“Jesus is Simply One of the Many Ways to God”: Response to “Religulous,” Part 4
Author: Andy Robbins
Josh McDowell (pictured) never intended to be a defender of the Christian faith. In fact, his goal was just the opposite. As a young man Josh considered himself an agnostic, and viewed Christianity as worthless and Christians as out of touch. But while attending Kellogg College in Michigan, he was challenged by a group of Christian students to intellectually examine the claims of Christianity. He accepted that challenge and set out to prove that Christ’s claims to be God and the historical reliability of Scripture could be neither trusted nor accurately verified. The evidence he discovered, however, changed the course of his life. He discovered that the Bible was the most historically reliable document of all antiquity and that Christ’s claim to be God was true. That brought him to the inescapable conclusion that Christ loved him and died to redeem him from God’s judgment against sin. Josh then trusted in Christ as the Son of God and his personal Savior.
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Since then, Josh McDowell has spoken to more than ten million young people in eighty-four countries, including more than 700 university and college campuses. He has authored or coauthored more than one hundred books and workbooks with more than forty-two million in print worldwide, including his most popular works, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, More Than a Carpenter, Beyond Belief to Convictions, and his latest release, The Da Vinci Code—A Quest for Answers.
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Josh McDowell’s original attitude toward the veracity of Christ’s claims to deity and the only way to reconciliation to God was not too unlike most of today’s skeptics. The only difference is that he set out to validate his position by investigating the evidence, and when the evidence pointed him in a different direction, he did not stubbornly cling to his original opinions, but humbly called upon the Savior. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that most people who doubt Christ’s claims of being the only way to salvation base their opinions on little more than what seems reasonable to them, but they have never bothered to investigate the matter in any depth.
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The Loftiest Claim Ever Made
Many people believe that Jesus never claimed to be God or claimed that He was the only way to salvation. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament, however, shows otherwise. (Stay tuned for a discussion on the reliability of scripture in a later post.) On numerous occasions, Jesus made incredible claims, such as “I and the Father are one,” “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father,” and the most incredible of them all, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” It is clear that Jesus considered Himself God and to be the only way of salvation for mankind.
So what do we do with those claims? As Josh McDowell points out in his writings, you cannot say that Jesus was just a good man who meant well, or that He was a good religious teacher, if His claims about Himself were not true. Because if Jesus was NOT God as He claimed, then He was either a madman or a charlatan and cannot be trusted.
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Was Jesus a Lunatic?
Perhaps Jesus’ claims to deity were the ravings of a madman. History records, however, that Jesus did not display the kind of behavior we normally associate with a madman. Even some of the most charismatic lunatics always display their insanity at some point. But Jesus always conducted himself with poise, had a commanding knowledge of scripture that even stumped the religious elite of His time, possessed incredible skills of reason that quieted his highly-educated opponents, and spent himself on behalf of the poor and needy. His recorded words have been the most quoted in human history, and have been the source of encouragement, peace, guidance, and wisdom to millions of people for more than 2,000 years.
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Jesus could not have been the only way to salvation and the manifestation of God in flesh if He was a lunatic. But since the historical record rules out that possibility, we have to consider the next possibility.
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Was Jesus a Charlatan?
There have been no shortage of pied-pipers leading unsuspecting followers to do their bidding for all manner of selfish and perverted motives. Many of these have been religious leaders who pervert the teachings of scripture for their own purposes. If Jesus was not the only way to salvation as He claimed, and if he was also not a madman, then that leaves only one other possibility. He must have been a lying charlatan.
