Bible Backgrounds/Church History 2012
Craig Kaes · Nov 11, 2012
Bible Bkgds/Church History, No. 44
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926333386175

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

funny story, but I'm going to tell it as a story about a story. So when I was preparing for the lesson this week, this is about evidence outside of the Bible around what do we know about the early church. And for me, this was pivotal in my coming to know the Lord, and I'll tell you a little bit about that. And I was wondering whether it was appropriate to talk about that rather than just deliver the material. And then later on in this, as I was going through the slides preparing for it, I saw one slide and I thought, oh, I've got this tremendous novel insight about this slide, and I'm going to be really happy to share this with you guys. So you'll get to hear it. But one of the things that I always do in preparing for the lesson is I look back to find out if it's been taught before. And if it's been taught before by one of our elders, I want to listen to how they taught it so that I make sure that I hit the points that they felt was important.

And I found it. I had to use Google. Vern didn't teach this as part of Bible backgrounds before. He taught it as apologetics in 2006. And I found it, and I'm listening to it. And the first 10 minutes of that class is Vern interviewing me about exactly what I wanted to tell you guys about.

So I have no memory of this whatsoever, but apparently it's OK. It's appropriate for me to tell you that story since I did it before when this class was taught and have no memory of it. The other one that was funny is that the key insight that I had on this slide that was brand new to me that I was really excited about was also a key insight that was brand new to me during the class in 2006, and I actually raised my hand and made the point in class. Okay, well, at least I'm consistent, you know, I'm kind of like this robot. Oh, bright idea. And six years later, oh, bright idea. Okay.

So anyway, let's start with why would we bother looking at what's outside of Scripture for understanding the early church? Why would that be important? OK, it verifies it. But scripture says we accept as true as believers, so why do we need verification? In case you get hit with an unbeliever that says, yeah, the Bible's one source, what else can I back it up with among my work buddies? Yeah, exactly. Unbelievers aren't going to look at the Bible as authoritative.

And so they may want to see the picture painted a different way. And that was certainly the case for me. So my background before coming to know the Lord was pure mathematics, symbolic logic, philosophy of science. Very logical, structured, data-driven, and very antagonistic, angry atheist. And then somewhere along the way, I decided, you know, atheism doesn't make as much sense as Christianity. Christianity doesn't make any sense to me either. So now I'm agnostic, right? So go from angry atheist to apathetic agnostic.

That's kind of how that transition happened. Crystal came to know the Lord. I don't know, maybe 12 years ago. Kaylee too. I saw a complete transformation in their lives. I started wondering, well, this is pretty weird. Then Crystal wanted to understand Romans, and my background is logic and argumentation. So she would come home from church and say, I don't understand the arguments that are being made here. Can you explain them to me? And so I would explain the arguments to her in Romans, giving this very calm sort of, this is how he's arguing. These are the points that he's making. This is how this logically follows.

Meanwhile, seething inside that she's making me read the Bible. Anyway. Somewhere along in that process, the Lord got a hold of me. And what he convinced me to do was to actually apply my brain to understanding whether scripture is true or not. And so the first step of that was to write down the list of all the things. These are all the things that are keeping me from believing in God.

And some of the absent ones were surprising. Evolution versus creationism didn't matter to me whatsoever. It stands to reason, if you've got an infinitely powerful God, assume that. Could he create the world? Sure. Yeah, okay. So let's put that behind us and let's worry about whether there's this infinitely powerful God. So one of them that was critical to me is, I don't believe the Bible. So I need to understand whether the Bible is true or not. That was a big one. Another big one was, did all this actually happen? Did Jesus, was he man and God, born on this earth, died on the cross, raised three days later? Did that actually happen?

And so if I don't regard scripture as authoritative, if there's no extra-biblical evidence, I'm kind of stuck, right? Yeah, I have to sort of have this, literally, a leap of faith. Okay, I believe. Now I see that I believe in something that's true. So this process of going through the extra-biblical evidence was absolutely critical to me.

