Naked Bible 41: Acts 3

In a sneak two螶under, (0s ghetto GALAC skal Band) Welcome to the nek-abival podcast episode 41 at 3 on Residential Layman, Trace Trickland, and he's the scholar Dr. Michael Heizer, and Amy, how are you? Very good, very good, try to be back again. Good deal, well we got a lot of positive feedback from our Q&A episodes, so that was good. Well I was good, you know, I only had four questions, but as one email I referred to, at least one of them as an epic rabbit trail, I guess, you know, it served the purpose. Absolutely. Well good, well this week we're gonna jump right into Acts 3. Alright, well what I'm gonna do, we're gonna, I'm gonna read through the whole chapter, we'll just take a few minutes to do that in case people are listening and don't have a copy of the Bible with them, and then I want to focus on two items in the chapter, and I'll tell people what those are after we're done reading. So in Acts 3, we read, "Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour, and a man lame from birth was being carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple that is called the beautiful gate, to ask alms of those entering the temple. Seeing Peter and John go about to go into the temple, he asked to receive alms, and Peter directed his gaze at him as did John and said, "Look at us." And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them, but Peter said, "I have no silver and gold, but what I do have, I give to you." In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk, and he took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong, and leaping, he stood and began to walk and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God, and all the people saw him walking and praising God and recognized him as the one who sat at the beautiful gate of the temple, asking for alms, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him. While he clung to Peter and John, all the people utterly astounded, ran together to them in the portico called Solomon's, and when Peter saw it, he addressed the people, "Men of Israel, why do you wonder at this? Or why do you stare at us as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk?" The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers glorified his servant, Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate when he had decided to release him. But you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the author of life whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses, and his name, by faith in his name, has made this man strong whom you see and know, and the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of you all. In Al-Breathers, I know that you acted in ignorance as did also your rulers, but what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent therefor, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, "The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you, and it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people. And all the prophets who have spoken from Samuel and those who came after him also proclaimed these days, you are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, and in your offspring shall all families of the earth be blessed. God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness." That's the end of chapter 3. So pretty dramatic scene. What I want to focus on might seem a little arcane, at least one of them anyway, two focus points in this episode. The first one is in verse 6, where Peter says to the lame person, the lame man, "I have no silver in gold, but what I do have I give to you." In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk. I want to focus on this line about in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. We had similar language back in Acts 2.38. If you remember, again, controversial verse, but repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and so on and so forth. This whole thing about the name is a familiar element to Luke's gospel and also to the book of Acts, the same author, the person of Luke, who of course was not one of the twelve, was a Gentile. But it's a familiar theme, and not just in his work, but as we're going to see a little bit later on. This whole thing about the names associated with Jesus, the name Jesus and then the term Christ as well. For Luke, the name of Jesus isn't just again something that he was called as a boy. It's a reference to the real presence of Jesus himself. You put faith in the name in the book of Acts and in the New Testament. You're baptized into it. Miracles are worked through it. Salvation is found in the name. The disciples preach the name. They suffer for the name. Again, these are what scholars would call "circlem locutions," basically. Different ways of referring to Jesus himself. That links us back again for those of you who have read maybe the first draft of my myth book, The Myth of It is True Now. Again, it referred to as the unseen realm, which is going to be out in May. I do a lot in that book about what scholars refer to as the name theology. The focus there is the Old Testament. We do a little bit with the New Testament, but in the Old Testament sense, the name, again referring to God as the name, was another way of referring to God himself. When the New Testament writers are doing this of Jesus