Making sense of Christianity - Historically | John Dickson

So, if you would like a Bible, a hard copy, check your hand up and someone will bring you one. Looks like Steven or Ali. So, the reading today is Luke, chapter one, verses one to four, it is on page 830 of the small print Bibles or 1456 of the large print Bibles. So, I'll just give you a minute to find that. So, that's page 830, if you've got a small print Bible, page 1456, if you've got a large print. And that's Luke, chapter one, verses one to four. Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us, by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. This is the word of the Lord. I think is what it is. It is, just to clarify. Welcome to St. Jude's in Park for this evening. I'm one of the two John's you're going to meet this evening. I'm John Forsyth, the Vickie here, the senior pastor here, and a very warm welcome if you don't normally come, or a visitor, or a guest, or it's your first time. We are delighted that you can be with us to kind of get to know what we do here at St. Jude's, but also it's my great privilege to welcome and introduce John Dixon. So, come on, please, John, round of applause. I think it'll be fine. Yeah. Thanks. John's about to kind of give us some insights historically into why Christianity makes sense, but I thought it'd be nice just to get to know John a little bit. Some of us might know you, some of us might not. Just very quickly, what's the family like? They're great. They're great. Awesome. Who are what do they consist of? Three kids, one's 30, 28, 21, and one wife. Any at home? At home with. no. They all left, right? They all left. So, hope. It does happen occasionally. We left. Miracles. We left. You didn't see it. Well, that's what I've done. Now, you are an author. You are a podcaster. You are a speaker. You are a filmmaker. Is there one of those things that you like more than the other for a particular reason? Because there's a different kind of dynamic at work in each of those things. Some of my friends say that's just evidence. I don't know what I want to do when I grow up. So, I've done a bunch of things. But for me, it's all one thing. I do have a passion for trying to make the Christian faith more public. And so, that has meant doing academia. It's meant making films, writing books, and so on. But for me, it's just one thing. I just want to communicate these fabulous things. We're excited to hear from you in just a moment. Last question. History is a big part of the thing that you kind of help and teach make public about Christianity. Why history? What is it about the history that you love? I think it's the strange combination in history of fact and imagination. So, I'm sort of an imaginative person. But I like to imagine things that were real. And so, the thing about history is you have data, whether it's inscriptions, archaeological evidence, or written documents. But there's a lot that's missing. And so, you have to imagine life. You can dig up the meat market in Corinth and know that's the meat market. But then you have to think about what it means for the meat market to have been there. And the houses there and the sklepiest temple there. And so, you imagine what life was like. But based on evidence, always being willing to let the evidence shape the imagination. tremendous. Well, that bowed as well, I think, for your talk. So, thank you very much, John. We are so grateful that you can join us. Thanks. You're in very good hands. Yeah. You're in some hands. John and I actually at dinner last night we're talking about what he's been observing. And I've seen in other places an increasing curiosity about the Christian faith across the St. Jude's empire. But in lots of churches, people who just haven't had a Christian background or whatever, but are sort of looking in and wanting to know a little more. So, if that's you, that's fantastic. But we're also chatting about the fact that that sits in a larger context of doubt and of the message of decline of Christianity. So, it's like two things happening at one time. The decline famously is reported in the census. We all recently did the census. And it'll be really interesting to see what happens with this question. You know, the question about religion. This is from 2011, we've seen a decline of those ticking any kind of Christian box from 61% to 52 to 43. And if that continues on, last week's census, before last, is going to produce a result that says something like 35% of Australians are willing to admit any kind of Christianity. And nearly half of Australians say they have no religion. So, the times are doubting. Another striking evidence of doubt in this country is a 2021 survey that asked Aussies whether you think Jesus was a real person. And it turns out that about half of Australians aren't even sure that he was a real person, like that maybe it was a thing from middle earth, you know, maybe it was a Hobbit or something like that. And when I first read that, you know, actually my first instinct was, man, history teachers in school are doing a terrible job. Luke is turning out around, good on your mind. But my second thought is, you know, what a sort of, what a sad sort of depiction of where Aussies are at in terms of their thoughts of Christianity. Because honestly, if you took a poll of, say, a thousand professors of classics or ancient history, you wouldn't find one that argued Jesus didn't live. I don't mean you wouldn't find one percent. I mean, you wouldn't find one. This just doesn't exist. In fact, in a rush of blood to the head some years ago, I put out a challenge on the ABC for people to try and find one professor of ancient history or classics at any university in the world. And if you could find one, I'll lead a page of my Bible. And this went out and Twitter went nuts for a little while because people were citing professors of, I kid you not, English literature, poetry, professors of German language, biology professor, but no professor of ancient