And we'll get, I guess, the second to the last slide in this deck shows the things that we know outside of scripture about the life of Jesus. And that alone was enough to take, you know, I had these four things and that was enough to take one of them away. Now I need to go research the other three. And the Lord just sort of took every one of those away until I was like, Oh, I guess, you know, Jesus died on the cross for my sins. So this is very important and personal.

So we're going to look at evidence regarding Christianity outside the Bible, first and second centuries, and we're going to do it a few different ways here. So first we're going to look at non-Christian authors who write about Jesus Christ and Christianity. And the reason why it says brace yourself is because some of them regarded it as, you Kind of a harmless myth. So they're reporting about it in that context.

Some of them were very much antagonistic. So we're not hiding that antagonism from you all. But even within the antagonism, a game we're going to play this morning is, what don't they dispute? Because that's a really fun game to play when you look through this stuff.

Next one, we're going to look at Christian quotes. of non-christian authors. So some of the non-christian authors, we don't have their original works, but some of them are preserved up to sixty to ninety percent as quotes within christian authors who are refuting what the non-christian authors were saying. And then if we get some time we'll look at some extra biblical christian writings. My guess is we don't have that extra time, but we'll see.

Let's start with the nature of the news. So the life of Christ, that it would be captured in the way that it was captured and sent all over the world the way it was sent, is contrary to the beginnings. And so it's important to understand very humble beginnings. So what's the big hoopla about? So humble beginnings.

Number one, Jesus starts hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Rome. which is pretty much the center of the world at this point. And it would take months to get from one place to the other place. So he's in this obscure sort of small town over yonder that nobody cares about. He lived a life of poverty. Again, history tends to capture those who are wealthy rather than those who are dear poor. Had no real political standing.

Pontius Pilate was governor for only about ten years. I guess the conservation of materials at the time was such that if they erected statues and things to somebody and they weren't a big deal, then after their time in office, they just reused the materials for something else. And so we actually have blocks that have Pontius Pilate's inscription etched into it, used to build a coliseum. So they're like, okay, that was cool. He was alright then, but now we really need that brickwork.

And then the way in which he died was a way that we only killed the erring slaves and the worst of hardened criminals. So not something that would be glorified and recorded in history. Every one of these red lines going through is a time when some conquering wave came through. And we're going to look at each one of those conquering waves and say, would they have wanted to squash out the life of Christ or alter the life of Christ in some way? So Rome, the Roman assaults come through, two separate Roman assaults. They're pretty upset with the way that things are going.

Would they have wanted to preserve Christianity in its current form or destroy it? probably not preserved. So what we've got in the historical record survives these. Then we've got Islam coming through in 700 or so. And Christianity went out with the gospel. Islam went out with the sword. Islam, would they want to preserve the accuracy of the historical record? No, and there's lots of conquering and burning and ransacking, and so our historical timeline makes it through that. We go through the Crusades, we go through another wave of Islam, and somehow the historical record is intact still.

A small-time person, poor in a small-time village, away from anything that was important. We have a huge historical record that somehow survived all of these conquests. So, pretty cool that we've got the amount of information that we've got. All right, so we'll start with the non-Christian sources, a couple, you know, Emperor Hadrian and the Jewish Talmud. These are just pictures. We'll get to these guys later.

So first one, Festus' reaction, as recorded in Acts 25.19, is typical of the early Roman officials. And it's actually pretty funny. If you haven't read this passage recently, you should go back and read it in the context of, OK, I'm Festus, and I'm trying to process what's going on here.

So Paul's brought before him by the Jews, and they've got all these angry accusations, and he's thinking, you know, clearly Paul's done something really hideous. And then it starts to hit him why the Jews are bringing him here, and he's just dumbfounded, and his comment is, they simply had Some points of disagreement about him about their own religion and about a dead man jesus who paul asserted to be alive It's like how do I prosecute that? What's what's the appropriate sentence for that? you know sort of sets the Sets the mindset of the non-christian documenting it at that time just that's really weird and it doesn't seem like a crime to me and we get to the point where There's the realization if Paul hadn't called on his right to go to Caesar that they probably would have let him go because all he's doing is talking about some dead guy that came back to life, he says. Weird, but not something we'd prosecute over. Anyway, this is, by the way, forewarning since we're talking about what authors said, what historians said about the early church, I'm going to be reading slides to you rather than presenting slides to you a lot this morning.

