2023-07-25
Given by Dr Peter Masters
Reading: 1 Corinthians 15
1 Corinthians 15.4-6
4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: 5 And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: 6 After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
The date of this letter is AD60-64 because there is no reference in it to Nero's persecution to believers. It is an early letter. It is not very long after calvary and the resurrection, we are talking here of AD33 to AD60/61 strictly speaking. Of 500 people who saw the resurrected Christ, the majority of them are still alive. They are speaking of these things, these are disciples, not just a congregation, but people devoted to making Christ known, preaching as eyewitnesses of the resurrection, and still most are alive. Only some had fallen asleep.
Tonight is an apologetics night. There are many on the internet who make confident assertions against Christ and the truthfulness of these things, undermining scripture and all kind of things, denying evidence for God, or Christ. Pastor started to pick these things up 60 years ago, there is nothing new under the sun. The most strident of the anti-Christ speakers just paraphrase old materials, these things have been resolved for years and it makes no difference, because tremendous prejudice is at work. People keep going. It doesn't bring down believers, because believers have what John calls "an anointing". They know that the Scripture is in fact a revelation from God, a tremendous instinct within them. They know that these things are truth, and they are certain. They may be thrown or troubled by assertions, but not actually thrown. But these are tremendous impediments to the seeker, or the unbeliever. People are thrown by the confidence with which statements are made.
They will ask "Who is Jesus?" There is no secular record or references, so they claim, to Christ. There is no verification, He leaves no footprint in documents or manuscripts of the period or in archaeology. These are the assertions that are made, so it is important to make a response to them. The evidence is fantastic and overwhelming. These claims are made in classes, colleges and RE classes. It is tremendous how far they go.
The atheists say that faith is absurd. Religious faith is an absurdity, and abdication of all reason and rational purposes. Some go even further, Dawkins will say regularly that he feels sorry for intelligent people who are taken up with this nonsense about Christ, and their faith is an entirely irrational act, it is an absurdity and people should be ashamed of it. These things are said regularly.
You can understand atheists being annoyed at Christians. When young, we go by instinct, and sometimes not very well versed in defending what we believe. But mostly, it is entirely unjustified. They think that faith is blind hope. But it is not. Faith that saves, saving faith, is never blind hope.
The very word faith in Greek comes from to be convinced or persuaded. That is the root, the origin of the Greek word. Faith is an act on the basis of being convinced that something is true and right. It is perfectly rational and based on evidence. When you first believe, you are given this divinely appointed conviction that these things are true. One day you discover that this Bible which was a mystery has a moral demand on you, and you know that it is true. It occurs to you, that everything that it says about the human race and human behaviour and their depravity and sinfulness, these things add up, the evidences around you is that this Bible has hit the nail on the head. Even the conviction that is supernaturally given to you, is not isolated from a mental process, with that conviction you begin to observe, that is the experience of all who are saved. You look with new eyes, you look at things with a Biblical way, this is because of the Fall, this is because of rebellion, that illumination enabled you to see evidence to which you were completely blind before. You saw how things actually were, you appreciated these things. The enemies of faith got it all wrong, faith is never blind hope, yes even the spiritual element of it.
You see for the first time, the great mass of evidence that only the scripture understands human beings and human nature, human alienation from God. It was evidence that the Holy Spirit drew in your anointing when you came to Christ. Their idea of faith, gently, is ignorance. We try to explain time and time again that this word group is persuasion, and it adds up. But they won't listen, saying this is irrational blind faith, that is the line they choose to take, and you can't persuade them otherwise.
1 Corinthians 15.1
1 Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand;
Declare, preached - from revelation of God, the truth has to be told. What is the gospel?
1 Corinthians 15.2
2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.
These essential doctrines that must be remembered and passed on.
1 Corinthians 15.3
3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
There is evidence straight away, Christ died for our sins. That is the leading doctrine of Salvation, according to scripture. This extraordinary book the Bible, supernatural, with prophecies of all things that Christ would die and be raised again, who has heard of such a thing in Secular literature, a great person being foretold over centuries. There is no evidence for Christ. Evidence is right here. No wonder the Christian faith spread far and wide, apostles were given powers to do miracles that Christ did, when they spoke of the resurrection people believed because of the special deeds they performed, and the Christian faith spread far and wide.
1 Corinthians 15.4
4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:
That is simply not true. Not an enormous number, but there are some. Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian, hostile to Christianity, although questionable, a great historian who refers 3 times to Christ and the spread of the Christian church. You have three English translators of Josephus to choose from. A contemporary, secular record. He was nevertheless a Jew.
There are others, a Roman senator Tacitus. Who speaks of the burning of Rome in AD64, who says Nero did it to blame it on the Christians and persecute the Christians, but it only spread Christians more abroad.
There are 5 important secular references to Christ as Messiah, and his Work, and the early church and even the worship of the church.
When you hear this statement confidently asserted, they are not true. Something you can pass on and bear in mind also.
There is so much more that can be said in connection.