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The fact that Christ spent his entire ministry caring for the poor, ministering to the outcasts, and teaching His followers to love others even at their own expense, is evidence of the fact that His motives were not selfish ones. But for further proof in determining whether or not Jesus was a charlatan, we have to look no further than the testimony of his disciples. Having followed Jesus closely for more than three years, they were in the position to know whether or not Jesus was on the level or not. Yet all but one of those disciples were put to gruesome and torturous deaths for their testimonies about Christ. They were willing to face being boiled in oil, beat to death with clubs, skinned alive, sawed in two, and crucified upside-down on a Roman cross rather than to recant their testimonies. If the claims of Jesus were not true, the disciples were in a position to know it, and they would have never allowed themselves to be put to barbaric deaths for what they knew to be a lie. Many people are willing to die for a cause as long as they are convinced their convictions are true, but no one willingly dies for a lie. The disciples were obviously convinced that what they believed about Jesus was true.
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Perhaps, however, the disciples were thoroughly brainwashed and deceived into believing that Jesus was God and that He was raised from the dead. That is a legitimate point, and so we must examine some of the evidence surrounding the resurrection of Jesus in order to determine if the disciples were brainwashed or involved in a cover-up.
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Jewish tradition holds that Jesus’ disciples stole the body of Jesus and then claimed He had been raised from the dead. But a study of the times in Jerusalem during Jesus’ life and death indicates that this story is highly unlikely – indeed, probably impossible.
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During this time in Israel’s history, they had been conquered by Rome and were now occupied by and under Roman control. Thus, when Jesus was crucified, the Jewish leaders approached the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and asked for a squad of Roman soldiers to guard Jesus’ tomb for fear that the disciples would steal his body. They remembered Jesus’ prophecy that He would rise from the dead, and they wanted to prevent a hoax. Pilate granted the request. So a squad of highly-trained Roman soldiers guarded Jesus’ tomb to prevent any tampering or theft.
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After Christ’s resurrection, the Jewish leaders paid off the Roman soldiers and told them to say that they all fell asleep at their posts – a mistake that would have cost a Roman soldier his life. The Jewish leaders said if this report got back to the Roman officials, they would intervene and keep the soldiers out of trouble. So the soldiers agreed, and that was the story that was circulated in an attempt to quiet the hysteria surrounding the resurrection.
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There are a number of problems with this story that make it difficult to accept.
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First and foremost, Roman soldiers were highly trained in the art of warfare, and falling asleep at one’s post would be grounds for immediate execution. No Roman soldier would be that careless.
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Secondly, even if by some remote chance the entire squad of at least a dozen soldiers would have fallen asleep at the same time, which in itself seems impossible, it seems equally impossible that the disciples could have rolled away the huge stone from the mouth of the tomb without waking anyone.
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Thirdly, the cowering disciples, all but one of whom had scattered and abandoned Christ at the time of His arrest, had gone into hiding and were frightened about being associated with Jesus for fear that they too would be arrested. It seems likewise impossible that they could have mustered the courage to risk taking on a squad of Roman soldiers in order to retrieve Christ’s body.
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Even so, the tomb remained empty, without any plausible explanation. All the Jewish leaders needed to do to put the issue to rest once and for all was to exhume Jesus’ body and parade it around the streets of Jerusalem for all to see. But there was no body to retrieve. And the hysteria about the resurrection gained ground as over 500 people reported seeing Jesus alive!
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If the resurrection of Jesus was a hoax, the disciples were in a position to know it, and they would have never allowed themselves to be put to gruesome deaths for something they knew to be a lie. When you are faced with either recanting your story or being boiled in oil, logic says that recanting would make more sense than having your skin burned off of your body for something you know to be false. It also seems likely that at least one of the disciples would have caved in to this kind of pressure. But each and every one of Christ’s disciples died unimaginably horrible deaths because all of them refused to recant.
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Thus, the lives and deaths of Jesus’ disciples are evidence that Jesus was not a charlatan. So if Jesus was not a madman, and he was not a charlatan, then the only other option we have left is that He was exactly who He said He was – the manifestation of God in flesh, the only way for mankind to be saved. You cannot say that Jesus was just a good man who meant well and one of the many ways to God if He was a madman or a charlatan. But if He was neither, then that leaves us with the only other logical conclusion: His claims about Himself were true, and He represents the one and only path God has chosen in order to reconcile mankind to Himself.
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More on this in the next post.