and you have passages in the Gospels like John 17 where Jesus in praying to God says, "I have revealed your name to them." The point is not that Jesus was informing the Jews that he preached to what God's name was. They have the Old Testament. God's name, again, I am that I am Yahweh, is in their thousands of times. So Jesus isn't coming to earth and saying, "Hey, guess what, guys? I know what God's name is. Let me tell you." That's absurd because they had it and they had it over and over and over again. What he's talking about is that I, again, when he prays in the garden in John 17 and he says, "I have revealed your name to them, to those who follow me." He's saying, "I have revealed you." Okay, the name is God. I have revealed you to them. You are manifest through me. I am, again, God in flesh. I am the name in flesh. You know, it goes back to John chapter 1. The word made flesh and then the name sort of picks up the same idea. And it's familiar from the Old Testament where the name is personified as a person, as God and so on and so forth. Yeah, we do a lot of that in the unseen realm. Here, again, there's this sense that this phrasing, the name of Jesus, is another way of referring to Jesus himself. And so there's this conceptual linkage between the idea of the name, again, something you get baptized into, you work miracles through it. Salvation is found in it. All that sort of thing. That language, the same language, is now present in the New Testament except this time, it's directed to Jesus. So I think that's kind of significant. When we look back at Acts, though, we have here in this line the name of Jesus Christ. And I want to talk a little bit about both names, Jesus in Greek, Jesus, and of course, Christ, which is Greek for Christos. And the audience may not realize, but there's actually a bit of controversy about the term Christos in the New Testament that gets bandied about by scholars. There are really three ways to look at it, three ways to understand it, both in the New Testament and then also since the New Testament's written in Greek, also the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is the Septuagint. The term Christos is found 531 times in the New Testament. And you will see three kinds of usage in the New Testament, not so much in the New Testament, but a little bit in the New Testament, and then also in the Septuagint. And here are the three. Sometimes Christos can be a simple adjective that means "unointed." because it Christos is the Greek translation of Hebrew Mashiach, an anointed, again, just an adjectival description. When it's used to refer to a person, it would be anointed one. But adjectival, it's very common. For instance, in this Septuagint, when you get references in Leviticus to the anointing oil in Greek and the Septuagint, that would be Eli on Ta Christon. Again, there you have the word Christos in the accusative case. So it's just an adjective. So is that what we're doing here? Is a reference to Jesus in the New Testament just as to someone anointed? You say, well, why is that even an important question? Well, it's because there were lots of people anointed in the Old Testament in Jewish thinking. And they're anointed status. It didn't mean they were divine. It just meant that they were sort of chosen and therefore anointed for a specific task or service. For instance, prophets would anoint kings. You would have judges that could be anointed, a priest that would be anointed. They're just especially selected for a task. And so some scholars would say, well, this is all that Christ means. It's just some guy that's sort of a prophetic figure that either was picked by God to do a specific thing or was perceived to be picked by God to do a specific thing. There's nothing about a suffering Messiah figure, a divine Messiah figure. It's just a guy who's appointed for a task. Nothing supernatural to see here. Again, that's why, again, it's a controversial thing. People just want to say, oh, it's just an adjective. Well, the second of the three ways you can look at Christos is as a title. And this would typically be a situation where you would translate it as the Messiah or Messiah with the capital M. For instance, in John 141, we read, we have found the Messiah and then the text actually adds which means anointed one. We have found Messias, which means Christos, the anointed one. And so in that particular usage, it's very clearly not just an adjective. And it's not our third alternative, which is a proper name. It's actually a title and a very important title, very specific title for the Jewish mindset. And we're going to come back to this title thing in a little bit. The third option for Christos, which I just briefly mentioned there was a proper name, kind of like either a first or last name because you'll see in the New Testament the two appearing like this, Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ. Well, the first one, Christ Jesus, it almost sounds like Christ has become a proper name alongside Jesus. And Jesus Christ, it almost sounds like it's sort of a last name. So is that the way we should understand Christos? And if that's the case, again, there's really nothing terribly significant about it because this was a term that was used outside the New Testament and it doesn't really necessarily