Research into this question was initiated by Brandon Shields, when he was a doctoral student in the School of Church Ministries at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Today, at 8:20 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Doug Bursch on Live from Seattle on KGNW. We will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that I will be discussing with Doug.

August 21, 2012

Photograph courtesy of Julie Kerssen

Today, at 4:15 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be on air with Joe Gonzalez on “Mars Hills Today” on Portland-based KPDQ. Joe and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Joe and I will be discussing.

August 1, 2012

Picture above, of what was once PGE Field in Portland, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Today, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Greg Bullen on “Off the Bookshelf” from WMPC in Flint, Michigan. Greg and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Greg and I will be discussing.

August 1, 2012

Picture above from Flint, Michigan, courtesy of Webb Mania

Today, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Charlie and Keith on “Good Morning Ozarks” from KLFC in Branson, Missouri. Charlie and Keith will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith. The Ozarks are the closest I have to a place on this earth that I would call “home,” so I always look forward to talking with Charlie and Keith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that we will be discussing.

July 30, 2012

Today and tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Clark Matthews on Authors’ Corner on KNEO Radio, based in Joplin, Missouri. Clark and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Clark and I will be discussing.

July 25-26, 2012

Earlier, I recorded an interview with Allan Dempsey of WTLN for Perspectives Radio. WTLN is based in one of my family’s favorite locations: Orlando, Florida. Unfortunately for my family’s hopes of making it to Sea World twice in one year, this was a telephone interview. Allan and I discussed why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the faith. The program will air at 6:00 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday, July 22.

Click here on Sunday morning to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Allan and I will be discussing.

One important note about this interview: After the interview, I realized that at one point I said “Marcion” when I meant “Arius.” Both were heretics but their heresies were quite different. I hereby resolve to keep my heretics straighter in the future.

July 19/22, 2012

Today, at 8:20 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Craig Roberts on KFAX San Francisco. We will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that I will be discussing with Craig.

July 18, 2012

Today, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Janet Parshall nationwide on Moody Radio. We will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that I will be discussing with Janet.

July 18, 2012

Today, at 8:00 a.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with Tommy Briggs on WYSA Morning Mayhem in Toledo, Ohio. Tommy and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Tommy and I will be discussing.

July 16, 2012

Today, at 5:15 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be talking with John and Kathy on WORD Radio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that I will be discussing with John and Kathy.

July 10, 2012

Today, at 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, I will be interviewed for the program Update Today with Maxine Sieleman. This program will air tomorrow, Tuesday July 10, at 7:00 a.m. Eastern time, on KPSZ in Des Moines, Iowa. Maxine and I will be discussing why it’s essential for every Christian to know the history of the Christian faith.

Click here for more information.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Maxine and I will be discussing.

July 9, 2012

Today, at 10:15 a.m. Eastern, I will appear on Miami-based Newd Radio, talking with Tiffani Knowles about different perspectives on the end of the world throughout history. Click here to listen.

July 6, 2012

This day would have been my father’s seventy-seventh birthday. One year ago, he celebrated the day of his birth at our dining room table; now, he has been nine months gone. Much emptiness still remains where he once was.

As far back as I can remember, my father’s favorite hymn was “Amazing Grace.” I do not recall this song ever being sung without it drawing tears from his eyes.

I think my father sensed deeply that he, like John Newton, would never have turned to Jesus in his own strength. It was nothing less than the gracious power of God that brought him to faith and kept him in faith.

It seemed fitting to me this day to read anew the original lyrics of “Amazing Grace” as well as the autobiography of John Newton. The autobiography consists of a series of letters collectively titled An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of Reverend J. Newton—clearly reflecting a time when publishers were not looking for pithy phrases to plaster on book covers.

My afternoon foray into the writings of John Newton led me to a couple of particularly noteworthy rediscoveries: a beautiful declaration of confidence in the sufficiency of the gospel, and two stanzas from “Amazing Grace” that have fallen into disuse over the past two centuries.

:: “Suitableness to Answer All My Needs” ::

Reflecting on God’s choice to save him at a time when he was seeking only his own pleasure, John Newton spoke these words of gratitude:

The gospel exhibits “exact suitableness” for “all my needs”; it fits the lock of the deepest needs of the human heart and satisfies them fully and suitably. When it comes to sin, this is the strongest antidote—a recognition that the establishment of God’s kingdom through the sacrificial death and resurrection triumph of Jesus supplies all that my soul truly needs. If I do not sense the full sufficiency of this good news, it is because I have not recognized my soul’s truest, deepest need. This truth stands at the heart of Christ-centered counseling, but Newton knew it well more than two centuries ago.

:: The Unsung Stanzas of “Amazing Grace” ::

The original words of “Amazing Grace” were not wedded to the tune that is so familiar to us today, and the lyric was known as “Faith’s Review and Expectation” (see this post for more about the original context of the hymn).

Another lesser-known fact about the hymn is that a couple of John Newton’s original stanzas have dropped into relative disuse—though one of them has reappeared recently in Chris Tomlin’s reworking of the hymn—while the familiar verse that begins “When we’ve been there ten thousand years…” wasn’t penned by Newton at all.

The unsung stanzas speak clearly of death and of the dissolution of this present earth. Perhaps their descent into disuse has something to do with our contemporary discomfort when it comes to discussing these topics:

“Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

“The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.”

In the moments when my father grasped for his final gasps of breath, my mother, my wife, and I sang the better-known verses of “Amazing Grace” to him. We did not sing these last stanzas. We did not need to, I suppose, because moments after we sang the first stanzas, he was living the last ones.

Happy birthday, Dad.

We look forward to that day when we see you again, when the sun will “forbear to shine” because the Light of the World has dawned at last.

Today, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, I will appear on the Detroit-based Bob Dutko Show on WMUZ. Bob and I will be discussing why it’s important for all Christians to know the history of their faith.

Click here to listen.

Click here to find out more about the resources that Bob and I will be discussing.

June 25, 2012

Today, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, I will appear on the Dallas-based Janet Mefferd Show. Janet and I will be talking together about the importance of history for understanding the New Testament.

Click here to listen.

Click here to learn more about the resources that Janet and I will be discussing.

June 22, 2012

I recently wrote an article for D6 Family entitled “It’s Time to Engage!: Three Facts You Need to Know to Launch an Incredible Family Ministry.”

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The animated feature The Incredibles is a favorite movie in our household—and one of our favorite scenes is the family meal early in the film.

Dinner at the Parr household has deteriorated into pandemonium. The infant squeals in delight at the chaos as two siblings engage in super-powered combat. A frazzled mom strains unsuccessfully to restore order.

And what about Bob Parr, father and former “Mr. Incredible”? He stands to the side, physically present, relationally absent, utterly uncertain as to what to do.

Finally, his wife flings a frantic plea in his direction: “Bob! It’s time to engage! Don’t just stand there. Do something!” The problem is, Mr. Incredible has no clue how to engage the situation wisely, and his engagement results in greater chaos.

Then, the doorbell rings.

Suddenly, everyone scrambles for a seat at the table and, by the time the door opens, what the visitor sees is a perfectly placid all-American family.

Many parents in your congregation have been walking in Mr. Incredible’s shoes for a long time.

They have observed their children’s spiritual development from a disengaged distance. They have watched youth and children’s ministers stretch and strain to promote growth.

Now, in a growing movement in churches throughout the world, ministers are suddenly turning to these parents and shouting, “It’s time to engage!” The problem is that many of them don’t know how or why, and part of the reason that they don’t know how is because we as church leaders aren’t quite certain why parents have disengaged in the first place. The result is frustration. The purpose of this article is to take away some of that frustration by helping you to understand three essential facts about families like the ones in your church—facts that a team of researchers worked with me to discover by surveying hundreds of parents in more than a dozen congregations throughout North America.

Read the entire feature here.

To learn more about family ministry models and strategies, start here.

While doing some research related to the writer of the lyrics now know as the hymn “Amazing Grace,” I ran across another set of lyrics that are equally powerful but far less familiar.

First off, a few little-known facts about “Amazing Grace”:

* The original title wasn’t “Amazing Grace” at all but “Faith’s Review and Expectation.”

* The words weren’t joined to the familiar “New Britain” tune until 1835, more than a half-century after John Newton penned the first version of the lyrics.

* John Newton and William Cowper wrote a new lyric almost every week for the church members who gathered weekly for prayer meeting in the village of Olney; “Faith’s Review and Expectation” was one of these hymns, penned as a poetic reflection on 1 Chronicles 17:16-17.

* “Faith’s Review and Expectation” was first published in 1779 in Olney Hymns, six years or so after Newton wrote the original verses for a New Year’s Day prayer meeting.

* Hymn texts in Olney Hymns were arranged according to the biblical passage on which each hymn was based—an arrangement that, in my opinion, it would be helpful to recover.

Now for the forgotten hymn: Immediately prior to “Faith’s Review and Expectation” in the original Olney Hymns, there is a set of lyrics entitled “More With Us Than With Them.” These verses reflect on 2 Kings 6:16. The words of “More With Us Than With Them” have been long since overshadowed by the words that once succeeded them, but I find this text to be just as powerful—particularly the final stanza with its call for intercessory prayer (perhaps even from saints who have gone before us) and its clear appeal to the cross:

“Alas! Elisha’s servant cried,
When he the Syrian army spied.
But he was soon released from care,
In answer to the prophet’s prayer.

“Straightway, he saw with other eyes
A greater army from the skies;
A fiery guard around the hill,
Thus are the saints preserve’d still.

“When Satan and his host appear,
Like him of old, I faint and fear;
Like him, by faith, with joy I see,
A greater host engaged for me.

“The saints espouse my cause by prayer,
The angels make my soul their care.
Mine is the promise sealed with blood!
And Jesus lives to make it good.”

For more on John Newton’s historical context, see my video on William Wilberforce in Session Nine of this series.

(I have updated the original spellings in “More With Us Than With Them.”)

If you are at the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans this week, I would be glad to talk with you about family ministry, apologetics, degrees at Southern Seminary, the relative value of the Star Wars prequels, or pretty much anything else you want to talk about.

I will be around the Southern Seminary booth on Monday, June 18, from 2:00 pm until 5:00 pm, then Tuesday, June 19, from around 6:00 pm until the exhibits close. I would also be delighted to meet with you at any other reasonable hour on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

The best way to set up a time to meet with me is to contact me through Twitter @timothywashere. Or, feel free to email me using my Southern Seminary email address.

I saw something beautiful the other day while walking down Breckenridge Lane. In a front yard not far from my home, a young mother was removing a layer of leftover leaves from the fall in preparation for planting spring flowers—an ordinary activity in the middle of an ordinary day.

What was extraordinary about this scene was what I saw beside this young woman.

A tow-haired boy, perhaps three or four years old, was attempting to assist her. His rake was man-sized, his movements were far from efficient, and he was leaving more leaves than he moved. Yet, as I passed this mother and child, I heard no criticisms. Instead, I heard a constant stream of encouragement: “Daddy will be so proud of your hard work! Can you try to get those leaves over there? You know, honey, it might work better if you turned the rake over.”

