Video Transcript: Christianity Lecture 1

We now begin our coverage of the Christian religion. And to do that, we're going  to start with the birth of Jesus Christ. obvious place to start, right. And the first  thing to understand is that when people tried to date are the years from the birth  of Christ, they made a guess, as to when he was born that we now know is not  accurate. According to the present calendar, Herod. And you remember, he's the ruler who tries to kill the baby Jesus Herod died in four BC according to our  calendar. So Jesus birth was probably a couple of years before that, most likely  around six. So we are end up in the verbally self contradictory statement that  Jesus was born six years before Jesus was born, which is weird. But we need to understand that, that the calendar is off in that respect. We're told then, in the  New Testament that Jesus began His ministry, when he was about 30 years old.  So this would be somewhere around 24, around the year 24. And we're also  taught, scholars have been able to figure out pretty much agree on the earliest  works of the New Testament are letters of Paul written about the year of 55. And, of course, I already mentioned then, that the temple is destroyed in the year 70.  And since there's no mention of it in the New Testament, it's good evidence that  all the books of the New Testament were written prior to the year 70. So here is  Jesus ministry. And here's Paul earliest, and the temple destroyed in 70, just to  give a timeline, there of some of the early stuff. What Jesus proclaims, is a new  covenant. We heard Moses Maimonides , in that quote, I read, say that there is  no other law to come. But that's not what the prophets had said. The prophets  had quoted God is saying, In those days, I will make a new covenant. And I will  write my law in their hearts. And the knowledge of God will cover the earth, as  the waters cover the sea, things like that. And Jesus proclaimed, that he was at  the embodiment of an forming a new covenant with humans from a new  covenant with God, it was not brand new in the sense of everything else is  thrown out. It's new in the sense that Here is another here is going to be the  fulfillment of the Old covenants, and that his ministry was going to be be  accomplished Israel's purpose in the world, of mediating the true God, to the  rest of mankind. So he's proclaimed in the New Testament, to be prophet  speaks for God, priest of the New Covenant, the sacrifice of the New Covenant,  that ends all sacrifices, and the king of God's coming Kingdom. He's all these  things in one we should also get straight. Right now, early on the meaning of  some of the terms that are used in the New Testament disciple, for example, is a term used of the people who traveled with Jesus and and hear His message and believe it and then later become apostles. So we need understand that disciple  means student, student, and apostle mean somebody sent on a mission. So  while they're traveling with Jesus during his lifetime, that the 12 disciples are his  students. After he rises from the dead and appears to them and commands  them to go into all the world and preach the gospel. They are apostles because  they'd been sent on that mission. Apostle is not to be confused with the word  epistle. That's an old English word for a letter. So it's the King James translation 