So the Nazareth inscription, this was found, it's called that because it was found in Nazareth. It's an edict coming from either Tiberius or Claudius. And it may be related to Jesus's resurrection. It seems to fit. We don't know for a fact. It's not, you know, something you'd hang your hat on, but it's interesting. And the inscription basically says, it's my pleasure that graves and tombs remain undisturbed in perpetuity for those who have made them for the cult of their ancestors or children, blah, blah, blah.

If, however, any man lay information that another has either demolished them or has in any way extracted the buried or has maliciously transferred them to other places in order to wrong them, or has displaced the sealing of other stones, blah-de-blah-de-blah, capital punishment. So, interesting that this comes out right about the time that they're deeply concerned that Christ is going to be stolen by his disciples. So, eat it, don't do that, or I'll kill you. Okay, Suetonius, a court official under Emperor Hadrian, writes, because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Crestus, he, Emperor Claudius, expelled them from the city.

And we think, again this is not one you'd hang your hat on, but it seems to fit pretty well, that this is actually talking about Acts 18, 2 through 16, and you can go back and read those passages yourself. Christos. You'll see later on the Romans referred to Christ as Christos, and the belief here is that this is probably just a typo.

So 26.2, what this refers to is basically chapter and paragraph. So this is the way that you reference historical documents at that time. So chapter 26, paragraph 2, Suetonius writes, Punishment by Nero was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition. So from this we get, OK, we've got Christians. Nero didn't like them. So don't worry. The revelations will get more interesting. OK, Josephus.

So this is the historian that people really put a lot of credence into. He was prolific in his writing, very accurate in what he said. Jewish historian. And he wrote the generation immediately after Jesus was born. So he's writing during the time that the apostles are also doing their writing. He makes a lot of references to things in the New Testament, including the Herods, Roman Emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, high priestly families, Annas, Caiaphas, the leader of the Sanhedrin who sentenced Christ to death, and Ananias, the Pharisees. So he's talking about all of this sort of stuff in a historical context about what's going on in the New Testament.

So we get some validation there. This quote has been stolen by Christians who may have good intent, but poor processing powers, and it's been amplified and made prettier and made more conclusive. This is not one of those. This is one that's not disputed in terms of what Josephus actually wrote. So you may find versions of this that are more definitive, but they've likely been doctored.

So, at this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus, and his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die, and those who had become his disciples did not abandon the discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive. Accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders." So Josephus, not a believer, clearly not a believer.

But he's trying very hard to be historically accurate. And we'll have a slide later on about how the historians viewed their jobs. It was their job to be as truthful as they could possibly be. So from this we get a whole heck of a lot, right? We get confirmation that Jesus was more or less virtuous, that he appeared before Pilate, that he was sentenced to death, that he had disciples who claimed that he was back with them three days later. So it's outside the Bible. That's cool.

Also, Josephus Ananus assembled the Sanhedrin of the judges and brought before them the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ, whose name was James, and some others. And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned."

So we've got Josephus confirming that that James was sentenced to be stoned because of his position with respect to Christ. The other thing you get here, which may not be incredibly obvious, is that if I were to get stoned to death, let's make it more realistic. So I'm in a state that's got capital punishment and I'm sentenced to die in that state. The historians are not going to record that Craig Case, brother of Mark, was sentenced to die, right? So there's clear recognition that Christ was a very significant, important figure of this time, that James derives his value by his association with his brother, Jesus.