If this woman’s sole goal for the afternoon was leaf removal, her best bet would have been to plop her preschooler in front of a television to watch professionally-produced children’s programs that pretend to equip children with skills for life while leaching away their capacity for meaningful relationships. If this mother had chosen this option, she could have pursued the goal of planting spring flowers far more efficiently.

But this woman had a goal that was far bigger than any flower-bed.

This woman understood that her deeper purpose on this day was not to improve a yard but to shape a soul. She was teaching her child the value of work and partnership and family structures, in addition to the quite crucial skill of knowing which side of a rake is supposed to face the ground. She was an amateur, in the best and oldest sense of the word “amateur”: a person who engages in a particular activity because of love. She most likely possessed no transcripted credential in the fields of motherhood or leaf removal. But that was all for the best anyway because no credential could develop in a child what this mother was engraving in her son’s soul that afternoon.

:: Equipping My Brothers and Sisters, the Neglected Role of Church Leaders ::

So what does all of this have to do with church leadership?

Simply this: If you’re a church leader trying to train parents to embrace their role as disciple-makers in their children’s lives, you are likely to wonder at some point, “Wouldn’t it be more efficient for hired professionals to disciple children through church programs instead of expecting parents to participate in this process? No matter how many times I encourage and equip the moms and dads, some of them don’t even seem to be trying! Even the ones that try don’t always do a good job. Why constantly acknowledge the parents as primary disciple-makers when so many of them do it so poorly? This is so inefficient!”

If that’s the way you feel, you’re partly correct! If your goal is organizational efficiency, equipping parents to disciple their children may be an inefficient use of your time, and turning over children’s spiritual lives to professionals at church might make perfect sense.

But efficiency is not the goal of gospel-motivated ministry.

The crucified and risen Lord Jesus determines the shape and establishes the goal for his church, and it has been his Father’s good pleasure to constitute his church as a conglomeration of amateurs, not as a corporation managed by professionals (1 Cor 12:4–31). His Spirit does not give gifts for the purpose of making the church efficient. The Holy Spirit arranges gifts in the body according to his will in order to make his people holy (1 Cor 12:11).

The role of God-called leaders is to encourage and to equip their brothers and sisters in their communities of faith to serve as ministers and missionaries first within their own households, and then far beyond their households (Acts 2:39; Eph 4:11–13). These processes are not likely to be quick or efficient. Sometimes, it will feel as if professionalized programs would be an easier solution, but no church program can develop in a child what parents are able to engrave in their children’s souls day-by-day. And so, despite the apparent inefficiency of expecting parents to disciple their own children, family-equipping ministers persist in their passion for training fathers and mothers as the primary disciple-makers in their children’s lives.

:: Divinely-Designated Amateur Disciple-Makers, the Neglected Role of Christian Parents ::

In the early twentieth century, a journalist named G.K. Chesterton offered these comments about the British and American jury system:

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained dancers because they dance better, specially
instructed laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on. … [Yet] our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

A similar statement might be made regarding the training of children to respond to the gospel day-by-day. Though professionals may certainly partner with parents in this task, such a serious undertaking is too significant to be relinquished to professionals, too profound to be befuddled by a focus on efficiency. The formation of a child’s faith is not a skill for specialists. It is a habit to be developed in the lives of divinely-designated amateurs, and these amateurs are known as “Dad” and “Mom.”

In my childhood, one of the most significant habits that shaped my soul was a single, simple pattern that required no special skills, no particular curriculum. Each night, my mother came into my room, sat on the side of my bed, and listened to me pray.

What was significant about this wasn’t so much the praying, which was pretty much the same every night. It was the conversations about life that arose in the context of prayer—coupled with the fact that I had to face my mother every evening, regardless of what I might have done during the day.

At some point in early adolescence, I informed my mother that, from that point forward, I could handle praying on my own. Deep inside, I regretted my request even then, and I regret it even more now. In some inexplicable way, knowing that I would have to pray with my mother each night placed a limit on what I was willing to say and to do during the day.

Today, this pattern from my childhood marks the end of each day in the lives of each of my own children. A few months ago, when my teenager suggested that she might not need me to pray with her each night, my response ran something like this: “You know, I think you are totally able to pray on your own, and I want you to pray on your own as well. But, even though you don’t need my help to pray, I need the reminder every night that God gave you to me and that I’m responsible to guide you toward him. So, every night, I’ll still be here to pray with you, no matter what.”

Since that moment, my daughter and I have had dozens of important night-time conversations that I might otherwise have missed.

There is no curriculum for this habit. Life itself is the curriculum. There is no special training, only the gift of time given each night. Sometimes it works well, other times it doesn’t. It’s an inefficient use of time by any earthly standard—but it is a right and good response to God’s work of grace in our lives.

To find our more about family-equipping ministry, go here.

Today, at 4:15 p.m. Eastern, I will appear on KGMS radio in Tucson, Arizona, talking with Kathy Thomas and Barbara Tompkins about Rose Guide to End Times Prophecy and different perspectives on the end times throughout church history. Click here to listen.

June 2, 2012

Friend and former SBTS colleague Lawrence Smith, now at WDRB television in Louisville, has produced a helpful video on the origins of the Southern Baptist Convention as well as the probable election of Fred Luter as president of the SBC.

Click here to watch the video.

To understand more about the history of Christianity during the early years of the Southern Baptist Convention, take a look at Chapter 11 in Christian History Made Easy.

In an enlightening and well-crafted article “Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to Internet Porn and Video Games,” Russell Moore writes:

“If you’re addicted to sugar or tequila or heroin you want more and more of that substance. But porn and video games both are built on novelty, on the quest for newer and different experiences. That’s why you rarely find a man addicted to a single pornographic image. He’s entrapped in an ever-expanding kaleidoscope. … Satan isn’t a creator but a plagiarist. His power is parasitic, latching on to good impulses and directing them toward his own purpose. God intends a man to feel the wildness of sexuality in the self-giving union with his wife. And a man is meant to, when necessary, fight for his family, his people, for the weak and vulnerable who are being oppressed.”

Read the rest of the article here.

For more on training men to embrace their role as self-sacrificial leaders, take a look at Randy Stinson’s chapter in Trained in the Fear of God.

On this day—May 26—in the year 1700, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf und Pottendorf was born. While still in his twenties, Nikolaus became part of a prayer meeting that—through hundreds of men and women who took turns praying—continued twenty-four hours every day for more than one hundred years.

So how did this prayer meeting begin?

Well, in some sense, the foundations for the prayer meeting can be traced to the late 1600s. A man named Jacob Spener wrote a booklet entitled Pious Desires. The book urged Christians to pursue a personal relationship with Jesus through prayer and meditation on the Scriptures; this pietistic impulse had a profound impact on Nikolaus von Zinzendorf.

In the early eighteenth century, several Roman Catholic princes were persecuting the Moravian Brethren, a small Protestant movement that had originated in the western regions of what’s now known as the Czech Republic. One rainy evening in 1722 a Moravian believer knocked on Zinzendorf’s front door. He asked if Nikolaus von Zinzendorf might shelter the flourishing Moravian movement. Nikolaus agreed and even helped the Moravians to found a community on his lands. They called their community “the Lord’s watch” (or “Herrnhut”). By 1725, nearly one hundred Moravians had made Herrnhut their home.

The prayer meeting began in 1727. The rationale was simple: “The sacred fire was never permitted to go out on the altar (Leviticus 6:13); so in a congregation is a temple of the living God, wherein he has his altar and fire, [and] the intercession of his saints should incessantly rise up to him.”

The influence of the Moravians and their prayers multiplied far beyond the borders of Herrnhut. God used the Moravians on a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to convict John Wesley of his need for the gospel. The Moravians became the first Protestant group to send both clergy and laypeople as missionaries. Nikolaus died in May of 1760. By that time, the Moravians had established missionary colonies in the West Indies, in Greenland, and among the natives of the northeastern American colonies, as well as sending missionaries to Livonia, to the shores of the Baltic Sea, to Suriname, to the islands of the East Indies, to South Africa, to South America, and to the African slaves of South Carolina—and it all began with a band of refugees and a deep commitment to pray.

For more on Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, take a look at Chapter 10 in Christian History Made Easy.

From the first century forward, Christians viewed testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus as uniquely authoritative. The logic of this standard was simple: The people most likely to know the truth about Jesus were either eyewitnesses who had encountered Jesus personally or close associates of these witnesses. So, although Christians wrangled for some time about the authority of certain writings, it was something far greater than political machinations that drove these decisions. Their goal was to determine which books could be clearly connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus.

With this in mind, let’s look at a couple of real-life examples of how some writings ended up excluded from the churches’ collections of authoritative books.

:: The Gospel of the Talking Cross ::

In 199 A.D., a pastor named Serapion became the lead pastor of the leading church in Syria, the church in Antioch. As the leading pastor in Antioch, Serapion was responsible not only for his own church but also for several smaller congregations in the area. One of these congregations gathered in the village of Rhossus.

Within a few months, Serapion heard rumors that the church in Rhossus was on the verge of a rift. So, Serapion found himself trudging the stony coastal road that took him north of Antioch, toward Rhossus.

When he arrived in Rhossus, he discovered that some church members had problems with a Gospel that was “inscribed with Peter’s name.” When he heard this, Serapion replied, “If that’s all that threatens to produce hard feelings among you, let it be read.” After all, if this retelling of Jesus’ ministry came from Simon Peter, surely it represented eyewitness testimony!

But the authority of this text wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as Serapion thought.

Some time later, someone brought the pastor a copy of this so-called Gospel of Peter. When Serapion read the codex for himself, he recognized he’d made a mistake. Sure, most of Gospel of Peter reflected the same stories as the other writings in the church’s book-chest. In fact, very little in the surviving manuscripts of Gospel of Peter directly contradicts anything in the New Testament Gospels. And yet, Serapion saw that this book was clearly not the product of Simon Peter’s preaching. There were hints in Gospel of Peter of the beginnings of a belief known as “Docetism” that hadn’t even emerged until a couple of decades after Peter’s death. This belief—named from the Greek word dokein (“to seem”)—claimed that Jesus wasn’t truly human; instead, Jesus only seemed human.

The oddest twist in Gospel of Peter is when Jesus erupts from the tomb. In the soldiers’ eyes, Jesus seems as tall as the sky, and, behind Jesus, they glimpse what looks like a massive cross. A voice thunders from heaven, “Have you proclaimed to those that are asleep?” To this, the cross replies, “Yes.”

After reading Gospel of Peter, Serapion dashed off a letter to the church in Rhossus, reversing his previous decision and declaring, “I am hurrying to see you; expect to see me shortly. … Most things [in this Gospel] are from the Savior’s right word, but some things are false—and these we will point out for you.”

So, why did Serapion of Antioch reject Gospel of Peter? Serapion had in his possession the testimony of eyewitnesses “in the writings handed down to us.” These writings most likely included the letters of Paul and one or more of the four New Testament Gospels—documents that strong and unbroken oral histories had long linked them to eyewitnesses or close associates of eyewitnesses. Faced with a writing that claimed to come from Simon Peter, Serapion compared its teachings with these “writings handed down to us” and found inconsistencies between Gospel of Peter and “the Savior’s right word.” As a result, Serapion reached the logical conclusion that Simon Peter—an eyewitness of Jesus, according to the testimony Paul’s letters, the earliest Gospels, and even texts outside the New Testament—couldn’t have been the source of the so-called Gospel of Peter. Serapion’s goal was the same as other believers scattered throughout the world: He wanted to preserve eyewitness testimony about Jesus. When he examined Gospel of Peter, his conclusion was that, because this disputed document was inconsistent with undisputed eyewitness testimonies, Gospel of Peter didn’t reliably represent eyewitness testimony.

