Lies, Lies, Lies

Exposing Myths About The Real Jesus

Michael Green

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844743919
• eBook ISBN: 9781844747573
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

The public are inundated with untruths about Jesus of Nazareth, the greatest figure in human history and the one by whom we date everything. Sometimes these truths emerge from the media and sometimes from specific assaults on Jesus by special interest groups and writers.
Michael Green thoughtfully and robustly takes on the most important of these untruths.
* Was Jesus just a mythical figure who never lived?
* Were the Gospel accounts of him corrupt and written long after he lived?
* Can we trust the text of the New Testament?
* Was Mary Magdalene Jesus's lover?
* Were the Gnostic Gospels just as good evidence as the four Gospels which Christians read today?
* Did Jesus really die on the cross?
And surely nobody these days believes in the resurrection? After all, hasn't the tomb of Jesus and his family been discovered?
These are some of the issues addressed in this book. The author is an ancient historian as well as a New Testament scholar. He is not ashamed to call the misrepresentations about Jesus what they are - lies, lies, lies!

1. The Jesus we thought we knew

If you say a word against Muhammad, the whole Muslim world can erupt. Witness the global fury over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad with a rocket in his head-dress. But a woman working in the airline industry wears a cross to work and is forced to remove it or lose her job. Another, a nurse, is suspended from her job for asking a patient if she would like a prayer to help her healing. And this is in Europe. There is something profoundly unequal going on here!

During recent years there have been countless smears against Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of the Christian faith. He is portrayed as the witty rabbi, the travelling salesman, the paramour of Mary Magdalene, the homosexual, the clown, the wandering charismatic prophet, and the impostor who never rose from the grave. Christians generally do not reply to allegations like this. They put up with the name of Jesus being dragged in the mud and used as a common swear word. But these repeated attacks can gradually erode the confidence of believers, and make it more difficult for others to join the Christian community because of the nagging fear that the foundations of the faith cannot withstand serious examination. So I propose in this short book to examine some of the current assaults on the person of Jesus and assess their credibility.

Before doing so, however, I must in this opening chapter outline the picture of Jesus which has been current in the churches all over the world from earliest days. That will give us an initial starting point for measuring the various arguments by which he is dismissed or marginalized. Many who attack the source of Christian belief put up a straw man, which simply will not do.

We possess four substantive accounts of the life and death of this remarkable person. All were written within a few decades of his death – something extremely unusual in the ancient world. Even more remarkable is the brand new type of literature they represent. It is known as ‘gospel’, meaning ‘good news’. Not biography, though it contains biographical material. Not history, though it is rooted in history. But something entirely novel: gospel. The word, a rare one in the Greek language which was the lingua franca of the ancient world by the first century AD, resonated with both Jewish and secular readers. The Jew would think of the good news of Messianic salvation, or national rescue, predicted by the prophets, for which the nation had long been waiting. The secular reader would think of the way the word was used of the good news of the Emperor’s birthday or perhaps of a special occasion when the Emperor might come to visit his city. The four evangelists, or Gospel writers, took this word over and applied it to someone whom they saw as greater than the Emperor. He had indeed come to visit a part of his world, and had delivered that rescue for which the Jews had been waiting, albeit not in the manner they were expecting.

From the earliest days, and certainly before the end of the first century, the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were established as the core documents of this new faith, enshrining the good news about who Jesus was and what he accomplished.

Who was Jesus?

Who was he, then? The Gospel writers let us know their convictions from the very start. Matthew and Luke tell us that he was truly human, born of a young Jewish girl called Mary, and yet that he shared God’s nature as well. They claim that Mary’s womb was made alive by the Spirit of the one and only God, the Creator of the universe. Mark’s Gospel starts abruptly, ‘The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ And John’s Gospel uses philosophical language with much resonance both in Greek and Jewish circles, in opening with: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...’ The writer continues with awe and wonder: ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father’ (1:14). He concludes his introduction to the Gospel thus, straining the boundaries of language: ‘No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known’ (1:18).

So, each in their own way, the four Gospel writers make plain, from the outset of their account, their settled conviction that Jesus was not only human but shared the nature of God himself. As much of the divine as could be embodied in a human being dwelt in him. That was their claim – nothing less. It took them a long time and a massive struggle to reach that belief. After all, they were Jews, and the Jews were as passionate (and militant) monotheists as any Muslim is today. For the Jew, as for the Muslim, it was and remains total blasphemy to put anyone or anything on the same level as God.

Over a period of some two thousand years, the Jewish nation had rejected the widespread view that every tribe had its own god: they had become united in the belief that there was just one God, the God of the whole earth. The Romans, who took over the country in AD 6, had to learn to respect what to them seemed a ridiculously narrow-minded religion. Time and again there were riots and fatalities if the Romans brought any suspicion of idolatry, like legionary standards embossed with the image of the Emperor, into Jerusalem. So it was highly improbable that these first disciples of Jesus the carpenter should regard him as anything more than a fine man.