Plinius Secundus, a Roman official writing to the emperor about his achievements as governor, and he's bragging, he's really happy, he's killed a bunch of Christians, so he's doing well by the Roman law. And he says, all who denied that they were or had been Christians I consider should be discharged, because they had called upon the gods at my dictation and did reverence with incense and wine, your, the emperor's, image. They curse Christ, which a genuine Christian cannot be induced to do. So interesting here is he doesn't say a lot of Christians can't be induced to curse Christ. He's saying, you know what, Christians as a whole, when I say, you know what, curse Christ or die right now on this spot, you're like, time for me to go be with my father. So pretty cool. And these are people, by the way, so he's writing in 112.

So were people alive during this period who had known the apostles? Yeah, absolutely. So they're very close in history. They're at a point in time where they can validate a lot of this information with public records. They know somebody whose grandfather saw Christ after he was raised from the dead. They know what's true. Plinius Secundus cannot convince any of them to curse Christ because they know it's true.

That's pretty cool. Same letter. Christians were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light when they sang an alternate verse of a hymn to Christ as to a God and bound themselves to a solemn oath not to do any wicked deeds and never to deny a truth when they should be called upon to deliver it up. So that pretty accurately reflects what we're doing today.

Cornelius Tacitus was a senator, a friend of the guy that we just read, which means he's probably not pro-Christian if this guy's really excited about all the ones he's putting to death. And he's writing of Nero's attempt to relieve himself of the guilt of burning Rome. So we know that this is after 64 AD.

Hence, to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt and punished with the most exquisite tortures the persons commonly called Christians who are hated for their enormities. Christus, and so you see why we would think maybe Christus is a reference to Christ.

Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius, but the pernicious superstition repressed for a time broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also. So, pro or against Christianity? Pretty much fully against Christianity, right? But he's acknowledging that Jesus was walking along on this earth, was put to death by Pontius Pilate. So we get these historical facts validated by people who are very much against Christ.

And I'm really excited. I almost can't wait until my favorite one, but I'm going to wait. So you should be excited waiting for this one because it's a hoot. Anyway, Marabar Serapion. Marabar means son of, so son of Serapion. A letter that now resides in the British Museum was written by him. He's also not a believer, but his position is interesting.

What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king? It was just after that that their kingdom was abolished. So from this we know he's writing after 70. But Socrates did not die for good, he lived on in the teaching of Plato. Pythagoras did not die for good, he lived on in the statue of Hera. Nor did the wise Cain die for good, for he lived on in the teaching which he had given.

So this person's not a Christian, but he can recognize, look, Jesus was a smart guy. He was wise. And the Jews, when they killed him, he's acknowledging that there was the perception that Jesus was king. You'll have to forgive my language here when I say perception and these sorts of things, because as we go through the historical record around what non-Christians are thinking, this is how they're thinking, and I think it's important to keep that in mind. They're not saying, oh, you know what, Christ was king of the Jews. They're saying there was the perception The Christ was king of the Jews. They're acknowledging a public opinion. Yeah.

It's possible that they also could have referred back to documentation in their records before that ended up getting destroyed in the fall. And Pontius Pilate wrote this superscription and said, So Nazareth and the Jews, point go. Yeah, that's right. And it's quite likely that a credible historian would look back at the historical record and see what he could from the historical documents. And I'm sure that's where the Jews' king comment here is coming from. All right. The Jewish Talmud. So this is a portion compiled after Rome came through and destroyed the temple.

On the eve of the Passover, Yeshu was hanged. And the word hanged here is actually a word that doesn't necessarily mean a rope was tied around his neck. It refers to a set of different kinds of capital punishment. For 40 days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, he is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Anyone who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.

But since none was brought forward in his favor, he was hanged on the eve of the Passover." So, kind of a creative retelling of that story, but things that we have confirmed is that he was capitally executed. We have that He was hanged or crucified on the eve of the Passover, and that's what we can sort of pull out of that one. So we're creatively recreating history at this point.

