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>>Montgomery: Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute! Now, here we've got to be very careful, because
there is a certain element of presumptu-ousness, in my opinion, in your article. You seem to
be sure as to how these accounts ought to have been written. Now, of course, had you
written them, you would have included material or excluded material that the writers didn't.
But that may be the reason why God didn't choose you to write the article.
>>Naland: I wasn't around then, so...
>>Montgomery: Exactly. Exactly. So as a historian what we need to do is to go with what the
stuff says unless we have solid and indeed better reason contemporaneously for not going
along with it. And here we have John, who, according to his own students, was an eyewitness
to these events stating that Joseph of Arimathea was a secret disciple.
>>Ankerberg: Also, Mr. Naland, you also have then the fact you have two witnesses here
because in Matthew he says, "As evening approached there came a rich man from Arimathea named
Joseph who had himself become a disciple of Jesus." Now, the fact is here you've got two
witnesses that say the same thing, and a man that's on the Council, we can all understand
the fact that on the Council he had a lot to lose when they'd just killed off the person
that he is secretly following. At the same time, the evidence that you read in Luke where
it says, "Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright
man, who had not consented to their decision and action." And the fact that he did not
consent to the whole Council's action, there's got to be a pretty good reason why. And that
flows with John's account and Matthew's account, the reason why. He was a disciple.
>>Naland: The reason why was that he was a pious Jew and the Romans were...the Roman
Empire was not a pretty thing. The Romans were vicious, barbarian pagans. And here you
have this Jew, Jesus, who is being crucified by the Romans, put up over the Sabbath is
what they wanted. And Joseph, in my understanding, as a pious Jew, just could not stand for that,
and he...
>>Montgomery: That may well be right. That may very well be right. But the point is that
the primary accounts, the firsthand testimony goes beyond that and says, also he was a "secret
disciple and he took down the body" and did those various things with it. But let's take
the worst possible scenario. Let's say that his servants by his command took the body
off someplace. The problem that you've got there is that as the account also says, Nicodemus
was privy to this, and obviously other people in those circles would be privy to it, and
these events occurred as public events of that time. Everybody was interested in them.
To think that he could have somehow, or his servants could somehow have gotten away with
stashing that body with all of the interest groups involved in the situa氟ion really
requires more faith than the resurrection does. You just can't explain it away that
way. It was Morison in his book Who Moved the Stone? that pointed out that if you're
going to doubt the resurrec氟ion of Christ, you've really got to provide a clean satisfactory
explana氟ion of what happened to this body. And the "Joseph of Arimathea" explanation
is getting you into more hot water than I think you want to get into.
>>Naland: I'm ready. Just give me a second.
>>Ankerberg: Okay, a final statement, because we're out of time for this week and we want
to move on. Where do you think the evi-dence...because what we have said is that you have two witnesses
that make a blanket statement and you have another that really does not contradict it,
and yet you want to go a different direction than the material. A concluding statement.
>>Naland: Okay, if you agree with the main scholars who say that Mark is the oldest,
and you see that Luke and Matthew are later and John is even later, Mark does not say
anything about the guards, he doesn't say anything about Joseph being a disciple of
Jesus, and later on, as the young Christian religion is growing and people are fighting
it and they're saying it was just a "ghost story" and all these things, then you get
the later accounts written by people trying to convince others of the reality of the risen
Jesus. And human nature is that you put the best foot forward, and maybe you add a little
more than you've received.
>>Montgomery: Yeah but you don't put your best foot forward when someone is going to
chop it off, and the fact of the matter is, that all of this stuff -- Mark, Matthew, Luke
-- all of this stuff was circulating among hostile witnesses, among people who had the
means, the motive and the opportu歪ity to blast it if the stuff was not set forth satisfactorily.
F. F. Bruce at the University of Manchester has made the very strong point that really
the presence of the hostile witnesses turns out to be the legal equivalent of cross examination.
There's no way in the world that they could have gotten away with this, even if you're
right, that they introduced it as a kind of subsequent explanation so as to put their
best foot forward.
>>Naland: Well, how could we help you now?
>>Ankerberg: We're out of time this week, guys. Just finish that up and we'll pick it
up again next week.
>>Montgomery: Well, I was simply going to make the point that the disciples, the very
people who wrote this stuff, had the temerity, the stupidity, to go to the Jewish synagogues
to present this. That would have been the worst thing to do if Mr. Naland was right
and that the stuff had been added later in order to make the story look better. Because
in the Jewish syna柞ogues were the rabbis, the Jewish reli柞ious leaders that had come
in from the Diaspora and had been present, many of them, at the time these very events
had transpired.