As it turns out, Serapion was correct: The language and thought-patterns in Gospel of Peter have convinced most contemporary scholars that the book was written in the first half of the second century—a generation after Peter’s death, at a time when the Docetist heresy was spreading.

Despite Serapion’s rejection of the book, Gospel of Peter remained popular reading among Christians for several centuries. In fact, more ancient fragments remain from Gospel of Peter than from the Gospel According to Mark. Still, only the scantest evidence exists to suggest that, except for those few months in the church at Rhossus, Gospel of Peter was ever considered an authoritative account of Jesus’ life.

:: How Love for Paul Cost an Elder His Ordination ::

About the same time that Serapion was examining Gospel of Peter, an argument about baptism erupted in a congregation in North Africa. A few church members appealed to a writing known as Acts of Paul—a document that some Christians seem to have accepted as authoritative. Acts of Paul is a fascinating text. According to this document, being a Christian includes not only faith in Jesus but also abstinence from sexual relations. Plus, partway through Acts of Paul, the apostle Paul baptizes a lion.

It was an elder named Tertullian of Carthage who related some of the reasons why Acts of Paul never became an authoritative text. When Tertullian heard that some church members were appealing to Acts of Paul, he seems to have did some research into the book’s origins. In the process, he dug up several facts that cast doubt on the book’s dependability.

What Tertullian discovered was that the author of Acts of Paul was neither an apostle nor acquainted with any apostles. The author had served as an elder in a church in Asia a half-century after Paul’s martyrdom. When questioned, the elder admitted that he had concocted the stories “out of love for Paul.” Once churches in the area learned that these stories were fictional, they forced the elder to step down from his position. This rightly led Tertullian to reject Acts of Paul as “a writing that circulates falsely under Paul’s name.”

What interests me most about the events surrounding is how much early Christians wanted to make certain that their authoritative writings represented historical truth. It truly mattered to these men and women that historical facts formed the foundations of their sacred books. If second-century Christians weren’t concerned with preserving eyewitness truth, why did this elder—who most likely wanted nothing more than to honor Paul’s memory with a few super-fantastic tales—end up shamed and stripped of his ordination?

:: Who Chose the Books? ::

So what do these texts tell us about why certain ancient texts became authoritative among Christians? Even among the earliest Christians, testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of the risen Lord was uniquely authoritative. That’s why the supposed “lost Scriptures” were lost—or, more precisely, why they were not preserved with the writings that appear in your New Testament today.

Not only Gospel of Peter but also other post-apostolic accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus—Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of the Savior, Gospel of Truth, and several others—emerged in the second and third centuries, long after the last apostles died. It’s true that some portions of Gospel of Peter as well as Gospel of Thomas—another second-century Gospel that’s falsely ascribed to an apostle—probably stem from very early testimony about Jesus. But these few first-century traditions have been heavily mingled with second-century additions that had no foundation in any eyewitness testimony.

In most cases, early Christians knew that these documents came too late to represent eyewitness testimony about Jesus. So, the primary preservers of these later texts were sects—such as the Gnostics—that focused more on mystical interpretations of Jesus’ teachings than on the historical events of Jesus’ life.

:: Why You Shouldn’t Shoot the Canon Quite Yet ::

I don’t want to leave you with the false impression that Christians quickly and easily settled every debate about their sacred writings. Prior to the fifth century, when different congregations listed the writings that they treated as authoritative testimony about Jesus, the results were rarely identical.

Yet, before you become too concerned with what might be different if early Christians had concluded that your favorite book of the New Testament didn’t qualify, consider carefully the overwhelming degree of agreement between every early listing of authoritative texts.

At least as early as the second century A.D., there were at least nineteen texts that were never questioned—and these are writings that reflect the most essential truths about Jesus. From the very beginning, Christians embraced the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, and at least one letter from John. Even if this score or so of books had been the only documents that represented eyewitness testimony about Jesus, every vital truth of Christian faith would remain completely intact.

Arguments about a few writings—including the letters of Peter, John’s second and third letters, the letters of James and Jude, and Revelation—did persist beyond the second century. By the closing years of the fourth century, Christians were arriving at widespread agreement concerning twenty-seven books—writings that were based on eyewitness testimony about Jesus. The letter of Athanasius in 367 A.D. reflected this consensus.

Many years did pass between the days of the apostles and the time when Christians agreed concerning every New Testament text. And, yet, a definite standard directed this process—a conviction that these writings must be rooted in reliable, eyewitness testimony. What’s more, despite continuing disagreements about a few writings, strong agreement on twenty or so texts existed at least as early as the second century. As a result, there’s every reason to believe that the testimony you find in your New Testament came from men and women who personally followed Jesus and who passed on their experiences to generations yet to come.
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For references to quotations and for more information on the authenticity of the New Testament texts, see my book Misquoting Truth.

Gail Welborn of the Seattle Examiner recently had this to say about the Rose Guide to End Times Prophecy.

“Award-winning author and scholar, Dr. Timothy Paul Jones … provides a simplified, unbiased and clear overview of end-times prophecies. His refreshing, informative and balanced approach combines with stunning artwork, colorful charts, pictures and diagram comparisons that streamline an otherwise mysterious and confusing topic. … I found the book, insightful, intriguing, and amazing.”

Read the rest of the review here.

Order the book here.

Suppose that you became a Christian in the second century A.D. You’ve heard the story of a divine being who died on a cross and rose from the dead. Through baptism, you’ve openly identified yourself with his followers. Now, you want to learn more about this deity. Yet you quickly realize that some people who call themselves “Christians” understand Jesus very differently from the Christians in your congregation. In fact, one nearby group that claims the name “Christian” also says that Jesus wasn’t actually a human being—he was a spirit that only seemed human!

How would you decide who was right?

As a twenty-first century Christian, the most reasonable reply seems to be, “Read your New Testament!” The problem is, most Christians in the second century couldn’t read. Even if you were one of the privileged few that possessed the capacity to read and write, you wouldn’t personally own a Bible. Your only “Bible” would have been found in an armarion—a specially-constructed cabinet with niched shelves for scrolls and codices—that stayed in the house where your congregation most often gathered. The armarion would likely have sheltered a copy of the Greek Old Testament and perhaps a couple dozen other sacred scrolls or codices.

But it’s possible that not all of these texts would have been identical to the twenty-seven books that you find in New Testaments today.

To be sure, the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s letters, and probably John’s first letter would have had a place in the armarion. But the cabinet could lack a few writings that your New Testament includes—the letter to the Hebrews and maybe the second epistle that’s ascribed to Peter, for example, or a couple of John’s letters. A quirky allegory entitled The Shepherd might have made an appearance in your armarion. You might even find a letter or two from a Roman pastor named Clement.

Do you sense the dilemma that faced first- and second-century Christians? How did they maintain a clear and consistent faith in the shadow of so many competing claims? And who decided on the texts that we call the New Testament today?

:: Circular Reasoning and Skeptical Spins ::

It isn’t helpful simply to reason circularly, as some Christian apologists have done, and to claim that “God chose the books” or that “the Scriptures say they’re inspired.” Any writer can claim inspiration! And the question isn’t whether God had any part in choosing the books; the question is, “By what human means did these texts come to be viewed as authoritative?”

Equally unhelpful are conspiracy theorists and skeptical scholars who claim that no definite set of texts existed until the fourth or fifth centuries A.D. Agnostic professor Bart Ehrman claims:

We are able to pinpoint the first time that any Christian of record listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament as the books of the New Testament—neither more nor fewer. Surprising as it may seem, this Christian was writing in the second half of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years after the books of the New Testament had themselves been written. The author was the powerful bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius. In the year 367 A.D., Athanasius wrote his annual pastoral letter to the Egyptian churches under his jurisdiction, and in it he included advice concerning which books should be read as Scripture in the churches. He lists our twenty-seven books, excluding all others. This is the first surviving instance of anyone affirming our set of books as the New Testament. And even Athanasius did not settle the matter.

Unfortunately, this summary spins the facts and leaves readers with several impressions that aren’t quite accurate—impressions such as that, until the late fourth century, there was no consensus at all about which Christian writings were authoritative, and that the church’s standard even then was the word of a powerful bishop.

So what’s the complete story? When and how did Christians agree on which writings were authoritative in their congregations? And was there any standard for these discussions beyond the decree of a respected leader?

:: The Standard of Who Saw It Firsthand ::

The primary standard for deciding which books were authoritative emerged long before the fourth century—and this standard was not the word of a powerful bishop. Hints of this standard can, in fact, be found in first-century Christian writings.

Long before Athanasius was even born, testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of the risen Lord was uniquely authoritative among early Christians.

Even while the New Testament books were being written in the first century A.D., the words of people who had actually seen Jesus—especially the words and writings of the apostles—carried special authority in the churches (see Acts 1:21-26; 15:6—16:5; 1 Corinthians 4—5; 9:1-12; Galatians 1:1-12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26-27). After the apostles’ deaths, Christians continued to value the testimony of eyewitnesses and their associates. In the first decade of the second century, Papias of Hierapolis put it this way:

I did not … take pleasure in those who spoke much, but in those who … recited the commandments given by the Lord. … So, if anyone who had served the elders came, I asked about their sayings in detail—what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s followers.

About the same time, a church leader named Polycarp cited the words of the apostle Paul as “Scripture.”

A generation later, when someone in the Roman church wondered which Christian writings should be considered authoritative, this emphasis on the eyewitnesses persisted. After listing the books that he viewed as authoritative, here’s what one Christian leader wrote regarding a popular book known as The Shepherd that was circulating in the churches:

Hermas composed The Shepherd quite recently—in our times, in the city of Rome, while his brother Pius the overseer served as overseer of the city of Rome. So, while it should indeed be read, it cannot be read publicly for the people of the church—it is counted neither among the prophets (for their number has been completed) nor among the apostles (for it is after their time).

Notice carefully this second-century writer’s reasons for not allowing The Shepherd of Hermas to serve as an authoritative text in the churches: This writing could not be added to the Old Testament prophets because the time of the Hebrew prophets had passed (“their number has been completed”), and—with the deaths of the apostles—the time of the apostolic eyewitnesses had also ended (“it is after their time”). This teacher didn’t forbid believers to read The Shepherd; he simply pointed out that the book should not serve as an authoritative text for Christian congregations (“it cannot be read publicly for the people of the church”).

Later church leaders such as Tertullian of Carthage and Serapion of Antioch echoed these sorts of standards, with Serapion clearly stating, “We, brothers and sisters, receive Peter and the rest of the apostles as we would receive Christ himself. But those writings that are falsely ascribed with their names, we carefully reject, knowing that no such writings have ever been handed down to us.” Again, Christians rooted their standard for determining which writings were authoritative in the testimony of eyewitnesses.