So Lucian Samisota, Greek satirist, wrote, the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world, Furthermore, their first lawgiver persuaded them that they were all brothers of one another after they have transgressed once for all by denying the Greek gods and by worshipping that crucified Sophist himself and living under his laws. So just more reinforcement, acknowledgement of how the Church was formed and what was core to the Church and the teachings of Christ. By the way, This is where Lucian lived, at least modern-day version of where Lucian lived. Probably didn't have paved roads at that point in time. Same work from Lucian. This is the slide I promised.

It was a historian. Let me just read these three quotes to you and you tell me whether it feels like a historian at this time feels like it's important that they record things accurately. History abhors the intrusion of any least scruple of falsehood. It is like the windpipe which the doctors tell us will not tolerate a morsel of stray food. The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened. They must sacrifice to no god but truth. He must neglect all else, his sole rule and unerring guide is this, to think not of those who are listening to him now, but of the yet unborn who shall seek his converse."

So, historians at that time, did they take their job seriously? Were they trying to record things as accurately as possible? So when we look at what Josephus had to say, is he trying to be accurate? Yeah, that's right. Now we're going to transition from direct text that we've got from non-Christians and we're going to look at Christians talking about text that were written by non-Christians and some of these are Heavily quoted, like I said, you'll find that one work, we've got 60 to 90% of the entire work just through quotes. And today, if you tried to pull that off in college, that would be gross plagiarism, and you'd get an F. I don't know what this guy got when he did that. So this is Julius Africanus.

He was a chronographer. Their job was to set the timeline straight, to assign the appropriate things that happened to the appropriate day, year, within history. And so they were pretty methodical in terms of how they went about looking at things relative to one another. So he's responding to a guy named Phallus who was saying, you know what?

There was a solar eclipse at the time of Jesus's crucifixion, and that's why it was dark across the land. So it's just simple astronomy. Anybody would know that. Interesting. Yes? Well, you've got more fun than that. I told you we were going to play the game of what are they not denying? So here's somebody who's obviously antagonistic to Christ. Is he saying, it didn't get dark for three hours when Christ was crucified? He's like, no, it totally got dark for three hours, but let me make up some reason for why that happened. So this is Julius Africanus' response to that, which is Thallus was a Samaritan-born historian. Africana said Thales' proposition was unreasonable, and here's why it's unreasonable.

Because the solar eclipse could not take place at the time of the full moon. And it was the time of the paschal full moon when Christ died. I mean, that's how you pick when Passover is. Full moon. Can't have solar eclipse when full moon. Sorry, go back to the drawing board. Interesting. No denial whatsoever. Yeah, it totally got dark, but here's my feeble reason, and then somebody with common sense says, sorry, feeble reason's gone, but thanks for the acknowledgement that the darkness was there.

Okay, Celsus, as quoted by Origen. Origen is in the line of John, likely. and got creative in his theology, but we'll take his quotes from Celsus. Celsus was a Neoplatonic philosopher, so he didn't like just Plato. He had to take Plato and do fancier things with Plato.

So we don't have any of this document. This is the quote that I was talking about. But we do have tons of it available to us through the work of Origin. And we're about to get to my really favorite slide. So when we go through this reading, play the game of what are they not denying?

And this is somebody, by the way, warning, definitely God-hater. So he accuses him of having invented his birth from a virgin, and upgrades him with being born in a certain Jewish village of a poor woman of the country who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because he was convinced of adultery. Then, that after being driven away by her husband and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a god. Not a Christian, right?

Okay, so let's play the game. What's he not denying? The person of Christ. He's not saying Christ didn't walk on this earth. So we've got Christ absolutely walked on this earth. What else? That he was in Egypt. That Christ was in Egypt. Okay, so we're backing up scripture some more. What else? He did miracles. That's the one that struck me as huge. He's not denying that Christ did perform miracles and had amazing powers.

There are other ones. Well, he's saying that, first of all, that there was talk about a virgin birth. That's right. Virgin birth is the other one that I was thinking about. So we actually get confirmation of a great deal of scripture out of this person who's, you know, grossly hostile. And a carpenter. And a carpenter.