history or classics, which are the disciplines relevant. And my Bible's safe to this day, people have not brought up such a professor. So here we are in these strange times where there's curiosity combined with doubt. And I think the passage that was just read is perfect for anyone who feels, I don't know, caught between curiosity and doubt. Maybe you're a curious doubtor or the doubting curious, however, because this passage, I think speaks to both our curiosities, but also to the solidness of the Christian faith. And I've got some thoughts to share from this passage. It was just read beautifully to us. So I won't read the whole thing just again, but I don't want you to zero in on the last sentence. Because this is the opening paragraph of what we call Luke's Gospel, the biography of Jesus written by someone called Luke. And the last sentence says, you know, I decided to write this orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. Theophilus has been taught a few things about the Christian faith, and the word that's used there for taught is like beginning instruction. So theophilus isn't like fully on board, so Luke's written this account that's helping him ground it more. And he uses the word asphalia, all right? Now, learning a little to Greek never hurt anyone. So asphalia is a great word to learn. We get an English word from it. Asphilt. Yeah, the stuff they make roads out of, right? Why do they call it asphilt? Because it's like sturdy. And that's what the Greek word asphalia means. I mean, so that you may know the solidness of the things that you've just begun to have a look at. Christianity, so the claim goes, is solid, dependable, historically. And I want to give you four thoughts, if that's okay, that I think underline this asphalia, this solidness. And the first is kind of a global thought. Christianity is weirdly historical, weirdly historical. The New Testament is about things that are meant to have happened in dateable time and in a place that we can still dig up today. And Luke in his opening paragraph of the biography of Jesus uses all these history-like words. You can check them out for yourself, but an account. You don't write an account of a myth. This is meant to have been based on eyewitnesses, he writes. You know, people saw this, again, that's not myth. He says he's carefully investigated. This is a historical term. I've written an orderly account so that you may know the ask for layer, the solidness of these things. Now, this is viewed from one perspective, a superpower of Christianity, but it's also a vulnerability. Because it means clever people are going to go, how do you know that? Right? One thing if we say, we think God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. People go, OK, well, that's a lovely thought, but I can't poke it or prod it. But if I say, the guy I followed was crucified by the fifth governor of Judea. Smart people are going to go, hang on, what was his name, and how do we know anything about him? You're making a historical statement. And so suddenly Christianity becomes vulnerable to poking and prodding, which is why just about every Christmas or Easter, SBA or one of the TV channels puts on a documentary debunking the history of the Bible, like it's a cool thing to do. And you can't do it to the other religions. Other religions are sort of invulnerable to historical poking and prodding, because Hinduism, so our Hindu friends tell us, was really passed on at the dawn of time into the Vedas and those Vedas talk about how your soul can escape this material world. You can't poke and prod that. It's just sort of stands there. Buddhism, the same. The Buddha had his entire insights while meditating under a Bodhi tree, and the insights are all about how you can be fine equilibrium amid suffering. You can believe it. You can't poke and prod it. There's not a historical thing to say, ah, you made that up. So Buddhism stands without being able to be poked and prodded. Islam is pretty much the same, because Islam, our Muslim friends, Ashurus, came to Muhammad, the Prophet, because Gabriel, the angel, dictated the divine book to Muhammad. It's not about a whole bunch of historical events that we can go out archaeologically and uncover. It's about how to submit to God correctly. Christianity isn't like that, Christianity is weird. It concerns actual historical events that haven't come simply from a divine dictation or a philosophical insight. It's a series of events in dateable time, and it's meant to have been seen by eyewitnesses. And this opening paragraph of Luke, I think, underlines this beautifully, the general historical character of Christianity. I think one way for us to contrast this with myth is for me to read to you the opening paragraph of the Odyssey, okay, I know super contemporary. But Homer's Odyssey opens with a clear description of this as myth. He couldn't confuse this with what Luke is trying to do. Ready? Tell me about a complicated man, muse, that's the divine beings, they help with creativity. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe, poor fools. They ate the sun God's cattle and the God kept them from home. Now God as child of Zeus tell the story for our times, find the beginning. It's clearer in the realm of myth. But when you look at Luke's opener, we are clearly in the realm of history. The gospels, the accounts of Jesus' life, teaching, healings, death and resurrection are not myth. They're not stories from Middle-earth. We're all sorts of cool things happened in the story books. Now this is a history from the Middle East. And one of the things that underlines the historicity of this, that grounds this history, is that we have quite a few sources, my second point. Luke tells us, right in the open up, that he knows other people have written on the topic of Jesus. Many, he says, have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled upon us. And he tells us he's investigated them all from the beginning. Okay. One of the best