In due course, as we shall see, they simply could not confine him to the category of ‘mere human’. All the more so in the light of his claims. This humble carpenter teacher actually claimed at least three things which properly belonged to God alone. He claimed to forgive sins. He claimed the right to accept worship. And he claimed that at the last day he would be the Judge of humankind. Totally crazy claims – unless they were true. And when those claims were backed up, as they were, by a matchless life and the miracles he performed, they began to be driven to the conclusion, so contrary to their assumptions and so shattering to their intellect, that God had indeed invaded our world in the person of Jesus in order to do something very special for his people.

The purpose of Jesus’ life

He came to teach

If the first followers of Jesus believed him to be divine, then what did they think he had come to do? It is plain from all the Gospels that the authority of Jesus’ teaching enthralled them. It was so exciting that people willingly dropped out of work to go and listen to him. Moreover, it brought to a climax the teaching they had inherited through the Jewish Law and the prophets.

He loved to speak about the kingdom of God – what life would be like if God was really enthroned as king in human lives. He spoke about God not as an absent dictator but as a loving father, ready to welcome his prodigal children back home. He spoke of the supreme quality of love, even for enemies. He called men and women to come and follow him. Much of his public teaching adopted a style previously almost unknown – parables, or stories with a deeper meaning, which grabbed the attention of the hearers and forced them to reflect on what it might mean for them. It was immensely attractive. It made God very real. But it was also authoritative.

The reaction we find in Mark’s Gospel after Jesus’ first teaching was this: ‘The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law’ (Mark 1:22). The teachers of the law, the scribes, were the clergy of the day. And, like modern scholars, they constantly appealed to others as authorities. But Jesus never did this. Instead he coined a phrase which carries its own authority: ‘Truly, truly I tell you.’ Here was a man who did not speculate about the things of God. He knew. And people recognized it.

He came to embody God’s kingly rule

But it was not just the authority of his teaching which had such an impact on Jesus’ first followers. It was the authority of his deeds. Who was this young layman who could walk into the temple and challenge the high priest’s domain by breaking up the crooked market that had developed there and by sending the traders packing? Who was this who could say to a paralyzed man ‘Stretch out your hand’ and immediately restore it to health? Who was this who could drive out the dark forces that were ruining a man’s life and making him gash himself with stones as he eked out a shadowy, tormented existence among tombs? Who was this who could address a storm as if it were a living thing, and bid it cease its raging? Who was this who could bid his followers with cool con­fidence to go feed five thousand hungry people with five little buns and a few local fish? Who was this who could face the Roman governor, the man who claimed the power of life and death over Jesus, and calmly say that he could have no power over him whatsoever unless it was allowed him by God? All these acts are documented in the vivid pages of the Gospels. Read them and see!

What a man! In the light of such positive and authoritative action, no wonder his followers began to regard him as more than man.

We shall need to reflect more fully on the topic later, but a word must be said here about the miracles of Jesus. They figure prominently in the story told by these four writers of the Gospels. We find Jesus healing sick people, all sorts of them – the blind, the deaf, the paralyzed, even the supreme outcasts of the day, the lepers. It was a demonstration not just of divine compassion but the fact that God’s long-promised kingdom had broken in. These miracles were not conjuring tricks or attempts to show off. They were occasioned by human need and were visible signs of who Jesus was and what life in the kingdom of God might look like.

The same point about Jesus’ divine rule was made by the many accounts we have of his dealing with demonic forces. The Bible is clear that there is a devil, a supreme anti-God force. Of course in the West we regarded the idea with scorn – until the New Age arrived with its channellers and spirit guides and a new outbreak of Satanism. But all over the world and all down the centuries people have recognized the reality of these malign powers, and still do. Certainly in the Gospels there is no beating about the bush. Jesus believed in Satan. He came, among other things, to destroy the work of the devil in people’s lives. So we find him casting out these dark spiritual forces. It is a major strand in the Gospels, and this ministry of deliverance continues today in many parts of the world. I have seen it time and again in my own job as a clergyman.

The meaning of Jesus’ death

We might think that this life, demonstrating the love of God to all and sundry, this life of teaching, healing, and mending broken lives, was the main part of what Jesus came to do. But we would be wrong, according to those Gospel writers. Each of them dedicates between a third and a half of their entire book to the last few days of Jesus’ life. Have you ever encountered a biography like that? Of course not. But these are no mere biographies. The Gospel writers concentrated on what they saw as most important, and that was the death of Jesus. Why did he come to such an untimely death, in his thirties, when his ministry was at most three years old?