The early church fathers bore so much history of the gospels. The atheists often attack the gospels. None of the original copies of the gospel are available today.
The earliest Greek manuscripts in Manchester University Library is from AD120. It is a page of a book, it is has several verses of John's gospel on the front and the back in Greek. That Rylands Library Papyrus, P52 is it's document number, is the earliest known fragment of a gospel. Some scholars put it back to AD160-170, can't accurately carbon date, can only rely on experts who study the handwriting and by dating it to other documents at the time.
There are 5821 fragments or whole manuscripts of the Greek NT before AD500. And a small handful of entire or almost entire NT documents.
When you look at that AD120 page of a book, it isn't a scroll. The Jews only worked on scrolls, but the Christians loved books. They took the sheets and bound them together. But the text on it, is no different at all to the texts on the manuscripts that belong to AD500. Now, the atheists say that these documents weren't written till after the event, so the copies changed so much, and the change in those documents would have been immense, and within a few 100 years there have no resemblance to the original. Fragments are important, the early ones largely agree with the later. The errors in copies, and redaction, the changes that went on from AD120-AD500 is less than 7% of the NT. Most of those changes are immaterial, none of them affect any major doctrine, that is staggering.
If the changes that took place between AD120-AD500 are minimal, and no doctrine is affected, do you think there were many changes between the autographs between AD60-120. If you made the long period without changes, don't you think the short period would also be free from change? The evidences that the NT is quite extraordinarily preserved, and that is what God and Scripture says - that God will preserve His word. There is no example of non-Christian or non-Bible literature that has anything close to that.
On a very energetic day, are you too tired?
We have so much evidence, Pastor has only mentioned 2 or 3 things, just the evidence that we can see, not even Creation, instinct of an afterlife. Everything fits Scripture, non one can explain these things, we are an evidence-saturated faith. We are infinitely more rational than the atheist. The atheist needs to believe in alien life, there is no scientific evidence for life from nothing. We are evidence faith-based company of people.
Pastor heard some years ago, this approach - the gospels are hopeless. The shortest gospel, Mark - what is that? How do you know it is Mark's? Why is it so short and scrappy? Why does it leave out so much? It is obviously taken fro other gospels and it is deletable. Mark is most likely the first, and it is short, because one early church father who got it from the student of Apostle Paul who got it from John who got it from Mark who got it from Peter. He wrote down everything Peter taught and proclaim. The church fathers would loosely refer Mark's gospel as Peter's gospel. Mark is a tract, for unconverted persons. Anything that is unnecessary is left out. Sometimes it expands on matters, it keeps it brief and to the point. The great attackers of Mark's gospel ignore this. Mark 5:1 - Gadarenes. Inconsistency between gospels, and criticised. It is a pathetic criticism, if Christ landed at Gadara to heal the two demon possessed man, and ordered out his demon and into the swine, did it happen at Gadara? that would be 30 miles inland, well southwest of the Sea of Galilee, so they claim that Mark was ignorant and the geography is wrong. Is that true? No. The critics haven't looked at the text, Christ did not land at Gadara, it simply says in the countries. It is known that Gadarenes and Gerasenes occupy the coastal stretch now. Both groups were present on the entire south-western coastline of the sea, the criticism is nonsensical. That is the poor quality and basis of these statements that never stand. And when you hear them, they are so arrogant and certainly stated.
When Pastor was 20, he had the opportunity to see Prof Donald Wiseman, he was honorary keeper of antiquities at British Museum. Prof Wiseman allowed Pastor to talk for 2 hours about unpublished material, the older that Pastor gets the more he is surprised that Prof spent such a long time with him. When younger, Prof Wiseman missed a plane and had to take a biplane which allowed Prof Wiseman to spot a great diversion at the River Euphrates. There was a great delta, and the branch that fanned into different groups. Biblical critics had long said that the Bible is all wrong and has the Euphrates geography all wrong, but it was in the 1920s when Prof Wiseman happened to spot the original track of the Euphrates which was later more thoroughly examined, and the Bible has been proved. This happens again and again and again.
This also happened with the records of the Chaldean Kings. Critics say that the book of Daniel is completely wrong, with no kings matching history and all the names being wrong. As recently as 1967, the first volume of Prof Wiseman's book about these kings came out. So many tablets were found in the 1880s, there weren't enough translators to translate them. So they were put in the British Museum basement, and in WW2 placed in the tunnels leading to Woolwich station. There is a branch of the underground that can't be used because there are many inscriptions that cannot be translated. Wiseman got a team of 4 scholars to open a packing crate, and they found the inscriptions of a Biblical king. All the scholars had got it wrong, the Bible turned out to be right.
You came to God by illumination and anointing. You saw the evidence for yourself, but there was a whole area of evidence we can't talk about because they are derided - our personal evidence - what God has done for us, the radical change that brought us to hate sin. How did that happen? How many answers to prayer are you now collecting. Wonderful things you dare not forget because they strengthen your trust in Him.