kept secrets of the Christian faith is that we have non-Christian sources from the ancient world that refer to Jesus. We could spend hours literally on these at Wheaton, where I teach. We spend about four hours on the non-Christian sources for Jesus. No intention of that. I'm just going to throw them on the board and say, from these few sources, we can actually piece together pretty much the whole outline of Jesus' life, not the details but the outline of Jesus' life. Even without opening a Bible, we could do that. We could be no biblical text ever written and we'd still know there was this Messiah figure crucified in whose disciples thought he'd been raised to life. But when Luke says many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled upon us, he's probably not referring to people who aren't Christians writing about Jesus. He's probably referring to other Christians who have written. And this is a really interesting historical point. It might sound a little bit nerdy, but the payoff is amazing. A Bible has one ISBN now, like it's one book. Like if you've got one of those Bibles, right, you've got a Bible. It's one book, right? You can verify, hold it up, one book, okay? But actually historians know it's many books bundled into that one book. And many of these sources were written without knowing what other people said. So the Gospel of Mark wrote his account of Jesus' life without looking over the shoulder of the Apostle Paul to see what Paul had said. But they are both bundled now into the New Testament. And again, we have spent hours on these weird names for sources, but these are the Christian sources now found in the New Testament according to mainstream historians. Mark is the Gospel of Mark. Paul's letters, he wrote a bunch, the letter of James, but then there are these sources within the sources that we call Q and S, Q and L and M. You don't need to worry about the details. The payoff is this. Sources that weren't directly copied from each other say pretty much the same thing about a Messianic figure who taught and healed and died and rose again. This is applying what historians call the criterion of multiple attestation, which basically says that when multiple sources report roughly the same thing about an event or person from the past, the reporting is judged more plausible. It's the same logic you apply if you leave church this evening. And you hear some really strange news from one source. You aren't sure what to make of it. But then half an hour later this evening, you hear the same basic news, maybe with some differences, but the same basic news from a different source and you're very confident that source didn't get it from the first or the first from that source, right? You're starting to think, man, maybe it's true. Then if you get a third source and you're pretty sure it didn't get it from one of the first two sources, you're starting to apply the criterion of multiple attestation. You're just not pretentious and you don't call it that. You just call it logic. There are multiple sources in the New Testament that roughly say the same thing about Jesus. So the historian, this is very significant, it is the basic methodological starting point of history. But this leads me to the third thing I want to say. It has to do with the sources themselves. It's the date of the sources. People sometimes say, "Yeah, but those New Testament sources weren't they written 300 years after Jesus during the reign of constant time when constant time wanted to invent a religion so we had gospels produced." There is this myth out there that these gospels come from very late, but the fact is they're from very, very close in time. All the New Testament literature was written within living memory of the events. What does that mean? It means the last text of the New Testament was written at a time when there were still people alive who had known Jesus, living memory. And actually Luke's opening paragraph gives us a little hint of his own dating. And I think this strengthens the historicity of it. Notice he doesn't claim to be in eyewitness. He says, "I received this from eyewitnesses." I've investigated it from the beginning, but I received it from eyewitnesses. Now that is remarkable because if Luke really felt the freedom to make stuff up, why didn't he claim to be an eyewitness? Just because he wasn't. And there's no point. claiming something that wasn't true, he received it from eyewitnesses and from another document we have, we can actually place this same Luke in Jerusalem in the late 40s AD. So if you do your maths, it's like 15 to 18 years after Jesus, we know Luke was in touch with eyewitnesses. He doesn't claim to have been there, but he was blooming early. Let's compare it with other historical texts. That should be taken seriously. Let me give you a little graph. So you've got the figure on the left hand side, you know, the Buddha, Muhammad, et cetera, and the texts written about them. So in the case of the Buddha, our Buddhist friends and Buddhist scholars will confirm that our earliest texts mentioning anything about the Buddha come from 350 years after the Buddha was dead. Now, historians still think you can find historical information in those texts. Our oral tradition was pretty good, even over 350 years, but that's the date with Muhammad. We have one official biography of his life called the Syrah, and it was composed 180 years after Muhammad's death. These are not John Dixon's favorite dates. This is what all Muslim scholars will agree, because we know the person who wrote it. Okay, what about Alexander the Great? One of the greatest figures. I mean, there are 15 Alexander's in the Oxford classical dictionary, and he's the only one who gets great after his name. Alexander the Great did lots of cool things, but our earliest biographical account comes from Polybius who writes over 120 years after Alexander's gone. The best source we have for Alexander the Great, for those who did history at school, is written