So in terms of, you know, Jesus going, hanging out with the Egyptians, learning some devil magic, and then coming back, I think the only thing that really needs to be said about that, when do we know that Christ came back? I mean, at 12, where is he? He's in the temple. At 12, he's in the temple, right? So we know that he came back as a child. Most likely, he came back once Herod died, which is around about the time he's two. So that's one.

Number two, Joseph and Mary, were they concerned about keeping up the Jewish culture? Yeah. So would they be hanging out with Jews or Egyptians? Jews, right? So there was actually a large community of Jews in Alexandria at that time because a lot of people fled because of Herod. There were other pockets, most likely pockets for Jesus to be in, just sheer probability based upon where the bulk of the population was in Alexandria. But they would certainly have a large Jewish community that they could hang out in. not have to go hang out with the Egyptians. But I just thought it was fascinating that no denial whatsoever that Jesus had miraculous powers. None.

Eusebius, writing about 325, quoting a letter from Emperor Hadrian, I do not wish, therefore, that the matter should be passed by without examination so that the men may neither be harassed nor opportunity of malicious proceedings be offered to informers, if therefore the Provincials can clearly evince their charges against the Christians, so as to answer before the Tribunal, let them pursue this course only But not by mere petitions and mere outcries against the Christians, for it is far more proper to bring accusation that you should examine it." Basically saying, you know, just stop just talking about the Christians. Get them into court with real charges, and then we'll go after them. Okay.

Extra biblical Christian sources, and here I think we'll pop through These are things that we have. We're not going to go into them in depth, but you should just know sort of the breadth of what's available because it's pretty dumbfounding when you compare it with what we know about anything else from that time period. So, early church fathers, we have Clement of Rome.

He's quoted a bunch in Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, and so on, is probably the Clement of Philippians 4.3, wrote, the apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, there you go. We have writings from Ignatius, quoting Matthew, John, Acts, saying, Jesus Christ, who was of the race of David, who was the son of Mary, who was truly born, and ate, and drank, was truly prosecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified, and died.

So again, he's writing in 117. He's writing during a time when there are people alive who hung out with the apostles. So, people who can check the facts. This is written at a time when there's a very clear historical record. I don't know how much of this we want to go through. Bottom line, there were a bunch of Christians who were writing about the church at this period of time. Early church fathers wrote about the gospel as historical fact. I want to go back to that where it said that who was truly born and back to the fact of the crucifixion. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, he was walking around on this earth as a human being.

Right, but they were talking about the division of the flesh and the spirit and the dying on the cross. That was part of the Gnosticism, so this right here would... And the timing's right. I mean, the Gnostics are big time right then. So that would refer to the crucifixion and the fact that he did die and then he did come back to life and that's their answers.

The church fathers who were writing at this time, interesting, repeatedly told people, don't blame me, go check it out, the historical records there, you know people who had a grandfather who knew Jesus, go talk to him, make sure that this stuff that I'm telling you is true. So the records were still there.

Okay, so what I just said. Alright, extra-biblical writings. I actually want to get through to... So we've got all of these different extra-biblical writings about Christ and the time of Christ, but the next two slides I'm not going to try to talk to them other than to say, Here are some other works in the first and the second centuries that are referring to Christ. We've got quite a record considering how many people came through and sacked this part of the globe who were antagonistic about Christ.

That's what we've got. Well, I mean that plus this. Right? So we have a lot of records from that time. And keep in mind, again, Jesus from Nazareth, forever away from Rome. He was poor, executed in a way only for criminals, under a governor nobody cared about. And these are the records we've got. OK. So a few other pieces, parts. Not so much on the writings, but interesting validating some of the things that we're learning about the church at this time. We've got other documents and archaeological findings from this time.

So one of them is that Jesus was asked about a divorce issue in the New Testament. And the divorce issue that he was asked about actually completely disappeared once the Romans came through and destroyed the temple, because there were two different divorce courts you could go to. One where you had to say why you were divorcing, one where you didn't. Well, the one where you didn't disappeared when Rome came through in 70.

