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>>Ankerberg: Now, guys, I’m glad that you’re here. And, Darrell, you’ve just written
an interesting article that’s coming out “When the Media Becomes a Nuisance.” And
one of the things that really struck me in this article was the fact that you said that
something has changed in our society about the way we get information about Jesus and
where that’s taking us. And then you talk about what we talked about in the introduction.
There are two stories about Jesus being told. Tell us about that.
>>Bock: Well, the way in which information is changing is that it’s coming direct to
the public. It’s coming not through university channels and not just among scholars, but
there actually is an effort by scholars to inform the public on what’s on going on
in the university campuses with this different portrait of Jesus. When you pull that into
the public square, you have two stories of Jesus in the public square, both of which
are called Christianity, but are very different. And so I’ve given them the names of Christianity
on the one hand – where the person of Jesus is at the center of the story, it’s his
work as well as his message that’s important. And then there’s Jesusanity, which refers
to Jesus of Nazareth, and there it is his teaching that is important, but his person
is not. So in one Jesus is the Christ, the chosen one of God, the anointed one around
whom the entire program of God rotates. In the other, Jesus is just a messenger. And
he’s a prophet, which means he’s respected, but he’s not regarded as anything special
in terms of the work that he does, other than to deliver a message.
>>Ankerberg: Yeah. And you say they’ve introduced what are called conversation stoppers to the
public, so that anybody that’s having a conversation about Jesus, via the media today
we have these conversation stoppers. Give me a couple of examples.
>>Bock: Well, for example, what do you do with all these other gospels that were written
and never made it in the Bible but should have? Or, don’t you realize that history
is written by the winners? And the New Testament was written by the winners, and now we’ve
found the stuff by the losers, so now we’ve got to change the picture because we’ve
got the whole conversation.