denote divinity. The only one that really denotes a specific figure in Jewish theology is the one where it's a title where Christos specifically points to a messianic figure, a deliverer figure, a supernatural deliverer figure. So when it's a title, that becomes important. Now, that's the setup. Again, Christos, 531 times you get three different possibilities. So the question is, again, this is where the debate always goes. How do the early Christians understand Christos? Do they understand like, you know, modern Christians do now and Bible believers and so on and so forth. Again, there, you can see sort of the whole debate is kind of, I wouldn't call it skeptical, but it sort of veers that direction. Well, the fact of the matter is that overwhelmingly in the New Testament, Christos is used as a title. It has a special theological significance. Now, of the 531 occurrences of Christos in the New Testament. 383 of them are in Paul's writings. And, you know, Paul's writings are fairly short. So it's about half of the New Testament. Half of the New Testament has well over half of the references to Christos. And of that 383, 270 are in specific letters of Paul that even critical skeptical scholars don't deny Pauline authorship to those letters. Again, the audience may not realize that in New Testament scholarship, the letters of Paul, there's disputes over several of them did Paul really write them. And there are some who say no, some who say yes, but then there's this other group that nobody doubts. Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1st Thessalonians, Phileum, and everybody accepts those as coming from the hand of Paul. And most of the references, again, to Christos as a title, are going to be found in these epistles. Again, that's an important thing. So there's a heavy concentration in Paul. And Paul's letters, in fact, are the earliest New Testament writings. Now, just because the gospels come first in our New Testament doesn't mean those were the first ones written. The earliest books of the New Testament are certain letters of Paul. The gospels come a little bit later, again, toward the end of the life of at least John. And then you have Mark, of course, Luke again, as a Gentile who traveled with Paul. He's writing during and after these trips to these churches were Paul's writing letters. So that's going to post date Paul's letters as well. So in the earliest stuff that we have, Christos, again, emerges as a really significant title. Now, 180 times Christos occurs with Jesus. As in, again, the combination Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, there's no apparent difference, by the way, between Jesus Christ and Christ Jesus. It's kind of like Simon Peter. And when Peter gets called "Seaphus" or Simon in the same passage, they're sort of just interchangeable. But the one oddity to this is the word Christos and Koryos, which means Lord, they only occur together two times in the New Testament, okay, or in Paul's writings. They only occur two times. Whereas a couple hundred times he'll have Christos with the name Jesus. So there's this really stilted distribution. Paul almost never refers to Christos and Koryos alone together. Lord Christ, again, it only occurs two times. It's in Romans 16, 18, and Colossians 3, 24. And both of those, because they're there, only two times. A lot of scholars think that they're sort of being used there to contrast the service of Jesus, the worship of Jesus with other foreign lords. And so they're not really construed as even there a proper name. I mean, Lord Jesus, Jesus sort of looks like second position. And it can function as a proper name. Lord Jesus, Jesus would be like the last proper name. Lord would be a title. But the reverse, Lord Christ, it just doesn't work. Christ is just not a proper name there. And so what I'm getting at is the way that the apostles, particularly Paul, use Christ, use Christos telegraphs something. It telegraphs that it's not a proper name. It's not just an idea of someone anointed to do something. Okay, it's a very instead a very specific connotation, a very specific designation for one individual. So that's why Christ is used hundreds of times with Jesus and also throwing in the word Lord. Okay, so you've got a situation where overwhelmingly Paul and others, when they think of the word Christos, they think of this man, Jesus, who was this thing, this person, this figure, he was the Messiah. And that's how they use it. It's not a proper name. And it's not just an adjective. It becomes a full-blown theological message, a title. So Christos, again, for Paul is used exclusively for Jesus. Paul never finds it necessary. Think about this in all the stuff Paul wrote. You will never see anything in Paul line material where Jesus finds it necessary to state, now Jesus is the Christ. He never says that. He just says Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus or our Lord Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus our Lord or something like that. There'll be this combination where it's clear that he is just assuming that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. Paul never adds any explanation. We never get Jesus the Christ as a phrase at all in Paul. For Paul and early Christians, again, to the people who are writing to Christ is