Friday, December 6, 2019 Well, I've been home most of this week recovering from surgery, and I finally finished a book I bought a couple of years ago. "Hijacking the Historical Jesus. Answering Recent Attacks on the Jesus of the Bible" is a good resource book for public evangelists to have in their library, and I'm glad I added it to mine. It is written by Phil Fernandes, Kyle Larson, and Matt Coombe, and I became familiar with it from watching Phil Fernandes apologetics teaching videos online. Chapters include:
An Overview of the History and Biases of Modern Jesus Research
The DaVinci Code
New Testament Reliability
Redating the New Testament Books
Is Jesus Just Another Myth?
Identifying the Canon: Which Books Belong in the Bible
And quite an extensive study on Bart Ehrman, his skepticism, his view of the four gospels, and the deity of Jesus
It took me way to long to read because I can be a lazy reader, but also because there is so much information and research presented that I would read a little and then set it aside. It is an academic book and not a pleasure read, and I need to go back through and make notes & highlight data that I can use to help better engage with the skeptical worldviews we encounter as we take the gospel of Jesus out into the streets of post-truth USA. You should check it out if you want to consider good, scholarly responses to refute the skeptics and point people to the Lord Jesus. Paul
Just an update to a previous post, "4-Point Case for Christianity." I'm adding a You Tube video that was broadcast live last night, of Frank Turek speaking at Eastern Tennessee State University. He covers the 4-point case in more depth in this presentation, plus he takes questions from the audience.
(Original post on 1/14/17) A quick 4-point case for Christianity from Frank Turek that I copied
down from "The 5 Minute Apologist." Frank asks and answers the following
4 questions to make his case.
Check it out:
Point 1: Does truth exist?
The Bible cannot be true
if there is no truth. (By the way, if there is no truth, neither can any other
book be true, including books written by atheists).
Obviously, it pretty easy
to say truth does exist: if someone claims “Truth does not exist”, we simply
ask, “Is that true?” The Bible claims to be true.
Point 2: Does God exist?
We can’t have a word from
God if there is no God. If there’s no God, throw the Bible away, and every
other book that talks about God.
But there is much evidence
that there is a …
Spaceless
Timeless
Immaterial
Powerful
Moral
Personal
Intelligent Cause of the universe
out there.
One piece of evidence: the universe exploded into being out nothing.
Once there was no space, no matter, and no time, and the entire space-time
continuum leapt into existence out of nothing, therefore whatever caused
space-time-matter cannot be made out of space, time, or matter.
Spaceless-Timeless-Immaterial – we just
covered that.
Powerful – to be able to create the universe
out of nothing.
Moral – absolute, existential morality exists.
Is it ever right to molest children for fun? No matter where or when, we
know this is wrong. Why? Because God is an absolutely moral being.
Personal – impersonal forces can’t choose to
create anything, only a person can.
Intelligent – to be able to fine-tune the
universe to the degree that it is.
Point 3: Are miracles possible?
Obviously, the Bible can’t
be true if miracles are not possible. But there are very good evidences that
miracles have occurred, and certainly the greatest miracle in the Bible has
already occurred, in the first verse: “In the beginning, God created the heaven
and the earth.” If that verse is true, then every other verse is at least
believable. We just went through an
argument for this first verse in the Bible being true. If that verse is true, certainly
every other miracle claim in the Bible could be true.
So when people tell me, “I
don’t believe in miracles” I tell them, “Look around you – you’re living in
one. This universe is a miracle.”
Point 4: Do the New Testament documents tell us the
truth about history?
In other words, are they
historically reliable? There is a lot of great evidence that they are telling
us the truth. One of these evidences, certainly not exhaustive or conclusive in
itself, is what is called “Embarrassing Testimony.”
Both the Old Testament and
the New Testament are full of embarrassing details that no one would include if
they were making this up. Moses argued with God to send someone else; Abraham
was a liar; David was an adulterer and a murderer; the Israelites consistently
refused to believe or trust God after seeing miracle after miracle; the
disciples run away at the crucifixion, and who are the brave ones? The women!
Is any man going to make that up? The men wrote these documents, and yet they
wrote down that they were Mr. Sissy Pants, while the women were the brave one’s
who went down to discover the empty tomb.
Now there’s other evidence
too:
Early testimony
Eye Witness testimony
Excruciating testimony (these people died for
what they said they saw)
Extra-Biblical testimony (other writers
talking about this)
Expected testimony (dealing with Old Testament fulfillment
of detailed prophecy)
Friday, December 6, 2019