So, from the first century onward, Christians viewed testimony that could be connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus as uniquely authoritative. The logic of this standard was simple: The people most likely to know the truth about Jesus were either eyewitnesses who had encountered Jesus personally or close associates of these witnesses. So, although Christians wrangled for some time about the authority of certain writings, it was something far greater than political machinations that drove these decisions. Their goal was to determine which books could be clearly connected to eyewitnesses of Jesus.

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For references to quotations and for more information on the authenticity of the New Testament texts, see my book Misquoting Truth.

For more on this topic, take a look at this article from John Mark Harris.

Today, at 7:15 p.m. Eastern, I will appear on “Live from Seattle” on KGNW radio in Seattle, talking with Doug Bursch about perspectives on the end times throughout the history of Christianity. Click here to listen!

May 4, 2012

I am humbled every day by the still-unbelievable fact that I have been given the opportunity to teach and to lead at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Even after five years as a professor here, there are days when I make my way across the parking lots and amble around the seminary lawn not because I have any particular need to be there at that moment but simply to remind myself of the rich history of this patch of earth. I am humbled that I have even the tiniest part in this place where so many God-called men and women “meet to part and part to meet.”

I am thankful for the thousands of Southern Baptists who give sacrificially to this institution and especially for those who serve so faithfully and voluntarily as trustees. Today, I am especially thankful for this action taken by the trustees and the administration:

In addition to approving the 2012-13 budget, the Board of Trustees voted to grant James M. Hamilton Jr., associate professor of biblical theology, with tenure. The board also promoted Timothy Paul Jones, currently associate professor of leadership and church ministry, to full professorship.

“Jim Hamilton and Timothy Paul Jones are two of our most creative, visionary professors,” said Russell D. Moore, senior vice president for academic administration and dean of the School of Theology. “They are not only writing the books the next generation of Christians will read, they are also pouring their lives one by one into students here on this campus. I couldn’t be happier to have them as part of this great, historic faculty.”

Mohler echoed Moore’s sentiment, stating that Hamilton and Jones model Christian scholarship: “Professors Hamilton and Jones are not only capable scholars, but deeply committed Christians and involved churchmen who model for our students just the right picture of what it means to be a Christian scholar.”

From Towers, the news service of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Today, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, I will appear on the Janet Mefferd Show, talking with Janet about the possibility that the New Testament Gospels were based on pagan myths that preceded Jesus.

Find out here when the Janet Mefferd Show airs in your area, or listen online here.

April 16, 2012

Christian retailers have chosen the finalists in the 12th annual Retailers Choice Awards, sponsored by Christian Retailing magazine.

More than three hundred products were nominated for this award, and Rose Guide to End-Times Prophecy, coauthored with Gunner Gundersen and Benjamin Galan, has been selected as one of three finalists in the Bible Reference category.

Introduced in 2001, the Retailers Choice Awards have been increasingly acknowledged as an important way of recognizing some of the most significant new life-changing products in the Christian retail industry. Products are judged on the impact they have had on staff and customers, including their ability to speak to hearts and evoke emotion, open minds to new ways of thinking and encourage and affirm Christlike living. Winners will be announced this summer.

Last week, millions of Americans endured the filing and, in some cases, the payment of taxes. Taxation has never been particularly popular among Americans, having once incited several dozen Bostonians to dress up as Mohawk braves and toss tea into a harbor. Several decades after this curious combination of costume party and hurling contest, a later band of Boston braves began pitching baseballs instead of tea crates and moved to Milwaukee before heading to Atlanta, where there are no harbors to fill with tea leaves but where there is a quite nice spot known as Turner Field in which to play baseball.

Even in the months that followed the tea incident in Boston, not every evangelical Englishman agreed that colonial taxes were unjust. “I am taxed; yet I am no slave,” John Wesley admonished fellow Christians in the colonies. “Nine in ten throughout England have no representative, no vote; yet … they enjoy both civil and religious liberty. … Who then is a slave? … See that negro, fainting under the load! … You and I, and the English in general, go where we will, and enjoy the fruit of our labors: this is liberty. The negro does not: this is slavery. Is not then all this outcry about liberty and slavery mere rant, and playing upon words?”

This year, Sunday and Emancipation Day conspired together to grant Americans two extra days to complete their taxes. What this provided for most was an additional forty-eight hours to practice procrastination. In the end, the vast majority of Americans provided the government with the requested forms on or before the appointed date, recognizing that, when you pay your taxes, the government reciprocates by providing you with vital services, such as not putting you in prison.

And yet, other than avoiding the unpleasantness of prison or penalties, why should Christians pay their taxes? Or should they?

Believe it or not, in the days when Jesus walked the dusty roads of the Levant, taxes were even less popular than they are today. This was particularly true among the perigrini—the more-than-ninety-percent of imperial subjects who didn’t possess the privilege of Roman citizenship. Hatred for taxation probably ran hottest in regions like Galilee and Judea. In fact, in the decades that followed the death and resurrection of Jesus, taxation was one of the tensions that triggered the Jewish revolt against the Romans. No wonder, then, that some of the religious leaders selected taxes as the topic of choice to trip up Jesus in the New Testament Gospels (Matthew 22:15-22; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:19-26).

:: Why Some of What You Make Belongs to Caesar ::

“Is it lawful,” messengers from the religious leadership asked the teacher from Galilee, “for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (Luke 20:22). The taxes in question here were not the toll taxes paid to publicans like Levi and Zacchaeus (Luke 5:27; 19:2). The taxes in the messengers’ purview were poll taxes that people paid to Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor. These taxes, collected by governors on a regular basis, constantly reminded occupied nations that the Roman Empire ruled their lands. More than a century after the time of Jesus, a Christian orator named Tertullian referred to the poll tax as a sign of slavery.

The question from the messengers seemed tailor-made to cost Jesus either his connection with the crowds or his low profile with the Romans. If Jesus claimed that his people should pay the poll tax, his popularity among the populace could plummet. Plus, the religious leaders might accuse him of placing Caesar’s authority higher than God’s authority. If Jesus declared that it was not lawful for his people to pay taxes to Caesar, he might multiply his popularity among those who longed for a leader who would defy the Romans—but any such claim would immediately mark Jesus as a potential revolutionary, and the Romans would destroy him.

Jesus refused to answer the question directly. Instead, he asked to see a denarius. A denarius was the typical wage for a day of labor; the image and titles of the Roman emperor were struck on the face of every denarius. Face to face with the emperor’s image, Jesus declared simply, “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

Caesar’s domain was a dictatorship dedicated to false gods. “Some of the taxes given by New Testament Christians,” Russell Moore reminds us, “would have gone to pay for crucifixion stakes. Some would have gone to feed wild beasts for the bloody circuses. Some would have gone to buy incense to be burned in honor of the self-proclaimed [divinity] of the Caesar.” Throughout the Roman Empire, state-funded temples enshrined prostitution, prophetesses in drug-induced ecstasies, and sacrifices to demonic deities.

Yet no government—not even the Roman Empire—rises without God allowing that state to exist (Daniel 2:21; 4:17). And, part of what a human government can legitimately demand from its subjects is a portion of people’s income. The verb translated “give back” or “render” in Jesus’ reply implied payment of a debt (compare Luke 7:42; 10:35; 12:59; 19:8). What Jesus was declaring was that everyone in the Roman Empire—even those who followed God’s law above all other laws—owed the emperor the debt of honor signified by the payment of taxes (see also Romans 13:7; 1 Peter 2:17).

Years later, the apostle Paul would make much the same point when he wrote that “there is no authority except from God, and those that exist are instituted by God. So then, the one who resists the authority is opposing God’s command. … Therefore, you must submit, not only because of wrath, but also because of your conscience. And for this reason you pay taxes” (Romans 13:1-6). The denarii and drachmae in the people’s moneybags were minted by the Roman Empire. And so, Caesar had every right to demand a cut of this currency from the subjects who lived in his lands. To resist Caesar’s demand was to oppose God’s command. Christians submit in this manner not only to avoid penalties and prison sentences (“because of wrath”) but also to live out the gospel by doing what in right in God’s sight (“because of conscience”).

From the perspective of the Christian Scriptures, the only foundation for resisting the government is if the state’s delegates demand direct and personal disobedience to divine commands; even then, the paradigmatic pattern is to resist simply by persisting in obedience to God’s Word (Daniel 3:1-18; 6:1-13; Acts 4:19-20; 5:29). This is the pattern that undergirds the closing paragraph of the Manhattan Declaration, in which a broad range of representatives from the Christian tradition have declared together

we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-­destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti­life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

Even in governments such as the United States where the people collectively comprise “Caesar,” this doesn’t mean that each individual constitutes his or her own regent, with the right to choose whether and when to render Caesar his due. The Constitution of the United States begins not with “me the people” but with “we the people”—the body politic represented by elected and appointed officials, who determine the size and shape of Caesar’s portion.

:: Why All of Who You Are Belongs to God ::

Yet what about the second part of Jesus’ response? What did Jesus mean when he said to “give back … to God the things that are God’s”?

Just as Roman coins were marked with Caesar’s image, something must have been marked with God’s image.

But what?

What is it that was marked with God’s image?

Every human being is the image of God.

At the dawn of human history, God created Adam and Eve “in his own image” and “after his likeness” (Genesis 1:26-27; 5:2; 9:6), and it is this link between God and humanity that calls for every human life to be treated as sacred still today. When Jesus called the people to give Caesar his due, the coins in their purses bore lifeless representations of Caesar’s passing reign, but the people themselves were living images of the eternal God.

And yet, what does it mean, practically, to render ourselves to God?

In the simplest possible terms, it means joining with Jesus in fulfilling the mission that Adam and Eve failed to fulfill.

In the ancient near eastern context in which Moses wrote the accounts of humanity’s creation, to be made in God’s likeness was to be a son of God and to be created in God’s image was to live as a servant-king—as a vice-regent who serves others and who shapes his domain for the glory of a greater king.

The Garden of Eden was a botanical temple, designed as a context for the glory and worship of God. As the living image and likeness of God, the mission of our primeval parents was to extend the borders of Eden and to raise up more image-bearers until the garden covered the globe and God’s glory filled the earth like waters that fill the seas (Numbers 14:21; Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14). Adam and Eve failed in this mission, disdaining their fellowship with God and distorting their role as viceroys of Eden. So, God brought forth a new nation for his glory from a meandering descendant of Shem and a woman long past menopause. God raised up kings among Abraham’s descendants to exemplify his image and likeness. Yet, one by one, the kings of Israel followed in Adam’s footsteps, until—just as Adam was exiled from the garden temple—the people of Israel were exiled and their temple was torn to the ground.

But then, in the fullness of time, the very God who had planted a garden on the eastern edge of Eden slipped into human history through the birth canal of a Jewish peasant, and nothing would ever be the same again.

This child perfectly exemplified the image of God because he was not only the Son of God and the Servant King but also God in human flesh. It was he who told the men and women on the temple mount to render themselves to God as his image and likeness—which is to say, to join in God’s mission as sons of God and servant kings. Then, he did what no other king could do: having kept the law without flaw, he took the punishment for his people’s failure and rose in triumph over death. As people from every nation become heirs with Jesus through faith and participate anew in God’s image and likeness, the Spirit of Jesus is drawing them together even now into a new temple (Ephesians 2:19—3:21; 1 Peter 2:1-5). Through this temple, the glory of God is flooding the earth before our very eyes.