just inextricably linked to Jesus. And therefore, you know, the term gets linked to what happened to Jesus, which Jesus did. He died in the cross, he rose again, so on and so forth. So Paul, again, the way he uses it, and it's him that's using it, the overwhelming number of times. It's unambiguous to the people, again, who were reading the material, even just using Christos in conjunction with the name Jesus or Lord. It telegraphs an idea. And the idea is that this person was the Messiah of the Old Testament who suffered and died for you. And all these things get sort of tied together just with one term. Now, in the Gospels, you have a little bit of a variation where sometimes you'll get a little bit of a proper name, feel, but overwhelmingly even there, Christos becomes a title. And I'm going to post another article on this because there's a lot of good material written on this that sort of helps you parse how New Testament writers are using not only Christos, but also the name Jesus and other things as well. I have an article that will post with this episode from anchor Bible dictionary on the Stantry for Christ by Larry Hurtado, who's very well-known New Testament scholar who happened to know. He's a good guy, and this is his thing. I mean, this is where he's at. High Christology is basically one of his major focus points. So in Mark, the identification of Jesus as the Christ, again, is coupled in many times with a challenge to the Jewish leaders about who the Messiah is or should be, what they should expect. Matthew, again, does the same thing. Matthew, Christos is a major title for this person Jesus. And Luke, as we've just seen, you know, Luke will sometimes get something that approximates a name, but most often, again, it's a title. And the same thing with John. John has two instances. John 117 and John 173, where we have Jesus Christ, where it could be, again, sort of a formulaic name, but all the other occurrences, there are dozens of them. All the other occurrences, Christos is a title. But all your New Testament writers are trying to telegraph something. They're trying to connect. They're trying to connect through using Christos as a title. They're trying to connect Jesus with Messiah in the Old Testament. You say, well, Mike, that's the most obvious thing in the world. Actually it's not, okay? Because to a Jew, why would the New Testament writers bother to do this hundreds of times? Trying Jesus, this guy who was killed and put on a cross. And of course, the apostles are saying he rose from the dead. Why would they over and over and over and over again try to reinforce the idea that this guy was the Christos, was the Messiah. He is the person who bears this title of the Old Testament deliverer. Why would they do that? The answer is really simple. The answer is that for a Jew, okay, for a Jew, a Jew did not expect a suffering Messiah. So our second focus point, and I'm going to return back to Jesus in just a minute, but I'm going to sort of preview our second focus point. Our second focus point is actually verse 18, where Peter says, God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets that his Christ would suffer. If you look in the Old Testament, you will never find that in a verse. Peter claims, okay, by virtue of what Luke is writing, that God foretold a suffering Messiah, but the concept of a suffering Messiah is never found in any verse in the Old Testament. You say, "Well, Mike, what about Isaiah 53? Guess what? The word "Mashyach" never occurs in Isaiah 53. Jews knew this, especially the religious leaders, the scribes and the Pharisees. And so for them, what happened to Jesus did not fit the Messianic profile. The fact that he was put on a cross, of course they don't believe the resurrection, but even if there was a resurrection, the fact that this happened to him and cannot be connected in any verse in the Hebrew Bible with the term "Mashyach" to them meant Jesus was not the Messiah. This is why the New Testament writers over and over and over and over again use this term as a title. Every time they do it, hundreds of times they do it, it is a theological assertion. It's a theological proposition. It's a claim. It's a truth claim. They need to connect Jesus back to the Messiah of the Old Testament. Now, if you've read my blog for any amount of time, and again, if you've read the first manuscript of what is now unseen realm, I actually cover this in the book. This notion, it's actually in chapter 28 of the unseen realm. Again, I realize it's not out until May, but if you're listening to it after May, you know what chapter look at. It's true that there is no verse that has "Mashyach" in the context of suffering. That's absolutely true. The problem is that you're not going to find the profile of Messiah in one verse. I have this whole chapter on what, and again, a whole blog post. I can't remember how many years ago it was, but it was in response to an atheist that was bringing this up. It's like, look, the biblical writers, the New Testament writers, were not morons. What they're doing is they're not quoting verses. They're not proof texting things. You know, his Peter never even quotes an Old Testament passage in verse 18. He just makes a blanket statement. "Hey, the prophets, plural, knew about this." What does he mean? He