by Aryan, and that was 400 years after Alexander, but historians still regard that as even much better than Polybius for various reasons. But still, they're the dates. Probably the best example, the best comparison is Emperor Tiberius, right? Emperor Tiberius is the person ruling Rome in the time of Jesus, okay? He is Emperor from 14 to 37, so Jesus is right in that pocket. Our very best biographical information about Tiberius comes from Tacitus, who wrote The Annals of Imperial Rome, and Tacitus writes 80 years after Tiberius is dead, 80 years. Okay, but every classist knows that's the best, most reliable source we have. Okay, and then you turn to the New Testament, and the New Testament shines just as a historical text. You don't even have to believe all the spooky stuff, just as a history text, we have texts within the New Testament that were written within 20 years of Jesus, and all of the texts of the New Testament within 60. That means all of the texts of the New Testament were completed in a period when people were still alive who had known him, which cannot be said even for Tacitus' account of Emperor Tiberius. So the latest text of the New Testament is still written closer in time to Jesus than the best source we have for the emperor at exactly the same time. The date is significant, and this is why even you know, agnostic and atheist historians who are not of a mind to debunk but actually doing history will tell you the New Testament needs to be taken more seriously than the general public thinks. Some of you will know the rest is history podcast. Those jerks have the greatest history podcast with the biggest relationship, and they did one on Jesus, and I was pretty interested to see how they would summarize Jesus, and Tom Holland, the principal historian, who is a specialist in ancient history, concluded this way. I think there are lots of reasons why one might choose not to believe in God, and specifically perhaps not believe in the Christian understanding of God, but I would say that the inadequacy of the New Testament as a source would not be one of them that I would deduce. I come to this from studying both the origins of Islam and from studying classical sources, and the closer up I get to them, the more I'm impressed by how much evidence there is for Jesus. None of this proves things about Jesus, it's just why it probably should be taken more seriously than a lot of people suspect. That's really all I'm saying. It's solid. Maybe not proven, but solid. I'm gonna give you a fourth reason and here's where I'm gonna end. It sounds quite unlike the previous three, but it's for me an important historical insight into the texts themselves. These texts have a humility about them that is remarkable in an ancient setting. The texts and the message and the key figures of the gospels, the accounts of Jesus' life, are lowly instead of elite. And this becomes important because historians, I'm sure Luke will verify this, are always worried that our sources are written by elites by powerful people. I mean, all of the ancient sources, Virgil, Philo, Tacitus, Philistratus, Pliny and the gang, they are all super wealthy and super powerful and super educated. And the worry of the historian is we're not hearing the majority voice of the Roman world. We're getting just a little tiny elite slice. And more than that, how do we know these texts aren't themselves a power play written by the powerful, you know, the winners write the history sort of thing in order to maintain the status quo. So we're always attuned to this, okay. Some people fear this is true of the new testament. And what I want to say categorically is it isn't. I agree that Mother Church in the history, in the history downstream from Jesus ended up becoming at times a real bully. But the texts themselves are actually lowly. And Luke hints at this. It's subtle, but it's there. When he speaks up to the awfulus, the awfulus almost certainly isn't a grand Roman official. He's a curious person. He's had basic instruction in the Christian faith, but he's called most excellent. He's probably a minor Roman official. And Luke has written this account to give him asphalia, the solidness of the things that has been taught. But it's interesting that Luke speaks up to him. Most excellent is the language of deferring. Not faux humility. It's not just mere politeness. It's a way of properly addressing someone above you. Luke is telling us he's not of that elite status. And here's the interesting thing. The language that the New Testament has written in is quite lowly. The Greek is called common Greek, but the Greek of the New Testament is not only called common Greek, chony Greek. It's actually a pretty simple form of chony Greek, the sort of the form you would use in the marketplace, not in the philosophical clubs. And when you compare the New Testament Greek to the Greek of even Plutarch or Plastratus or Pliny, not Pliny, a phyllo, the level of Greek in these other texts from roughly the same period, so much higher than the New Testament. Now, all of our copies of the New Testament that predate the conversion of Constantine in the 4th century are written in a really messy hand. I mean, legible, we can read each letter, but clearly not professional scribes. And the heroes of the texts are lowly. Sure, Emperor Augustus is mentioned, Pontius Pilate is mentioned, Herod the Great is mentioned, but they're not the heroes of the story. The heroes are like fishermen. Stop. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's one of the leading Krakow Roman historians in the world today. From Oxford, recently just moved to Yale University in America, saying roughly the same thing. So this really is the community literature of very ordinary people. And as such, it's actually a priceless, I mean, the yng Nghymru yn cymryd rwy'n gwaithio'r hynny. Mae'n gwaithio yn gwaithio'r hynny. Mae'n gwaithio'r hynny'n gwaithio'r hynny. Mae'n gwaithio'r hynny. Mae'n gwaithio. Mae'n gwaithio'r hynny.