:: Rendering to Caesar, Whether and Why ::

The first part of Jesus’ reply dealt with whether God’s people should provide to Caesar the percentage of their income that Caesar’s representatives request. His reference to the image of God hinted at why.

Followers of Jesus pay taxes because this world matters. Yes, the corruption of our first parents has enslaved this world to “groaning,” to a yearning for redemption that no human pleasure can quell (Ecclesiastes 3:9-11; Romans 8:19-23). And still, this planet matters. The entire cosmos swirls and twirls in a celestial dance that proclaims the very glory of God; despite the manifold failures of human government, states and societies reflect God’s order and provide a context for the fulfillment of God’s mission. Paul saw the state as an evidence of divine order in a sin-disordered world even during the reign of Nero—an emperor who murdered his own mother and kicked his pregnant wife to death (Romans 13:3-5). Even imperfect governments curb human depravity, and this curbing of evil results in greater opportunities for God’s people to proclaim the gospel (1 Timothy 2:1-4) so that God’s glory flows over the globe like waters that fill the sea.

Paradoxically, followers of Jesus also pay taxes because this world is not the realm that matters most. None of the numbers on your 1040 form will last into eternity. National currencies, no less than kings and kingdoms (Psalm 75:2-8; Daniel 2:20-22), are tools that God raises up and tosses aside according to his will. It is, of course, foolish to pay more taxes than we rightly owe—but not because such payments violate our rights. It’s foolish because it leaves less to give away for the sake of a kingdom that will never fade. The cash in my wallet and the currency in my accounts are nothing more than ephemeral signposts of my placement in a world where the kingdom of Christ is not yet fully realized. The values on my payroll statements have no value in any domain that will outlast the moment when Jesus plants his feet on planet earth. Whether the currency is backed by gold or gravel or the government’s paper is irrelevant. In the New Jerusalem, the gravel will be gold, and the government will rest on the shoulders of a serpent-crushing King (Isaiah 9:6; Revelation 21:21). When I release my taxes to the government, I am not expressing confidence in the state’s competence to right the wrongs of this world. I am being reminded that this money is a tool that I can release without remorse because any values that are tied to these dollars and cents are indeed Caesar’s values—fleeting fragments of a kingdom that is passing away.

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Thoughts from the following three texts appear in some portions this post:

Beale, G.K. The Temple and the Church’s Mission. Downers Grove: IVP, 2004.

Gentry, Peter, and Stephen Wellum. Kingdom through Covenant. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.

Hamilton, James Merrill. God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment. Wheaton: Crossway, 2010.

It’s an accusation that’s been around a long time.

Even in ancient times, critics of Christianity noticed some parallels between Christian beliefs and pre-Christian myths. In the late second century, a pagan philosopher named Celsus charged, “The Christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, of the Auge and Antiope in fabricating this story of virgin birth!” In more recent times, skeptical scholars such as Marvin Meyer and Robert Price have claimed close connections between the resurrection of Jesus and the myths of dying and rising deities that marked many pagan mystery religions.

In the simplest possible terms, here’s what these critics contend: The most marvelous claims in the Gospels—a miraculous birth, for example, as well as the idea of a deity who dies and rises again—are paralleled in pagan religions that predate Christianity; therefore, early Christians must have fabricated these miracles based on their knowledge of pre-Christian religions.

To be sure, there are some surface-level similarities between ancient myths and certain events in the Gospels. Long before the first century A.D., the myths of Egyptians deities such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Horus included tales of death and rebirth. The Persians venerated Mithras, a deity who (according to some recent claims) was born of a virgin and who died and rose Fain. Sacramental bread and the fruit of the vine make appearances in a few mystery cults as well.

So why should anyone see Jesus as being distinct from the pagan gods? Could it be that the New Testament stories of Jesus represent the fictive myth of an ancient mystery cult that’s survived for two thousand years? Or is there something different about the accounts of Jesus’ time on planet earth?

:: The Pagan Parallels Aren’t Particularly Parallel ::

In the first place, it’s important to be aware that most of these supposed pagan parallels aren’t nearly as parallel as the skeptics suppose. When the actual sources behind the pagan myths are closely examined, the supposed parallels have little in common with the New Testament narratives.

For example, there are dying and rising gods in some earlier religions—but these deities died and arose each year, certainly not the same pattern as Jesus’s once-for-all sacrifice for the sake of others. And the pagan myths of miraculous births are closer to divine impregnation—a mortal woman conceives a child as a result of sexual relations with a god—than to the virginal conception described in the Gospel According to Matthew and Luke.

To exemplify how these supposed parallels aren’t nearly as parallel as the critics claim, let’s take a look at one particular mystery-cult myth that’s often presented as a predecessor to the New Testament, the myth of Mithras.

So what of Mithras’ miraculous birth? In the ancient sources that describe the birth of Mithras, Mithras was birthed from solid stone, and he got stuck on the way out. Some nearby persons in a field pulled him from the stone, which left a cave behind him. Yet some writers continue to connect this birth to the birth of Jesus in a stable with shepherds arriving soon afterward. A few critics even refer to this birth of Mithras as a “virgin birth”! I guess that birth from a rock is sort of a virgin birth. But how can you tell if a rock is a virgin, anyway? And how precisely do rocks lose their virginity? Parallels of this sort are too vague and too dissimilar to support the claim that Christians borrowed their beliefs from pagans of previous generations.

James Tabor, a professor at University of North Carolina, doesn’t believe in the virginal conception of Jesus, and he denies that Jesus could have risen from the dead. Yet even he sees how radically the birth of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels differs from the supposed pagan parallels:

When you read the accounts of Mary’s unsuspected pregnancy, what is particularly notable … is an underlying tone of realism that runs through the narratives. These seem to be real people, living in real times and places. In contrast the birth stories in Greco-Roman literature have a decidedly legendary flavor to them. For example, in Plutarch’s account of the birth of Alexander the Great, mother Olympias got pregnant from a snake; it was announced by a bolt of lightning that sealed her womb so that her husband Philip could not have sex with her. Granted, both Matthew and Luke include dreams and visions of angels but the core story itself—that of a man who discovers that his bride-to-be is pregnant and knows he is not the father—has a realistic and thoroughly human quality to it. The narrative, despite its miraculous elements, “rings true.”

:: Supposed Parallels and Significant Problems When Comparing Jesus and Mithras ::

Supposed parallel: Mithras had twelve followers.
Significant problem: One piece of ancient artwork depicts Mithras surrounded by twelve faces, but there is no evidence that these were “disciples” of Mithras. In fact, Mithras had only two companions, Albederan and Antares.

Supposed parallel: Mithras was identified as a lion and a lamb.
Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence for the connection of Mithras to a lamb. Mithras was identified as a lion. However that imagery for a royal ruler existed among the Israelites (Genesis 49:9) several centuries prior to the emergence of any Mithraic myth; the New Testament writers were using familiar Jewish imagery when they depicted Jesus as a lion.

Supposed parallel: Mithras initiated a meal in which the terminology of “body and blood” were used.
Significant problem: The earliest evidence of such terminology in the context of Mithraism is from the mid-second century—nearly one hundred years after the Gospels were written. In this instance, it is far more likely that Mithraism borrowed from Christian practice.

Supposed parallel: Mithras sacrificed himself for the sake of others.
Significant problem: Mithras is frequently depicted in the act of sacrificing a bull—but Mithras himself never becomes the sacrifice.

Supposed parallel: Mithras rose from the dead on the third day; his followers celebrated his resurrection each year.
Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence from the pre-Christian era for a resurrection of Mithras on the third day. Because of his association with the sun, it is possible that followers of Mithras celebrated a renewal or rebirth each year.

Supposed parallel: The resurrection of Mithras was celebrated on Sunday.
Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence from the pre-Christian era for a celebration of a resurrection of Mithras on the first day of the week, though the followers of Mithras—and of other sun-related deities—did worship their gods on Sunday. The reason for the emphasis on “the first day of the week” in the New Testament Gospels was, however, more closely tied to the fact that, in Genesis 1, God’s work of creation began on the first day. The implication was that, through the resurrection of Jesus, God was initiating a new beginning, a re-creation of his world.

:: Claims of Parallels in Pagan Sources Confuse the Historical Claims of the New Testament with Later Christian Practices ::

What’s more, proponents of these parallels consistently conflate later Christian traditions with what’s found in the Gospels. It’s true, for example, that pagan festivals occurred around the time when Christians later celebrated Christmas—but the New Testament documents never suggest a date for the birth of Jesus in the first place! The identification of a date to celebrate Christmas occurred centuries after the time of Jesus; Christians probably arrived at a date near the winter solstice because of an early tradition that Jesus was conceived on the same date that he died, and nine months after Passover landed the birth of Jesus in late December. In any case, since the New Testament makes no claims regarding the date of Jesus’ birth, the celebration of Christmas is irrelevant when it comes to a discussion of whether the New Testament description of Jesus’ birth is rooted in real historical events.

The same holds true when it comes to connections between pagan fertility festivals and later Easter celebrations. The term “Easter” comes from “Ishtar,” a Sumerian goddess who died, arose, and ascended, and several familiar Easter motifs originated in pagan fertility cults. Yet, except for a mistranslation in Acts 12:4 in the King James Version, no New Testament text even mentions Easter! The pagan roots of later Easter imagery have nothing to do with the historicity of the Gospels.

Likewise, later Christian art incorporated both Egyptian and Mithraic motifs, especially when depicting Jesus and his mother. Yet later imitations of pagan themes among Christian painters has nothing to do with whether the events in the New Testament actually occurred. It simply means that Christians artists could have been a bit more creative when choosing sources for their inspiration.

:: What If Some Pagan Parallels Did Exist? ::

Let’s suppose for a moment, though, that some patterns that were present in the life of Jesus could be pinpointed in some previous religion. Would this weaken the historical foundations of the Christian faith, as critics claim?

Not necessarily.

The real question isn’t, “Are there similarities between the New Testament’s descriptions of Jesus and some previous religious practices?” Perhaps there are—although I must admit that every ancient parallel I’ve examined has turned out to be vague and weak when examined in its original context.

The crucial question is, “Did the events described in the New Testament actually occur?”—and the answer to this question doesn’t depend on parallels in pagan practices.

Parallels in other ancient religions neither prove nor disprove the authenticity of the New Testament documents. They simply demonstrate the common expectations of people in the first century A.D. Even if some clear parallel did exist between the story of Jesus and previous religious expectations, this wouldn’t warrant the belief that the apostle Paul or the authors of the New Testament Gospels “borrowed” these tenets from other faiths. It would mean that, when God dropped in on the human race, he chose to reveal himself in ways that the people in that particular culture could comprehend. If that’s indeed the case, it would merely mean that the myths of dying gods and miraculous births are rooted in longings that run deeper than human imagination; although the pagan religions twisted and distorted these motifs, they are rooted in a God-given yearning for redemption through sacrifice that makes the world right and new. C.S. Lewis addressed this possibility with these words:

In the New Testament, the thing really happens. The Dying God really appears—as a historical Person, living in a definite place and time. … The old myth of the Dying God … comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We must not be nervous about “parallels” [in other religions] … : they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.