Well, in a sense, his death was inevitable. For one thing, his enormous popularity was rocking the stability of the fragile peace with Rome and was likely to bring down savage reprisals that would embroil the whole nation. For another, he was perceived to have taken on the whole fabric of Jewish religion, Jew though he was. The focal points of Jewish worship and identity were the temple with its sacrifices, the law with its scribal interpreters, the sabbath with its restrictions, and circumcision, the seal of belonging to the Jewish people. But Jesus put a massive question mark at the heart of all these prized indicators of the special nature of the Jews.

He told people the temple would be destroyed, and his body would be a timeless ‘temple’ which God would raise up after his death, and make the centre of spiritual worship. These were mysterious words, not understood until much later. They were also dangerous words, which were raised against him at his trial. They could be construed as either blasphemy or signifying magic, and both were capital offences.

There was also his attitude to the law. This was very embarrassing to fellow Jews. On the one hand he seemed more at home in the law than any of them were, but on the other he was strongly opposed to their literalistic interpretation of it. He made his own revolutionary additions to the sacred text, and was ruthless in his attacks on clerical dis­honesty and hypocrisy.

What is more, he seemed to be very casual in his approach to the sabbath. He even healed people on the sabbath day, to the disgust of the religious experts who saw this as forbidden ‘work’. On one occasion the experts tried to gather evidence against him while he was in the synagogue. They drew attention to a man with a withered hand and asked if it was lawful to heal on the sabbath. Jesus, as quick-witted as ever, responded before restoring the man’s hand: ‘If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath’ (Matthew 12:11–12).

As for the circumcision issue, Jesus frequently kept company with the dregs of society, people with whom the pious would never dream of associating. It was his way of showing that God cared for bad characters as well as good. But it scandalized the Jewish clergy. Worse, he was known to have defiled himself by helping non-Jews, such as Romans, Samaritans, Syro-Phoenicians – the uncircumcised scum. God loves them too, of course, and Jesus was demonstrating it. But it was too much for the Jewish authorities to stomach. It was inevitable that he had to be eliminated.

Not only do the Gospel writers show Jesus’ death as inevitable. Astonishingly, they make clear it was voluntary. He said that nobody would take his life from him. He would lay it down of his own free will. We read that he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, knowing what would await him there. Three times in his final journey to Jerusalem he told his followers that he was going to his death. When he was arrested on that dark night in the Garden of Gethsemane, he could have asked his followers to protect him. He did nothing of the sort. Indeed, when one of them drew his sword, Jesus told him to put it away and then healed the ear of an attacker which the sword had severed. At his trial he could have spoken in his defence. Instead he remained silent. Even when hanging on the cross, the Gospel writers are clear that he could have asked for God to rescue him, confident that he would receive instant and decisive divine aid. Instead, he determined to go through with it, although every nerve in his body shrieked in protest. There was something mysteriously voluntary about the death of Jesus.

But there is more. The Gospel writers are all clear that Jesus’ death was vicarious. It was on behalf of human beings, to benefit them. By now they were convinced that Jesus was no ordinary man: he had brought God into their midst. And as he perished in agony on that barbaric Roman cross they came to recognize at least four things about his death.

First, it was an example of supreme love. Here was the good shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep. He had said, ‘Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). He not only fulfilled this, he exceeded it. As the apostle Paul put it a little later, he died for those who were at enmity with God. ‘God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8). Amazing love. He loved human beings so much that he was prepared to drink the cup of suffering to the dregs, to die in unspeakable agony, so that nobody would be able to point the finger at God and say, ‘He doesn’t understand.’ He does understand; he has stood in our shoes. He suffered as nobody else had ever suffered, so his friends believed. The cross was the demonstration of supreme love.

Jesus’ death was also a rescue from mortal danger. The human race is in dire peril not only from international, social, economic and ecological disasters, but from one more serious still – we are out of touch with God. And most of us want to keep it that way. He is a threat to our independence, a check on our pleasures, and a judge of our actions. So we distance ourselves from him. Of course we do. And when God sees the alienation we have chosen instead of closeness to him, he cannot remain indifferent. We are in the wrong, and he cannot pretend otherwise, and so the gap widens. Alive mentally and physically, we are spiritual corpses. We are out of touch with God so comprehensively that we do not even recognize the extent of our separation. We have wandered deep into the wasteland and we are perishing there. We desperately need someone to ransom us and set us free.