doesn't actually quote a verse because he knows there is a verse that has "Mashyach" with suffering in it. He's talking about his look. You have to look at the full orbed, what I call the Messianic Mosaic. The full profile of the Messiah is not a verse or a set of verses. It's scattered. The elements of the profile are scattered everywhere throughout the Old Testament. You do not quote a verse to get the Messianic profile. You have to build it from pieces scattered all over the Old Testament. It's not just about the Messiah. There are other ideas, other themes that are important. I'm going to return to this in just a second. I want to go back and pick up Jesus because I often get emails about how Jesus, Jesus, is some borrowing from the pagan named Zeus. There's a really good scholarly word for this. Again, I just want you to be listening here so you don't miss it. That word is "bunk." It is utter nonsense. If you come across someone like a Jordan Maxwell or even if they're in Christian circles that saying, "Jesus comes from Zeus." You should just hang a sign around their neck that says, "I don't know the Greek alphabet and I can't spell any words in Greek." Jesus comes from Hebrew, Yahosua or Yeshua. The shorter form occurred. It was common after the exile. When the Old Testament was translated to put in a Greek at the Septuagint, they retained the short one, Yeshua. Then they made it "declineable" in Greek. That means that you could have a nominative form, an accusative form, so on and so forth. They made it "declineable" by adding an "s" at the end. They made "yesus." "Yesus," the "s" sound there, both of them, are "sigmas" in the Greek alphabet. Zeus is a "zeta." So "yesus" spelled with a "sigma." Zeus spelled with a "zeta." They're not even the same letter in the Greek alphabet. It's very easy again for anyone who knows the languages to know where Jesus came from. It's a transliteration with an "s" added in Greek to make it "declineable." That's all it is. End of "Habihors." I just wanted to throw that in there because I get this email a lot and it's just "bunk" to make this argument. Back to the whole thing about the messianic profile, the messianic mosaic. Again, our second focus point here, Peter's claim. Again, there is no verse that gives you the messianic profile. Those of you who know me know that what I'm going to say next. This was deliberate. There's no verse for a suffering messiah because the idea of a suffering messiah, the thing that the messiah would have to do to die on the cross, to die as a sacrificial death, that had to be kept secret from, again, the supernatural powers. And I get this from what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, "Have the rulers of this world known?" Again, what was going to happen? Had they known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory. 1 Corinthians 2, around verses 6 through 8. They don't know what's going on. Yes, again, demonic forces in the Gospels, Satan himself knows who, they know who Jesus is. They know He's there. He showed up. They know, they know, part of what the reason He's there because He wants to kickstart the kingdom of God and reclaim the nations and all this kind of stuff, but they don't know the catalyst event for all that is. And they also don't know how doing that would undo the effect of sin that has extended since the fall. They don't know that. And that's what has to be kept secret. And so that's why in the Old Testament, you never get a verse spelling out, okay, a specific, you know, explanation of what's going to happen and what needs to happen with Messiah. Again, Mashiach never occurs in Isaiah 53. It's deliberately cryptic. Okay, this whole idea can only be discerned after the fact. This is why in the road to Emmaus, you know, Jesus has to, you know, tell them all the things, all the things that the Old Testament, again, put into this profile. He explains all those things to him. He goes after the Emmaus rodents and he goes and he, you know, post-resurrection, he goes back to his followers in the upper room there. He appears to them. And it specifically says point blank. He had to open their minds. So even after he rose to the dead, they didn't get it. He had to, he had to supernaturally open their minds so that they would realize and look back and see how what he had done, where he had gone, what he said, what happened to him, and all this stuff, how all of the pieces could be found somewhere scattered in the Old Testament and then reassembled into a complete profile of the Messiah. The problem with the Jewish view of the Messiah was that it was incomplete. Again, what they were looking for is understandable. I'm not saying that, again, the disciples or any of the Jewish leaders were stupid. What they're looking for is, again, they're going with the term anointed and specifically the king, the anointed king. And the promise that, you know, God made to David in 2 Samuel 7 where, you know, the only rightful kings to sit and rule from Yahweh's dwelling place, Jerusalem, would be those from the line of David, the Davidic covenant. So when they go into exile, then after the exile, they get this sense that, okay, well, you know, the the the monarchy needs to come back. It needs to be revived. You know, and so you get prophets talk about it, a new