When it comes to parallels between the New Testament story of Jesus and the myths of pagan gods, the supposed connections are not sufficiently parallel to claim that Christian faith is borrowed. Even if some parallels were indisputable, the parallels merely mean that God worked out his plan in a manner that matched the context within which “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:18).

So what should you do the next time someone pulls out a pagan parallel?

(1) Locate the primary source. With the rarest of exceptions, the primary sources—that is to say, the actual ancient texts that describe the pagan practices—do not include any real parallels to the New Testament.

(2) Determine whether the supposed parallel precedes or succeeds the New Testament. Every text in the New Testament was in circulation no later than the late first century A.D. If the pagan parallel is from a text that was written later than the first century A.D., the New Testament writers obviously couldn’t have borrowed their information from that text.

(3) Determine whether the supposed pagan parallel connects to the New Testament or to later Christian traditions. Connections between pagan practices and later patterns in Christian worship or holiday celebrations may be interesting—but these links have nothing to do with whether the New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus are historically accurate.

__________

R. Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (New York: Oxford, 2006) 209-210.

M. Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras (New York: Routledge, 2000) 68-165.

C.S. Lewis, “Answers to Questions on Christianity” and “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970) 58, 66.

Origen of Alexandria, “Contra Celsum,” ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graecae 11 (Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857-1866) 37.

T. Snyder, Myth Conceptions (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995).

The historical case for the Resurrection is that everybody else, except the Apostles, had every possible motive to declare what they had done with the body, if anything had been done with it.

The Apostles might have hidden it in order to announce a sham miracle, but it is very difficult to imagine men being tortured and killed for the truth of a miracle which they knew to be a sham.

—G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying

I have believed in the resurrection of Jesus for many years. Over the past seven months, I have grown to love the truth of the resurrection like never before.

On a summer Sunday eight months ago, my mother called to let me know that my father had collapsed that morning. A few weeks after that telephone call, I found myself standing in a physician’s office while an assistant clicked through scans of my father’s brain. An undetected tumor in his lung had sown several cancerous lesions in his skull. Seen from the standpoint of Christian faith, these results signaled the approach of a time when the “last enemy to be abolished” would separate my father’s spirit from his flesh (1 Cor. 15:26) until that future moment when the risen Lord Jesus returns for his own.

Thus began a long journey alongside my father down that dark hallway with the door marked “Death” at the end. I watched as a country pastor who previously devoured multiple books every week became incapable of assessing whether his newspaper was right-side up. Sentences once spoken with an inescapable Ozarks twang disintegrated into unaccented grunts and finally into silent, liquid stares.

In September, at the time when my father would typically have finished preaching his Sunday evening message, he opened his eyes and began to breathe in deep, ragged heaves. We sang “Amazing Grace” to him, and he passed from this life at “bright shining as the sun.” On the first day of fall last year, we planted his flesh in the stony red soil of southern Missouri. There, his body awaits the spring of resurrection, the death of death itself, the consummation of the new covenant that was inaugurated on a hill outside Jerusalem so many centuries ago.

I have defended, debated, and written books about the resurrection of Jesus. And yet, I do not know that I ever realized until the past few months quite how much depends on the resurrection. I have long believed in the resurrection based on a combination of historical evidence and faith. But now, I love the doctrine of the resurrection because, if there is no resurrection, there is no hope in death and, if there is no hope in death, there is no lasting purpose in life.

Jesus was “the firstfruits” of resurrection life (1 Cor. 15:20), a foretaste of how God will raise every believer to eternal life. The risen Lord’s presence with His followers three days after His death provided evidence of the inauguration of God’s kingdom and the vindication of Jesus’ claims. But there is something else as well, twined in that reunion of Jesus with his first followers: a picture and a promise of a future moment when those who live in Christ and those who have died in Christ are raised together in fellowship with one another, never to die again.

It will not do … to say that Jesus’ disciples were so stunned and shocked by his death, so unable to come to terms with it, that they projected their shattered hopes onto the screen of fantasy and invented the idea of Jesus’ ‘resurrection’ as a way of coping with a cruelly broken dream. That has an initial apparent psychological plausibility, but it won’t work as serious first-century history.

We know of lots of other messianic and similar movements in the Jewish world roughly contemporary with Jesus. In many cases the leader died a violent death at the hands of the authorities. In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. ‘Resurrection’ was not a private event. It involved human bodies. There would have to be an empty tomb somewhere.

A Jewish revolutionary whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest himself, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. We have evidence of people doing both.

Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option.

Unless, of course, he was.

—N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

One rule in our household is that, if a book is turned into a movie, everyone must read the book before watching the movie. Our oldest daughter was eight years old when C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was turned into a feature film. In the weeks leading up to the movie’s release, Hannah read nearly all of The Chronicles of Narnia. I rewarded her diligence by taking her and her friend Lacey to see the movie on the opening day.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan the lion offers his life in the place of a traitor. The White Witch and her minions mock and taunt the kingly lion; they strip off his mane and lash him to the Stone Table. Then, the White Witch plunges her knife into the lion. There, surrounded by the jeers and chants of his enemies, Aslan dies.

During the silence in the theater that followed the death of Aslan, I glanced sideways and glimpsed two wide-eyed girls clutching each other’s hands. Then, I watched Hannah lean to the side and heard her whisper these words to Lacey: “Don’t worry. I read the book. He doesn’t stay dead.”

“Don’t worry. I read the book. He doesn’t stay dead.”

That’s the message that we’re privileged to proclaim whenever we consider the death of Jesus: “Don’t worry. I read the book. He doesn’t stay dead.” God’s seeming silence on Saturday was only temporary, a fleeting moment when the cosmos holds its breath in anticipation.

Through the cross, the heel of the divine Son crushed the serpent’s skull; the cosmic vice-regency of an obedient Servant eclipsed Adam’s ancient revolt in Eden; in Jesus, a new exodus dawned—an exodus from which there can be no exile because the King himself has endured exile from his Father’s presence once and for all in place of the people he has purposed to save. Through the resurrection, God the Father publicly demonstrated this victory and vindicated the faithfulness of his Son.

And so, when it seems that the silence of Saturday may never end, don’t descend into despair. Read the book. He didn’t stay dead. Because he is alive, the moments when God seems distant are never the final word.

So much can depend on the answer to a single question.

“Will you marry me?” “Did he get the job?” “Was I accepted into the program?” “Did she survive?” “Will you forgive me?”

Sometimes, everything comes together—or falls apart—in the shadow of a single question.

The Christian faith is that way.

In the case of Christianity, everything that matters depends on one single question: “What happened after Jesus died?” If Jesus returned to life after he died, there is every reason to entrust my entire existence to him. If Jesus is still dead, Christianity is the most far-fetched lie that anyone has ever believed.

In one sense, for those who accept this proclamation as true, Easter weekend is all about apologetics—the defense of the central claims of the gospel against other possibilities. This isn’t because the resurrection suddenly becomes more important in the spring; it’s because a significant number of people are suddenly more open to considering the historical foundations and implications of the resurrection of Jesus.

With that in mind, I’ve developed a brief introduction to what I call “gospel-centered apologetics.” If you’re interested, click on the link below and take a few minutes to listen to this presentation, from this year’s Give Me An Answer Conference at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

Listen to the presentation here.

:: The Obscenity of the Cross in the Ancient World ::

With few exceptions, even the most skeptical scholars admit that Jesus was crucified—and with good reason. Not only Christian authors but also the Roman historian Tacitus mention the crucifixion of Jesus. It’s highly unlikely that first-century Christians would have fabricated such a shameful fate for the founder of their faith. In the first century A.D., crucifixion represented the darkest possible path to death.

It is almost impossible for contemporary people to comprehend the full obscenity of crucifixion in the ancient world. Beginning as early as the third century B.C., the very word “crucify” was a vulgarism that did not pass freely between the lips of cultured people. In one ancient document, a Roman prostitute hurled this insult—perhaps the lewdest curse in her vocabulary—at an uncouth patron: “Go get yourself crucified!” The Roman philosopher Seneca described what he witnessed at a crucifixion with these words: “I see the stakes there—not of one kind but of many. Some victims are placed head down; some have spikes driven through their genitals; others have their arms stretched out on the gibbet.”

That’s why first- and second-century Romans referred to the Christians’ worship of a crucified God as “foolishness,” “insanity,” and “idiocy.”

One of the earliest graphical depictions of such worship is a scrap of late second-century graffiti, uncovered near Rome in a palace where slaves trained to serve the imperial family. In this graffito, a man with the head of an ass dangles naked from a cross. At the foot of the cross, someone kneels, surrounded by these rough-scrawled words: Alexamenos sebete theon. “Alexamenos worships God.” Someone—perhaps a servant training to serve Caesar himself—was ridiculing a young man named Alexamenos because Alexamenos had embraced a new religion, a faith centered around a deity who suffered the punishment for humanity’s sin on a cross.

:: What Happened to the Corpses of the Crucified? ::

The shame of crucifixion ran deeper than the nakedness, the torture, and taunting. In most cases, crucified bodies were not even buried. Instead, in the days that followed the deaths of the crucified, the beaks of vultures and the teeth of wild dogs tore the corpses to shreds and scattered their remains across the countryside.

Roman crucifixion was state terrorism; its function was to deter resistance to revolt and the body was usually left on the cross to be consumed by wild beasts. … The norm was to let crucifieds rot on the cross or be cast aside for carrion.

According to some critics of the New Testament Gospels—John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar, for example—that’s what happened to Jesus too. Consumed by birds and beasts, the flesh of Jesus degenerated inside the stomachs of wild creatures and became dung that decayed in the sun in the alleys of Judea.

Not a pleasant thought, is it?

Not the end that you’d imagined for someone as celebrated as Jesus.

So what if it’s true?

These critics do have some archaeological and literary evidence that stands on their side. Not long after the birth of Jesus, the Roman general Varus crucified two thousand Jewish rebels at once. While besieging Jerusalem in A.D. 69 and 70, Titus the Roman general crucified Jewish captives in view of the denizens of Jerusalem. In each of these cases—and in many, many other instances of mass execution—the bodies seem to have remained on crosses. There, weather and wild creatures reduced their flesh to dust and dung. Suetonius wryly noted regarding a crucified man, “The carrion-birds will quickly take care of his burial.” “The vulture hurries,” the satirist Juvenal claimed, “from dead cattle to dead dogs to crosses.” The epitaph of a second-century murder victim includes this haunting clause: “My murderer was suspended from a tree, while still alive, for the benefit of beasts and birds.”

The critics have a bone that could support their argument too—a heelbone with a spike in it, to be exact. Over the span of four centuries, the Romans crucified tens of thousands of murderers, revolutionaries, and persons who happened to be trapped on the wrong side of the political tides. Yet the only fragment that has been found from these thousands of cadavers is one single heelbone, still pierced by a spike. According to the inscription on the side of this man’s ossuary, the man’s name was John; he was Jewish.