So we've got Jesus sometime before 70. interaction recorded in Matthew 8 about, you know, let the dead bury their own. It's a reference to the ossuary box. And we have Caiaphas' ossuary that we'll get to look at here in just a little bit. But this sort of burial process was only around from like 10 BC to 60 AD. So we've got a time bound there as well. We have other documents to validate pieces, like here's an early census document from Philadelphia, which is one of the churches in Revelation. But it's from the time period where Joseph and Mary would have had to go back to their hometown. So, oh, OK, this is what a census document looks like. They really were doing this sort of thing.

Caiaphas's Ossuary. His name is inscribed. Bones of the man are the right sort of age, and the ornate carvings are fitting for somebody of his position. So we've recovered the leader of the Sanhedrin's Ossuary box. That's kind of cool. Less ornate Ossuary box. This one is probably James. Brother of Jesus. If you want to zoom in on this particular portion of the box, blow it up so you can look at it. And it says, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus. Okay, so here we've got a military base for a pilot.

And if you look within there, you've got the Colosseum. If you look within the Colosseum, you're going to find that they reused some of the brickwork that had Pilate's name on it to build the Colosseum. And if you zoom in on that particular piece, then you can actually see that it says Tiberium TS Pilatus. So you just throw in the pon because it's Pontius Pilate.

So here's a zoom in. You can kind of see. So I alluded to the fact, I'm surprised we have had time to go through all the material. It's because I've been talking over any questions. So I promised you what we could clearly state from the historical record outside of the Bible. And this was one of the things that the Lord used to remove one of my problems that was keeping me from Him. Here's what we know. beyond the shadow of a doubt, looking at historians who were not Christians. Even if we did not have the New Testament or Christian writings, we would be able to conclude from such non-Christian writings as Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger that 1. Jesus was a Jewish teacher. Many people believed that he performed healings and exorcisms.

3. He was rejected by the Jewish leaders.

4. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. I'm going to go off script here just for a moment. 4.5. The disciples fled when he was crucified, every last one of them. Back on script.

5. Despite this shameful death, his followers, who believed he was still alive, spread beyond Palestine so that there were multitudes of them in Rome by 64 AD.

6. All kinds of people from the cities and countryside, men and women, slaves and free, worshipped him as God by the beginning of the second century. Quite a historical record, isn't it? And again, even people who hated him said he had miraculous powers. So the reason why I answered 4.5 is I think it's important to understand that the disciples were men, and it's also one that we can conclude from the historical record, and it shows that they had some measure of self-preservation in them. And that was important to me.

They saw Christ crucified. They were not brainwashed. They were like, holy crap, I am going to get in a world of hurt right now if I'm associated with him in any way shape or form and they took off. 30 days later they're back on the street proclaiming the gospel. What changed? What changed was Christ appeared to them. Anybody on this earth who's the most likely to know whether Christ appeared to them? Did they believe it?

11 out of the 12 of them were executed, never once denying it, and executed because they never once denied it. The 12th, they tried like heck to execute him. They threw him in boiling oil, but it just didn't take. So they had to send him off to Patmos. So the historical record outside of the Bible was enough for at least one person to say, you're right, clearly this happened. tick, now I'm on to my next one. So pretty cool.

Any questions? I guess we have a couple of minutes. I would say that one comment in here about the divorce issue that disappeared after 70 AD, that would also indicate that the Mosaic Law ended It went to the Gentiles and not to Jews. So the law ended almost a short period after his death on the cross. Which is also very interesting, because it had continued for thousands of years. That's right. And it ended right after his death. At the beginning, the mention of James as stone Yes. Correct. James, brother of John. Ended up getting stoned. Yeah. Yeah. One of the 11 who just would not give up this myth, right?

Pretty cool stuff. All right, let's close. Father, thank you for this time that we've had looking at everything except your word. to understand just in a different way, in a different view, that what you say in your word is just absolutely correct. And we know that the truth from it comes because it is from you, not from any external source. And yet, this stuff is valuable nonetheless. It's in Jesus' name I pray. Amen.