David, you know, coming back here, a new Mashiach, a new anointed one, well, specifically that, they're referring to a new anointed king, someone from David's line. And they they describe that event of having the the Davidic descendant come and rule as king again in these idealized and apocalyptic, you know, terms and they're linking it to the day of the Lord. They're expecting a descendant of David who would come and be a military deliverer, someone to really get them out of exile to regather the tribes and we have our kingdom again. The the idea of suffering is nowhere on the radar. The only way you get it on the radar is to go back in the Old Testament and say, okay, well, what what does the Old Testament say about? King ship and who gets to be king. Oh, we find out that the king is also God's son and lo and behold, God's son is also Israel. Back in Exodus, God uses that terminology. So there's some sort of alignment, conceptual alignment between the king and the people. Well, that makes sense because the king sort of represents the people. Well, wait a minute. If the nation is God's son, the nation in the book of Isaiah is also described as the servant collectively. And you know what? If you read through Isaiah, Israel is not just the servant. Sometimes there's an individual servant that ministers to Israel to get, you know, take care of their exile problem. Maybe you have a corporate servant and an individual servant. And you know what? That individual servant is spoken of as a prophet and didn't Moses say that there would be a problem. Again, you get these this concatenation of ideas. And you wind up in Isaiah 53 and Mashiach is not there suffering, but the servant is the servant, the individual who represents the nation who is the son of God and represents the corporate son of God who is the ruler. And they are again, the ruling nation. This is why you get in the later chapters of Isaiah, the idea of the kingdom of God extending over all the other nations. These are dozens of points. These are dozens of biblical theological points scattered throughout the Old Testament about one individual who is related to a corporate entity called the people of God in some way. And there's this whole profile that comes together, this whole picture. That is what Peter was talking about in Acts 318. "When he says, God foretold by the math of all the prophets, all the prophetic voices, that his Christ would suffer and he fulfilled that." Again, he's not saying, "Well, there's this verse that I know that nobody else knows about that Mashiach is suffering." No. The Christos, the Messiah. That's only one title for this guy. There are other titles for this guy. And the Jews are only looking at one aspect. They're only looking at one thing. Why? Because they desperately wanted to be delivered. And because they're looking back at their Old Testament and they're thinking anointing means someone enabled for a task, specifically after the exile, the king. They're looking for a king. And kings have kingdoms. To have a king to means you're not ruled by anybody else. Again, this is what they're looking for. And Peter's saying, "Look, you missed it. You just missed it." And he can't claim to have figured it out on his own because he was in the upper room where we read, again, at the end of the gospels that Jesus had opened their minds. He had to show them after the fact what was going on. And the reason that they didn't know was because God didn't want them to know because it needed to be cryptic. It needed to be a secret because had the rulers of this world known. They would never have crucified the Lord of glory. As it stands, when Jesus shows up and says, "The kingdom of God is among you," or he does these things that, again, that I describe in the unseen realm, to provoke the powers of darkness in the killing him. The whole thing with going up to Cecilia Philippi, the whole rock passage and then the transfiguration after that, it's only after that point, think about it, it's only after that point. The scripture specifically explicitly say this. At that point, he began to teach them about his death. Why? Because he's just gone up and provoked Satan, provoked the powers of darkness there at Mount Hermann and all the baggage that goes with that, the gates of hell. He's gone up and he said, "I'm here. Do something about it." He's picking a fight. And a week later, he's dead. A week later, he is dead. As soon as they get down off the mountain after the transfiguration, he says, "It's time for the Son of Man to go up to Jerusalem and die." And that's when Peter rebukes him. It's like, "What? This is crazy talk. They have no idea." Why? Not because they're stupid and we're just smarter. No. They know because Jesus had to tell them after the fact and we know because they wrote it down. We have the gospels and the epistles. We have the picture that they were able to see after the fact. If we were in their shoes, we would have been the same way. We would not have known because we'd have been looking at the Old Testament, myopically, looking for the deliver and that just wasn't the point. There's this kind of stuff just lurking. They're subtexts. There are just things going on, again, that aren't spelled out, but they're subtexts to what they were thinking, their theology, what's happening