And why have the remains from only one crucified body survived? Well, according to some skeptics like John Dominic Crossan, it’s because, in nearly all cases, weather and wild creatures dealt with the corpses of the crucified. Crossan declares,

We have found only one body from all the thousands crucified around Jerusalem in that single century. I keep thinking of all those other thousands of Jews crucified around Jerusalem in that terrible first century from among whom we have found only one skeleton and one nail. … I think I know what happened to their bodies, and I have no reason to think Jesus’ body did not join them.

So, according to this band of critics, the body of Jesus was never buried. Instead, his flesh became carrion for wild beasts.

And what of the resurrection? From Crossan’s perspective, the resurrection was mere fiction—nothing more than a hallucination that emerged from the disciples’ deep-seated hopes and dreams that they might see Jesus again.

If such critics have rightly reconstructed history, Good Friday was not good, and Resurrection Sunday was no triumph.

Jesus died, his corpse remained on the cross, and the resurrection was nothing more than a series of hallucinations and fabrications.

So what really happened to the body of Jesus?

Is there any historical foundation for believing that the body of Jesus was entombed in the way that the New Testament Gospels claim?

Or could it be that Crossan and other critics are correct?

I am convinced that the historical evidences provide little support for Crossan’s contention that the corpse of Jesus became carrion for dogs and birds. In fact, in the context of Jerusalem around A.D. 30, the best available evidence points in the precise opposite direction. Even if you disagree with me, please at least take a look with me at both sides of the evidence for the burial of Jesus’ crucified body.

:: The Religious Leaders Would Have Wanted the Body of Jesus Buried ::

In most areas of the Roman Empire, crucified bodies did become pickings for vultures and dogs—that much is certain.

But not always, and not everywhere.

In Judea—and especially around Jerusalem—there was a law that, from the perspective of the Jewish people, came from a higher source than Caesar. In this law, God commanded the Israelites: “If someone commits a capital crime for which he is executed and if you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree. You shall bury him the same day, for anyone hanged from a tree is condemned by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance” (Deuteronomy 21:22-23; see also Ezekiel 39:14-16).

The Temple Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran testifies to how seriously Jews took this command even during the times of exile and occupation: “You shall not allow bodies to remain on a tree overnight; most assuredly, you shall bury them, even on the very day of their death.” The Jewish book of Tobit—an entertaining little text, penned in the time-period that stands between the Old and New Testaments—identifies the burial of abandoned corpses as an act of supreme piety. Near the end of the first century A.D., the Jewish historian Josephus contrasted the Jewish perspective on crucified bodies to typical Roman practices. According to Josephus, “Jews are conscientious about their burial practices—so much so that even criminals sentenced to crucifixion are removed and buried before the sun sets!” In another writing, Josephus stated, “[Jews] must furnish fire, water, and food to anyone who asks, giving directions to the right road, never leaving a corpse unburied.” Later rabbis echoed this concern for the deceased. According to the rabbis, although the bodies of criminals might not immediately be placed with the bodies of their ancestors, even criminals had to be buried. After their flesh decomposed, the bones of criminals were placed in a family tomb.

Especially approaching a festival as important as Passover, the Jewish people and particularly the religious leaders would have wanted the body of Jesus removed from the cross. And, in the case of a figure as popular and potentially problematic as Jesus, it’s likely that someone would have been willing to bury him—even if that act rendered the person ceremonially unclean.

In this context, the request of Joseph of Arimathea makes complete sense (Mark 15:43-45). To be sure, Joseph wanted to honor the body of Jesus. But, from the perspective of Pontius Pilate and fellow members of the ruling council, here’s how his motive would have appeared: As a member of the ruling council, Joseph of Arimathea wanted the corpse removed before sundown to avoid any defilement in the land of Israel (Deuteronomy 21:23). A burial overseen by the Jewish ruling council also fits with Papyrus Cairo 10759—a fragmentary account of the life of Jesus that, though written several decades after the apostolic eyewitnesses, retains remnants of an ancient retelling of the resurrection narrative, independent of the New Testament Gospels.

Someone would have wanted to bury the body of Jesus—that much seems certain. Both the Roman authorities and the ruling council would have wanted to stifle any loyalty to this would-be Messiah as soon as possible. Furthermore, from a Jewish perspective, not to bury his body would have violated the law of God. So, the question isn’t whether anyone would have requested the body of Jesus—someone would have. The question is, “Would the Romans actually have granted such a request?” The answer to that question is clearly yes.

:: Pontius Pilate Would Have Handed Over the Body of Jesus for Burial ::

In times of rebellion and war, Romans were known to ignore the native practices of occupied nations. That’s why, when crushing the Jewish independence movement in A.D. 70, the Romans crucified thousands of Jews and left the corpses to rot on their crosses.

But Jesus wasn’t crucified in a time of war.

He was, in fact, crucified during a relatively peaceful period in the history of Judea.

And, in times of relative peace, Romans consistently respected the laws of occupied nations. “The Romans,” Josephus contended, “do not require … their subjects to violate their national laws.”

As part of this pattern of toleration for local peculiarities, Pontius Pilate would have granted the body of a deceased Jew to his own people—even if Roman law didn’t demand it. After all, hadn’t Herod Antipas given the body of John the Baptist to his disciples after he beheaded the popular prophet? During a potentially volatile religious festival, Pilate would have had an even greater reason to respect local customs. Pilate’s desperate determination to maintain peace during the Passover would probably have persuaded the governor to hand over the body of Jesus for burial.

But such concessions weren’t just Roman practice.

They were Roman law.

Here’s what Pandectae—a summary of the Roman legal code—declared about the bodies of crucified criminals:

The bodies of those who are condemned to death should not be refused their relatives; and [Caesar] Augustus the Divine, in the tenth book of his Vita, said that this rule had been observed.

At present, the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted; and sometimes it is not permitted, especially where persons have been convicted of high treason. … The bodies of persons who have been punished should be given to whoever requests them for the purpose of burial.

This fits perfectly with the description in the New Testament Gospels. Roman law required Pilate to provide the body of Jesus “to whoever” requested it “for the purpose of burial.” When Joseph of Arimathea requested the body of Jesus, Pilate verified that Jesus was dead—he had already dealt with Jesus once, and he didn’t want to deal with him again if he wasn’t quite dead and his followers somehow resuscitated him. Once a centurion confirmed that Jesus was dead, Pilate granted Joseph’s request.

“Roman legal practice,” Gerd Lüdemann claims in the book What Really Happened?: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection, “provided for someone who died on the cross to rot there or be consumed by vultures, jackals or other animals.” Despite the confident title of Lüdemann’s text, this was not “what really happened”; Roman legal practice explicitly provided for the precise opposite of this claim. Other than mass crucifixions during times of war or revolt, it was only when a Roman citizen was executed for high treason that burial was forbidden—a category that the crucifixion of Jesus certainly didn’t fit. Jesus of Nazareth was not a Roman citizen; his execution occurred not because he has conspired against Caesar but because because it was claimed that he had asserted kingship over the Jewish people, an act that could (at least from the Romans’ perspective) result in a revolt.

:: Why Were So Many Bodies Left on the Crosses? ::

So, why—if families could request an executed corpse—does Roman literature include so many references to the consumption of crucified corpses by birds and beasts? And why has only a single heelbone from one crucified man ever been found?

Don’t forget this crucial fact: Crucifixion constituted the supreme dishonor in the ancient world. The very word “crucify” remained unmentioned in polite company. Among Romans, suicide was to be preferred above a cross. As such, beyond the borders of the Jewish provinces, it would have been highly unusual for a family to reclaim the corpse of their crucified kin; families would have disowned this person because of the shame that the accused criminal’s actions had brought on their family’s name. These forsaken bodies—the vast majority of the victims of Roman crucifixion—remained on their crosses to be consumed. Thus their remains disintegrated into the dust of the Roman Empire. But the case of Jesus—a Jew, crucified near Jerusalem on the eve of a popular religious festival—doesn’t fit the typical pattern: The Jews would have wanted Jesus buried, and Roman practice called for Pontius Pilate to grant this request.

________

11QT64:11-13; 11QT48:10–14; 4Q524.

Craig Evans, “Jewish Burial Traditions and the Resurrection of Jesus”: http://www.craigevans.com

N. Haas, “Anthropological Observations on the Skeletal Remains from Giv‘at ha-Mivtar,” Israel Exploration Journal 20 (1970) 38–59.

Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross rev. ed. (Minneapolis, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1977).

Josephus, Antiquitates Judaica, 17:10; 18:5; The Jewish War, ed. H. St.-J. Thackeray, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927) 2:5; 4:5; 5:6-11; Contra Apionem, in The Life, Against Apion, ed. H. St.-J. Thackeray, in Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1926) 2:6, 29

Juvenal, Satires, 14:77-78.

S. R. Llewelyn, ed., New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 1.

Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:4-6.

Philo of Alexandria, In Flaccus, Philo, ed. F.H. Colson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941) 10:81-85

Seneca, De consolatione ad Marciam, in Volume II: Moral Essays, ed. John Basore, in Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1932) 20:3.

Cornelius Tacitus, Annales, 6:29; 15:44:

Tobit 1:18–20; 2:3–8; 4:3–4; 6:15; 14:10–13.

V. Tzaferis, “Crucifixion–The Archaeological Evidence: Remains of a Jewish Victim of Crucifixion Found in Jerusalem,” Biblical Archaeology Review 11 (January—February 1985): 44-53.

“The future shape of the world,” Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler has noted, “appears to be a worldview competition between Christianity, Islam, and Western secularism.” The Hunger Games film and books present us with a world where the worldview competition is over in North America, and Western secularism has won.

Centuries in the future, the secularist’s dream has turned true: Among the citizens of Panem, God is unmentioned, unnecessary, perhaps even unknown. Rich or poor, powerful or powerless, the people of Panem proceed with no apparent consideration of God above or hell below. John Lennon imagined in 1971 that such a world would result in “all the people living life in peace”—but discontent seethes beneath the surface of Panem, and the Hunger Games themselves represent the survival of the fittest at its most brutal.

So what societal values survive in this land that has been denuded of the divine?

I would suggest that the two values that have survived secularization in this fictional future world are self and the state.

:: Self and State in the Hunger Games ::

The purpose of the state in conducting the Hunger Games is to sustain an illusion of hope but to quell this hope by manipulating the outcome of the games. “The only thing stronger than fear is hope,” President Snow reminds the Gamemaker when it becomes clear that Katniss is no typical tribute, “Control it!”

What Katniss and Peeta demonstrate in the arena is a triumph of self over state. The Capitol may manipulate people’s hopes, but the Capitol cannot ultimately suppress the people’s capacity to choose their own path. “If I’m going to die,” Peeta muses the night before the games begin, “I want to still be me.” In the end, the two protagonists’ self-determination rises to subvert the state’s power. Katniss and Peeta become partners, and both survive by threatening to end their own lives, thus depriving the Capitol of a champion—a possibility that would steal the state’s capacity to manipulate the people’s hopes.

Few would disagree that self-determination is preferable to dictatorship. Yet the elevation of self-determination to a supreme value is no less problematic than the elevation of the state to supreme authority. Separated from any sense of the divine, neither the state nor the self is sufficient to establish ethics that can support and sustain human thriving. This insufficiency is most clearly apparent in a question posed in a conversation between Katniss and Gale before the Hunger Games begin—a question that neither book nor film ultimately answers.