that fixes it by having the term epistle in the different letters written by Paul,  Peter, James, and so on New Testament, the epistle of Paul to the Romans, For  example, that's an epistle is not the life of an apostle. It's a letter. We have an  account then of Jesus birth, it's given in the Gospels. And we're told that his  parents traveled to Bethlehem in order to register for a tax. And then there's the  next story is that of the Wisemen coming to find Jesus. There was some gap in  between there. Apparently, from the we gather this from the text, the text says,  Jesus is born in Bethlehem. And then the Wisemen come to see him, not in  Bethlehem, but in Nazareth, where his parents have returned back to where  they lived. And he's referred to as a young child, not an infant. So he's maybe 2,  3, 4 years old, when the Wisemen arrive. And, and they are seeking the one, the Messiah who's going to be the rightful King of Israel. And of course, news of that travels to Herod who is a paranoid. Herod was a good administrator. And he was admired by he was a puppet of the Roman Empire. He was admired by the  Romans for what he did, he had engaged in all these building projects and, and  dedicated them to the the rulers in Rome and so on, but ingratiated himself with  them. And he kept peace and so on. But he was a genuine lunatic. He had his  four year old son executed, for plotting to take his his place. He was a Looney  Tune. And this is the guy that the cause the Wisemen and says, Oh, someone's  been born king of the Jews, tell me where he is. So I can go worship Him, which is, which is code for tell me where he is. So I could wipe him out. And the  Wisemen, of course, are warned by God, not to go back to Herod and they go  home another way, and they don't report where Jesus is. But at the same time,  God warns Jesus stepfather, Joseph, that evil people are going to try to kill the  child. Get up, pack up, go to Egypt. And Joseph does that. And it saves the  baby's life, because Herod's soldiers go up to Nazareth and kill all the children,  the little kids trying to get trying to wipe out this Messiah, who is going to be king or has the right to be King of the Jews. Let's try to get some of the doctrinal stuff. Clear, here about the claims that we see made and that Jesus makes on behalf  of himself, and that his the apostles make after he is risen and ascended into  heaven. I think we ought not to confuse these two expressions, Jesus is called  Son of God, during His earthly ministry, and as he travels with his disciples and  there are several senses in which that's true, but the main one is that he was  virgin born he had no earthly father, and God the Holy Spirit is his father. This is  Jesus As human. God the Son is the expression we use for the second person  of the Trinity, which is incarnate in Jesus and is His divine nature. And it just will  help in clarity, if we're clear about what we're talking about, at any one point, of  course, the real offensive thing to choose. And it will, as it will be to Muslims,  and we'll come to that, after we're done Christianity is this. There are many Jews who might have accepted that Jesus was the Messiah. Except of course, that he didn't do what they expected the Messiah to do, which was form an army throw  off the Roman Empire and setup that Israeli empire. And he didn't do that. And 

he got executed. So it looks as though if he was the Messiah, he failed. So that's one reason they can't accept him. But the other is, they certainly can't accept  this part. Jesus is not divine nothing, nothing in creation is the divine.  Remember that basic schema for theism was the divine brings into existence,  the non Divine Creation, this is self existent. This is not this depends at every  point on God, God not only has to create it out of nothing, God has to sustain it.  Because if God didn't sustain the creation, it would disappear, like the writing on  your computer screen when you turn the computer off. Now, that's not quite the  schema I showed you for Christianity. There was a good reason for that.  Christianity insists that God has taken Christ into himself. The objection that this  makes something creaturely divine and violates the schema. It's not quite right.  And I quoted this before and I will again, it is not that in the Incarnation, our  humanity became divine, but the divine took our humanity into himself. And  unless this principle is acknowledged, the theistic schema leaves us with no way to know anything about God at all. This is the major difficulty with rejecting this.  There is in the universe, quantity. Things have a how much to them, we  represent that by numbers. God is one. This is in the basic creed of Judaism the Shema, hear, hear O Israel, the LORD your God, the Lord is One, Christianity  adds, and three, one in three, one God, three persons, is Oh, God has  replicated himself. Twice. But this is still quantity. Quantity is a feature of  creation created things have quantity, we count them and measure them all the  time. Creation is spatial. There's the Space of the Universe, the galaxies, and  the planets. And there's the space around us. Every all things have a spatial  shape, and position and so on. Those normal things. But God is said to be  everywhere. The Psalm says, if I travel to the utmost, reaches the universe, or  make my bed in hell, but hold you are there everywhere. But there is in the  universe power There's energy, matter and energy. And God has all control over  all powers. And we can keep on going. God is our Father. God is our judge. God is our shepherd. All these things are drawn from creation. And that's why I had  the term up here. When I said even prior to the Incarnation, there was already in creaturation. God had already taken on characteristics of creatures. Some,  sometimes he has created those in himself first, as his wisdom. And then he  makes he gives wisdom to people. Proverbs 8 says, In Proverbs 8, wisdom,  speaking in a personification says, I was the first of God's creations before he  brought into existence, the heavens and the earth, He created me, and I was  with him when he when he created the heavens and the earth. And then it ends  by saying, and now I'm with the children of men. So he can create these  characteristics and then give them to creatures, but they are created by Him.  That is they exist, by His will, doesn't mean there was a time, God didn't have  them. That's not what I mean by create. I mean, they depend upon God's will.  And he is what He wills, and wills what he is. And he has these characteristics.  And he swears that he will have them forever. And that's how he will rate relate 