That is where the cross of Jesus comes in. He died there to bridge the gap between us and God, to end the hostility, to bring reconciliation in place of alienation. He took personal responsibility for the wrongs we have done. He burdened himself with the debts to God we could never pay, and before he gasped out his life he was able to cry in triumph, ‘It is finished!’ The debts were squared. The job was done. That is why Jesus called his death ‘a ransom for many’. That is why he said, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

The New Testament writers also saw the death of Jesus as a solution of complete fairness. For God has a problem with us. From the dawn of time humans have chosen to go their own way. We have been rebels against God, ungrateful and self-centred. You only have to watch the TV headlines, or open the daily paper, to see it on every side. Human sinfulness is the most empirically verifiable of all Christian teachings! Inevitably that causes a problem between God and us. How can a holy God have unholy people in his presence without compromising himself? That is the problem.

In the cross of Jesus I see a perfectly astonishing answer. God could be perfectly fair on the one hand and have people like us back in his company on the other. What he did is breathtaking in its boldness, unassailable in its justice, and earthshaking in its generosity. He took our place. He condemned the wickedness of human beings and took the condemnation in his own person. He faced up to the poison in human hearts and drank the bitter cup himself. He did not pretend that our debts to him were not astronomical. But he paid for them out of his own account, and it crushed him. He upheld the penalty we deserved – and then went and endured it himself. And because Jesus was human, it was a man standing in for the human race at the place of our greatest need. Because Jesus was God as well as human, the effect of what he has done is limitless.

As John, the close friend of Jesus put it, ‘He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world’ (1 John 2:2). That is remembered constantly by the worldwide church at every communion service – ‘his body given for me’, ‘his blood shed for me’.

Finally, the death of Jesus is a pledge of our total accept­ance. How can we be sure God will accept us? And why should he? The answer lies in the cross of Jesus. Because he carried my accusing load on that cross I will never have to carry it. Well could the apostle Paul exult, ‘Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1). The cross is the seal on the whole transaction. It is the marriage ring to guarantee the whole relationship. It is the adoption certificate into the family of God.

The sequel

But the Gospel writers could not leave it there. All their accounts are lit up by the conviction that this Jesus who was crucified did not remain in the tomb, but was raised from the dead and is alive again. This was a totally unprecedented claim. The Jews believed in resurrection, but not until the end of history. So the idea of Jesus being raised to life again after three days would have struck them as totally bizarre – and interestingly the Gospel accounts show initial disbelief in all those who saw the risen Jesus. It was the last thing they were expecting. They could scarcely credit it. But once convinced they went all over the ancient world with their message. They were prepared to face mockery, persecution and martyrdom. Nothing would make them change their minds. So what convinced them?

First, the tomb of Jesus was found to be empty on the first Easter morning, though the grave-clothes were still in place. Second, Christianity, however, is not all about an empty tomb, but about a living Jesus. And that is what his followers found him to be over the next six weeks, in a whole variety of different locations and situations.

This brings me to the third piece of evidence I regard as very significant – the transformation of the disciples. A band of sad, demoralized cowards was changed into a group of evangelists and potential martyrs for whom death held no terrors. As Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish scholar, has written, ‘Without the resurrection there would have been no Christianity.’ He goes further. ‘When this scared, frightened band of apostles which was just about prepared to throw away everything and flee into Galilee in despair...could be suddenly changed into a confident missionary society convinced of salvation, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.’

There is a lot more that could be said. What turned Saul of Tarsus, the scourge of the Christians, into Paul, the most passionate evangelist there has ever been? The resurrection. What changed James, the half brother of Jesus, from a pronounced sceptic into the leader of the Jerusalem church? The resurrection. (We read, ‘he appeared also to James’.) And what continues to change men and women from their selfish, often wicked lives into new people with a fresh power, a fresh motivation and a fresh joy? It is encounter, they would tell you, with the risen Jesus.

The implications of the resurrection are enormous. If it is true, it means there is a life after death. It vindicates Jesus’ position as Son of God. It suggests that his power is available for his people, the power they came to call the Holy Spirit of God. It means that he is currently Lord of the universe. It means that the world has not seen the last of him. He will return for judgment at the end of history.

These convictions encapsulate the main beliefs Christians have always held about Jesus. They are repeated world wide in that summary of Christian belief, the ancient Apostl...

Table of contents

• Lies, Lies, Lies!
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Jesus we thought we knew
• 2. ‘Scholars are discovering a very different Jesus’
• 3. ‘Jesus had a fling with Mary Magdalene’
• 4. ‘Jesus? He’s just a myth’
• 5. ‘The New Testament manuscripts are unreliable’
• 6. ‘The New Testament story is incredible’
• 7. ‘Jesus never really went to the cross’
• 8. ‘Jesus did not rise from the dead – his tomb has been found!’
• 9. ‘Jesus did not rise from the dead – there’s no evidence’
• 10. ‘Nobody thought Jesus divine until the fourth century’
• 11. ‘The “New” Testament is evil’
• 12. The real trouble with scepticism about the Jesus story
• 13. Will the real Jesus stand up?
• Taking it further: some useful resources
• Notes