“You’re the best hunter I know,” says Gale.

“It’s not just hunting. They’re armed. They think,” I say.

“So do you. And you’ve had more practice. Real practice,” he says. “You know how to kill.”

“Not people,” I say.

“How different can it be, really?” says Gale grimly.

The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all.

:: Human Value in a Land That Has Forgotten God ::

“How different can it be, really?” Gale asks and, in the process, reveals one of the most problematic aspects of a society that has exiled God from public discourse.

Is the death of a person truly more tragic than the demise of any other creature? If so, why? A secular worldview cannot provide a consistent and coherent answer to this question—except perhaps to make the utilitarian suggestion that, if people began to kill one another indiscriminately, human society would become unsustainable. Yet, if human beings are merely primates with overdeveloped cerebral cortices, why does the sustainability of human society matter anyway?

This is not to suggest that human death is treated lightly in The Hunger Games. When Katniss kills other humans in this first book and film, she most often does so indirectly or in the process of protecting others. Her nightmares in the aftermath of her father’s death and her sacrificial commitment to the survival of certain others suggest that the loss of human life can be tragic. When a twelve-year-old tribute dies, Katniss sings to her and covers her corpse with flowers, suggesting the need even in a secular culture to mark death with some sort of sacred ceremony. Yet what the secularized worldview of The Hunger Games lacks is any clear capacity to articulate why human life matters or which lives should be valued.

Nevertheless, I would contend that Suzanne Collins does imply an answer to this dilemma. Her solution is consistent with the supreme value of self-determination in The Hunger Games—but it is also antithetical to a Judeo-Christian worldview that sees human life as intrinsically valuable.

In the final pages of the book and in the closing moments of the movie, a pack of wolfish mutants mauls the only remaining tribute other than Katniss and Peeta. In response to the tribute’s plea for death, Katniss sends an arrow through his skull. What justifies this death, particularly in the book, is that Katniss’ intent is “pity, not vengeance” and that the victim requests his own death. The point implied here is that even the value of one’s life is self-determined in The Hunger Games. If a person’s future is filled with agony instead of hope, death may be chosen over life, and human death is tragic only if the deceased person would have preferred life.

This is a popular version of the perspective that bioethicist John Harris and others have articulated throughout the past decade. According to Harris’ self-determined consequentialism, the value of a life is determined by the value that the individual places his or her life. “There is,” Harris writes, “only one thing wrong with dying and that is doing it when you don’t want to. … Persons who want to live are wronged by being killed because they are thereby deprived of something they value.” Self-determination of the value of one’s life becomes fundamental to Harris’ argument in favor of abortion, since “non-persons or potential persons cannot be wronged in this way because death does not deprive them of anything they can value.”*

Moments after the death of their last competitor, in the climactic triumph of self over state, Katniss and Peeta make it clear that they are willing to commit suicide before killing one another. In a fascinating twist on humanity’s fall in the Garden of Eden, the woman urges the man to consume fruit that will be fatal for both of them. Seeing that the Capitol is about to be deprived of any capacity to manipulate people’s hopes, the powers of Panem intervene, and the threat of death becomes the last tributes’ pathway to life.

Suicide or murder is, of course, a false dilemma, and Katniss clearly expects the Capitol to intervene before she and Peeta consume the fatal poison. Still, the threat serves to underscore the underlying point that each individual decides the value of his or her own life. Such self-determined value stands in stark contrast to the Judeo-Christian perspective that human life is intrinsically valuable because every person is a living likeness of God, created in his very image (Genesis 1:26-28).

Princeton ethicist Peter Singer predicted the possibility that, in Western culture at some point prior to the midpoint of the twenty-first century, “only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.” The Hunger Games presents another possible future—a future in which the thought of taking a human life is still accompanied by a nagging sense that something about this action is wrong, but no one can quite remember why.

__________

The bestselling novel and blockbuster movie The Hunger Games provoked a wide range of reactions among evangelical Christians. A reviewer from Focus on the Family find in the female protagonist a heroine who determines to value human life, even if that means sacrificing her own. Alvin Reid and Amy Simpson glimpse the gospel throughout the storyline while MovieGuide sees such strong humanistic messages that the film is deemed “unacceptable.” Doug Wilson describes the book and film as an exercise in ethical relativism while Dick Staub treats The Hunger Games as a morality tale that moves beyond situational ethics.

[Read more about the ethical perspective in The Hunger Games here.]

From my perspective, such a breadth of responses is encouraging. The Hunger Games trilogy and film deserves neither uncritical acceptance nor flippant rejection from the Christian community. What this piece of popular culture calls for is thoughtful engagement that is willing to listen for echoes of the gospel while critiquing a deeply-flawed worldview.

:: Why I Hadn’t Read The Hunger Games Until Now ::

My exposure to The Hunger Games began with a pleading glance from my teenager. “Everybody says it’s going to be an amazing movie. Could you at least look at the book to see if I might be able to watch the movie?”

It was a respectful request, and she was prepared to follow our family protocols for watching such films: If a movie is based on a book, the book must be read before there’s even a chance of seeing the story on the silver screen, and parents must approve the book before the progeny can read it. Up to that point, I had only heard of The Hunger Games in the context of literature for female young adults, and I had assumed they would be too similar to Twilight for our family’s taste. Further complicating matters was the fact that Denny Burk is the designated Twilight fan among the faculty at Southern Seminary; interacting too much with popular entertainment intended for teenaged girls could intrude into his important area of specialization.

Despite my trepidation at meandering inadvertently into a Twilight zone, I began to glance through the first volume of The Hunger Games for the sake of my daughter. Three chapters into the book, I was hooked. I found myself spending a half-day devouring the first volume then immediately purchasing the remainder of the trilogy.

The prose is far from fine literature. Descriptions of the heroine’s inner conflicts when caught in a romantic triangle are cliched at best, cringe-worthy at worst. Yet The Hunger Games is—for the most part—a well-plotted tale set in a richly-detailed dystopian future. The premise, the pacing, and an abundance of clever allusions to ancient history kept me reading long past the point when I had planned to lay the book aside.

:: Theseus of Athens with a Braid and a Bow ::

Katniss Everdeen is a fatherless sixteen-year-old in the nation of Panem, a confederation of twelve districts in a far-future North America. Katniss lives with her mother and sister in District 12, a destitute region responsible for producing the coal that provides power in a distant and decadent Capitol. The family survives because Katniss has carried on her father’s habit of hunting illegally beyond the fence that hems in District 12. Katniss hunts alongside Gale, a young man who lost his father in the same coal-mining accident that took the life of Katniss’ father.

Nearly a century earlier, the districts revolted against the Capitol only to be defeated. To punish the districts for their failed rebellion, the Capitol decreed that each district would send two tributes—one young man, one young woman—to fight one another to the death in the yearly Hunger Games. Each year, twenty-four youth enter a vast arena that encircles a different type of terrain each time; only one emerges alive.. The games function as entertainment in the popular culture of Panem, particularly in the Capitol, and the victors become celebrities.

What Suzanne Collins has twined together in these novels is a futuristic retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. After conquering the Athenians, King Minos of Crete constructed a circular labyrinth with a mutant beast—the Minotaur—at the center. To avoid utter destruction at the hands of the Cretans, the Athenians agreed to send seven young men and seven young women each year into the labyrinth to battle the Minotaur. The third time that this process played out, Theseus—son of the king of Athens—offered himself as a volunteer and defeated the beast.

The beast in The Hunger Games is not a single particular creature, although mutant creatures (“muttations”) do make appearances throughout the trilogy. The beast in this arena is the system that turns citizens into slaves of the Capitol. President Coriolanus Snow—described throughout the books as a snakish tempter—serves as a personification of this system.

When the name of Katniss’ twelve-year-old sister is plucked from the bowl to represent District 12, Katniss Everdeen offers herself as her sister’s substitute. She is paired with Peeta Mellark, the son of a baker, and sent to the Capitol to prepare for the seventy-fourth annual Hunger Games. In the hype that precedes the games, it’s revealed that Peeta has long loved Katniss, and they are portrayed by the media of Panem as a star-crossed couple, faced with the impossible dilemma of one having to kill the other for either to survive.

In her training and in the arena, Katniss Everdeen is a reluctant hero with a Byronic streak. Her compassion for a twelve-year-old girl in the arena transforms her into a folk hero among the citizens of Panem. When she outwits the seemingly-omnipotent powers of the Capitol by bringing the game to an end in a way that saves both herself and Peeta, Katniss becomes more than a tribute or even a hero. She becomes a symbol of hope and solidarity for those who wish to overthrow the Capitol.

:: Quivering Cameras in the Shadow of Cain ::

Working with author Suzanne Collins and screenwriter Billy Ray, director Gary Ross has developed one of the most faithful novel-to-screen adaptations of the past decade. Only one change between book and film struck me as unnecessary and unfaithful to the original story line: In the movie, Katniss obtains her mockingjay pin—a token that increases in significance as the trilogy unfolds—through an impulse purchase for her sister; in the book, the pin is more purposefully placed in Katniss’ possession.

Jennifer Lawrence is stellar as Katniss Everdeen. Tiny tremors of fear flitting through her face and fingers, heaving sobs over the corpse of a child, hunger-hardened glares of determination in the face of death—all of them are deeply convincing. Josh Hutcherson, playing the part of Peeta Mellark, slips skillfully between the same roles that Peeta does in the books: he manipulates the media but refuses to sacrifice his commitment to do whatever it takes to save Katniss.

A faithful move from book to film means that not only the book’s strengths but also its weaknesses are transferred—and perhaps magnified—on the screen. A solid underlying premise from Collins couples with strong performances from Lawrence and Hutcherson to prevent their characters from becoming the next Bella and Edward. The same can’t be said for Gale, a cliched character in the books who becomes a brooding cardboard cutout in the film.

Gary Ross chose to tell this tale in a documentary style, with an ever-shifting camera . In most instances, “shaky cam” pretends to provide audiences with cinéma vérité while mostly just making people queasy. Yet, this approach serves The Hunger Games well. The camera shots reveal the grisly deaths of the tributes in rapid glimpses before quickly turning away. It is as if the camera itself is shifting its gaze, unable to linger over the horror.

For the fictional citizens of Panem, the deaths of the tributes are entertainment; the cameras they have embedded in earth and trees for their viewing pleasure never blink at the horror. By refusing to allow moviegoers to gaze long on these murders, The Hunger Games underscores the point that these deaths are meant to provoke shock and reflection, not amusement.

If such carnage is necessary to a story line, perhaps these quivering glimpses are an appropriate approach to depicting the dark horror of walking in the footsteps of Cain, staining the earth east of Eden with the blood of our fellow human beings. And yet, one wonders whether such a cinematographic strategy can possibly succeed for moviegoers of the twenty-first century. So many scenes in so many films, television episodes, and video games have descended so deeply into virtual orgies of gore, lingering long over horrors that ought to have remained unseen or, at most, glimpsed briefly in a context that considered the true tragedy of life lost. In a world that gorges itself on virtual violence, are we still capable of being shocked by these fleeting shots of teen-on-teen carnage for the sake of entertainment in the arenas of Panem? And, if we aren’t, one wonders whether The Hunger Games are quite as far-fetched as we’d like to think.