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>>Ankerberg: Now, we want to talk about, in the documents, in the evidence, Dan, if you
go to the University and you’re talking to students right now that are listening and
saying “I’d like to learn about Jesus,” in the evidence that we have, the historical
evidence, where would you advise them to start to get a glimpse of who Jesus claimed he was?
>>Wallace I’d have them start with the Gospel of Mark. And certainly they have to start
with a Gospel, but if they start with the Gospel of Mark then they’re dealing with
a document that both sides of the theological aisle would agree is probably the most primitive
Gospel. And even here, you strip all the layers of theological accretions that are assumed
to take place in Matthew, Luke and John, you get down to Mark and you’re down to the
closest core we can get. And even here you see important glimpses of Jesus being seen
as God. One of my favorite texts that suggests this, in fact there’s three that I’d like
to link if I could.
>>Ankerberg: Sure.
>>Wallace Mark 2:5: Jesus is in Peter’s house and they’re ripping off the tiles,
not tiles but the roof so that four men are bringing a paralytic inside because they can’t
get through the door, the place is all filled up. And so they drop this man down – gently
– and then Jesus says to him, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” And they go, “What!”
I mean, this guy didn’t come to have his sins forgiven, he came so that he could walk!
And so you get these religious leaders who are sitting there. And they start muttering
to themselves, “He’s blaspheming. Only God can forgive sins.” [Mark 2:6-7] Half
of what they said was true – that is, only God can forgive sins. But the other half is
not true. And so then Jesus responds to what they are murmuring to themselves. He says,
“To show you that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,…” and then he
commands the man to walk. [Mark 2:10-11] Now, what you see here is, Jesus is appropriating
the actions that only God can do, which is to forgive sins. And so when he says the Son
of Man has authority to do this, he’s saying something about himself that could only be
said of God. Now, these religious leaders understand it, but the disciples don’t.
And the reason the religious leaders understand who Jesus is claiming to be is because they
don’t have any loyalty to him at all. They have loyalty to the Jewish code, and consequently
they read the shema every day. It says, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
[Deut. 6:4] Well, when Jesus is forgiving sins he is claiming that he is functioning
in the capacity of God. Now, the disciples, on the other hand, who
are not theologically trained, but they are loyal to Jesus and they’re loyal Jews, now
they just have a big question mark over who Jesus really is. They know he’s a good guy,
they know he’s a prophet, they know he can heal people – they’ve just seen this.
They know that he can cast out demons. But they still don’t have a category for him.
Two chapters later we get to Mark 4, and here Jesus had just stilled the storm. And he does
it with two words: “Quiet! Shut up!” [Mark 4:39] That’s it. He doesn’t say, “I
command you in the name of God” or anything like this. He just quiets the storm down.
And instantly it goes still. In verse 41 the disciples say, “who is this guy who can
still the storm?” So still they’ve got no category for him yet. They’re loyal to
him, but they don’t know to whom they’re loyal.
Then you go later into Mark 8 and you see the healing of the blind man, where Jesus
has to spit in his face. [Mark 8:22ff] It’s a remarkably repulsive story that I hope we
can get to in a later show. But after that and after the confession of Jesus as the Messiah
by Peter [Mark 8:29], and the disciples don’t have a clue what it means for Jesus to be
the Messiah and to die on the cross, to be raised from the dead. They don’t have a
category for that yet. Then you get to Mark 9:9 where, after the Transfiguration, when
Jesus is with three of his disciples and they come down from the mountain. And he says,
“Now don’t tell anybody about this until after my resurrection.” And then the next
verse says, Mark 9:10, “And they began to debate with one another what the resurrection
might mean.” What all this points to is, this is genuine
historical material. For the disciples not to have a clue about Jesus being raised in
human history, rather than being raised from the dead at the end of time, as what Judaism
did teach. This is a remarkable thing. They didn’t have a category for that yet. And
that shows us that they could not have invented that doctrine right after the crucifixion.
They couldn’t have come up with this. This had to be something that Jesus taught them
because they didn’t understand it. And only when he’s raised from the dead they said,
“Oh, you really did mean a physical resurrection from the dead.”