to us. This is the way that theism make sense. It's not that the, the incarnation is a drawback. It's what saves it. Because without that, even the Shema wouldn't  be able to be affirmed. If God has called into an existence, space and time,  quantity and matter, biological life so that there's such a thing as fatherhood,  justice, so that there's such a thing as being a judge, Shepherd. So there's such  a thing as kindness, if he has created all of them, if everything that we find in in  the world around us is created, then then God would not be any of those things,  he would have called those into existence. Remember, this is not pantheism.  We're not back with Hindu and Buddhist schema that sees the divine as the  being of these non apparently non divine things that are only illusion. That's not  it at all. So what makes the transcendent creator? knowable is the is this  increaturation and ultimately, incarnation. Drawing the humanity of Jesus Christ  into himself is what makes him knowable. And it's why Jesus is said to be the  very image of God, the Express likeness of God's nature, this is his nature,  shown to us, it also means there's part of there's a side of God, we can't know.  We don't know at all. And that's true too. I hope that this is it's clear what role  this plays in this in this schema. What is knowable about God is therefore his  actions and relationships toward people, toward human beings. And those are  those are knowable in turn because they have characteristics that are created,  and their subject is manifestations are subject to the laws of creation, such as  the laws of logic and so on. That's why they're understandable. They're  knowable, but the knowable is accommodation. It's God taking the creaturely  into himself, and then revealing that is Gregory Palamas puts it, God out of a  super abundance of love for us, has imposed upon himself a really diverse  mode of existence. And that's what gets revealed. And the supreme revelation of all of that is in the person of Jesus Christ. His nature is the nature of God that  God has assumed himself in a person right there in front of us, that we see in  action and in the in the record of his daily life. That's what makes this so  important. And it's the key doctrine here. There have even been Jewish thinkers  who have admitted that Jesus, they think Jesus was the Messiah. Take Matthew LaPine I'm thinking of is one and, but deny vehemently, that he could be the  incarnation of God. But that's the main point for the, in the New Testament. And  it's, it's crucial, because it's the continuation, and the logical development of  increaturation. And God comes to rescue his people himself, incarnate in Christ.  And we'll see how this This changes everything. It transforms what it means to  be a Jew, and it grafts Christians who believe this into Israel into God's people is the way Paul puts it in Romans and makes them honorary Jews, honorary  people of God, because Jesus now opens the way of salvation to all people. It's  not just for Jews, but it's for everyone. And that's the significance of the wisemen showing up at Nazareth. It's why the church remembers that. That's an event in  the church calendar, because they were not Jews. They were Gentiles. But they  could come worship the King too. And they worship him despite the fact that 

what they know of, from what prophecy I know not, I don't know where they got  their information, but that he's king of the Jews. Nevertheless, they're coming to  worship because it's there's more involved than just Kingship of an earthly  kingdom. It's also significant at this early, early in Jesus ministry, he's led into the wilderness to be tempted. Because this goes back to the very first covenant that God made. The first people with whom he made a covenant are Adam and Eve,  and they failed their their probation. And Jesus now is tempted by Satan. And he prevails, he is does not cave into the temptation. He has not defeated, he is not  covenantly disobedient, but perfectly obedient to God's will. So that's a  significant story because it contrasts Jesus with Adam, and all of Adam's  successors, where we're told of the great things that they have done. But Noah,  and then later Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob and Moses and so on, but the  stories of all of them have to record that at times they lapsed. They failed to  become mentally obedient, even the great Moses offended God, because when  the people were dying of thirst and wanted water, God said, speak to that rock  and the water will come out. And instead, Moses went over and struck it with his  stick, and commanded water to come out. And it did. It made it look as though  he did it rather than God. And God said, for that you're not going into the  promised land. You'll see it from afar, but you're not going in. Each one of these  people in some way failed God and Jesus, we find the record of perfect  obedience to God unfailing obedience, and keeping the covenant in a heart filled with love for everyone. And this is why these early stories are significant  because they have to do with him as the Proclaimer of and the keeper of the  New Covenant. Keeping it on behalf of all the people who who trusted in him.  And next time we'll come back and continue this and keep our focus on the  doctrine.