to them. It leaks out in a phrase they use here and there, some sort of, again, throw away line that to us just looks like extra material or filler. Some of these things, again, these little, again, throw away instances, telegraph things to someone listening who, again, is part of that world. They start using Christos as a title for Jesus. That's a theological claim. You're asking me just by using the term that way, you are demanding that I believe something or reject it. Look who he's preaching to. He's preaching to the Jews. They know what, again, Peter is trying to do it and it's hard for them to buy it because because again, that's not how they're thinking about the Messiah, but over and over. It's this guy. It's this guy. And you don't believe it, "Hey, why is this guy walking?" You know, "Why can we speak in other languages?" And it's gonna go through the book of Acts. Why is this happening? Why did that happen? How are we able to do this? You know, if what we were saying wasn't true, none of this other stuff should be happening. And again, you know, when Paul comes along, Paul is able to reason with them, you know, really in depth in certain ways, in certain respects in the scriptures. I mean, he saves a lot of that, you know, for Gentiles, you know, 'cause he's writing to churches, but I mean, he's writing into, he goes to the synagogue everywhere he goes, and that's where he starts his ministry, every place he goes. You know, there's just a lot of subtexting going on that we lose 'cause we're not alive back then. You know, we didn't just live through these events, and they did. And I think it's very interesting how, in the Old Testament, it didn't allude to him suffering, like you said, because he couldn't, 'cause the powers to be would have known, and they never would have crucified him. - Right. - The only way you're gonna put it together, again, is to put together all of the motifs, and then think to yourself, "No, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, king, son, prophet, servant, servant, servant. "Where have I seen servant before?" And I mean, you wind up in Isaiah 53, and it's like, "Oh, I wonder." (laughs) You know what I mean? It's just, again, this concatenation of ideas that if you start following the breadcrumbs, and you start, again, it's like putting together a puzzle. Well, this one makes sense here, and this one over here, and this one looks like it goes over here, and after you put enough of them down, a picture starts to form in your mind, and that's what's going on with the Old Testament. And Jesus, again, they didn't get it. Jesus had to, again, the road to Emmaus, that whole scene, going back in the upper room, opening their minds, looking back, I mean, we can see all that, but that's only because we have the benefit of hindsight. You know, they didn't have anything. They had to have their minds open. They had to be shown. You know, and then that became their task, you know, to show the people, especially the Jews, listening to them that this is how it worked. We weren't looking for it either, but this is how it worked. I'm curious, you've had to have some run-ins with people talking about Jesus coming from Zeus. When you break it down for them, do they try to give resistance back to you after you explain to them the completely different spellings? Usually when I get the question, it's somebody who hears it, who is sort of troubled by the thought, and again, the person giving them the thought is like, you know, thinking they've won some sort of point. So I haven't gotten any direct pushback, but I mean, I do get, yeah, I told that person this and that was basically the end of the conversation. - Right. - You know, I mean, that kind of making a living off that. Trying to bring the Greek mythology into the Bible, it's kind of a big. - Yeah, you know, it's the whole zeitgeist thing. I mean, I like to put it this way, hey, look, there's a reason why people, even atheists scholars, who in some cases don't even believe Jesus existed, just like the zeitgeist people, but there's a reason they haven't gotten on the zeitgeist bandwagon, because the arguments don't work. They don't hold it up. In other words, the zeitgeist will try to get people to look at only, and this is the key phrase, only the similarities between this, you know, this divine figure in one religion over against Jesus, the New Testament. They'll try to get you to look at only the points that sort of look similar, and you never look at the ones that are dissimilar, which are more frequent, and more, in many cases, more pronounced, that actually demonstrate that a correlation here can't be the intent, because this difference is actually taking a shot at this other thing over here that you're trying to compare Jesus to. I mean, you never get into that. And so, scholars, again, whether they have any faith or not, they know the material, and they're just not hopping on this bandwagon, because they know the material really well, and they know that they would just get shot down by their own colleagues, their own friends, if they tried to make these arguments, but, you know, for the average person watching something like this on the internet, they don't know that stuff, and they're not familiar with the literature, and so it does generate trepidation and concern, so that's usually where I hear about it. And I tell people, I'm pretty blunt about it, like I was here, and I'll say, "You feel free to quote me. I am not hard to find, feel free to quote me. If anybody wants to get into it, okay, we'll do that. We'll find some way to engage, but to this point, it hasn't happened." It's not that frequent, but I probably get one every few months, you know, here it comes again. It's the Jesus Zeus thing. And what I want to say is, look, tell the guy to just go learn the alphabet, and then use AlexaCon. That should be the end of that one. Great, it's more complex than that, but on that point, it is that simple. That argument is just nonsense. - I guess going back to Acts 3, 6, when Peter pretty much said, "I'll have no silver and gold," and he basically healed that man to walk. In present day, people talk about having faith beyond a shadow of a doubt and how you can heal. If you truly believe 100%, you know, there's been numerous stories documenting, or not documenting some of these claims of healing and the power to heal, and so forth. What's your thoughts on all that? - My first question I would ask is, where is the lame man's faith in Acts 3? - Just look at it. Seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked to receive alms, and Peter directed his gaze at him, and as did John, and said, "Look at us." And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. They're gonna give me alms. But Peter said, "I have no silver and gold, "what I do have, I give to you." And the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up in a walk, and he, that his Peter, took him by the right hand, and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. He could feel something happening. But there's no faith exercised prior to Peter taking him by the hand and helping him up. He's thinking he's gonna get money or something. So I raised that to make the point, yeah, I hear these stories too, and I'm not gonna be one that says, God doesn't heal people today, or that God never uses another person to heal someone. I mean, I know that's not the case. You know, I know people who've just had, you know, just been healed of things that, you know, frankly, there's just no explanation for, and, you know, their doctors will tell them that too. I mean, I know that happens, and I don't assume everyone who says, "Hey, you know, I got this impression to go pray for this person, and I never met them before, and I prayed for them, and then a week later, they called me and said that they were healed of something." I mean, I'm not gonna say everybody who has that story as a liar, 'cause they're not, and they're not looking for personal gain. It's the people who are looking for personal gain that irritate me, because, see, then the problem when people don't get healed, is they just didn't have enough faith. Well, where's the faith of the lame beggar in Acts chapter three? I wanna see it. I mean, they do this, again, you know, in answer to his request, he gets a totally different answer than what he thought he was getting. He had no idea of what they had in mind. There was nothing for him to put his faith in, you know, so they just say, "Get up and walk." Here, I'll take you by the hand, and lo and behold, I can walk. Holy cow, you know, just, I mean, they don't ask for a faith statement. They don't ask him, "What do you believe?" They don't do any of that. They just do it, you know, so that would be the way I addressed those kind of things. And honestly, I've said it, I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times. Look, if I knew I could heal people, I'm not starting a church, I'm not selling, I'm not starting a TV ministry, I'm not starting anything like that. I am going to the hospital, and I'm gonna empty the sucker, okay? I'm gonna empty it out, because if I can really do this, that's what I ought to be doing. That would be why God gave that gift to me, not so that I can make a buck, or have a really cool ministry, and you know, all this kind of stuff, I would be emptying the place. And then I'd be asking, where's the next one? You know, but I don't see that. I just don't see that in what we think of as this modern healing stuff today. And so I'm critical of it, but at the same time, I know that God is active and can do this, but I think a lot of the people who make these claims are just basically pretenders, is there anything else that you would like to? - No, I've probably angered enough people in this stuff. (laughing) - I'm saying you're hate maltoons. (laughing) - You're hate maltoons. - So you're trickling just those the way? - Yeah. - Send it to trade. - Please send me, send it to me, and I'll say a prayer for you. How's that? - There you go. - Right. - So I just wanna remind everybody that I will put a link about that Christ definition of the anchor Bible dictionary on the website. Okay, Mike, so I take it Acts 4 next week. - Yep, yeah, at least Acts 4, I'll have to read through it and again, see what jumps out. I mean, what I think might be interesting to somebody. That sounds good. All right, well thanks for listening to another episode Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbiboblogs.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizard's other web sites and blogs, go to www.grmsh.com.