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History tells us that every founder of every religion is dead, except Jesus Christ. Many will argue that Jesus is dead also and that Jesus Christ is no different than any other religious founder. When they do argue in this manner they show themselves to be less than good historians.
Why would I make that statement? That sounds pretty ignorant to the modern, scientific mind. This business of Jesus being alive makes most intellectuals scoff.
It all gets down to: "How do you prove history?" History cannot be scientifically proven because as wise thinkers have pointed out history isn't infinitely repeatable. Very, very little of what we call history can be scientifically proven! You can't re-run history like you can re-run a laboratory experiment.
That reality pretty much takes history out of the realm of the science lab [with the exception of the use of DNA]. History can basically only be validated, to a less than scientific degree, by something that we need to call historical evidence, as opposed to "scientific evidence."
Here's a shocking fact: You cannot prove your mother is your mother, scientifically, without maybe using DNA, and there are even questions about DNA. There is absolutely no way that you can have your Mom go to the laboratory and deliver you again, to prove to skeptical scientists that you are truly her child.
Scientists don't just re-do an experiment once. They re-do it again and again and again, because scientists are very, very sceptical people. They even doubt each other! They question each other. They test each other. They will accept nothing that they cannot validate in the lab repeatably. Naturally many of them have a problem with the subject of faith. To many scientific types faith is non-sense.
Before DNA, all you could do to make some attempt at validating that you are your mother's child was to call in all your relatives and the doctor who attended, and gather all the official documents and pictures, and then put on a presentation of what you have gathered. If you had enough data we could validate, to a limited degree, historically, that your Mom is probably your Mom. But, we could not repeat the experiment of your birth! And so, outside of DNA we have no repeatable experiment for proving that Mom was Mom! This puts Jesus Christ and your Mom in the same historical dilemma.
Many people have too liberal a view of what science is. But science is locked out of any department where experiments in a laboratory do not work. If you can't infinitely repeat an experiment that proves something, then you cannot prove that something or another scientifically. Archeology is not as much science as it is history!
Everything you studied in school about World history cannot be proven scientifically!! It can only be validated to some degree. And some historians, very wisely, tell us in their books that certain events are not all that certain. They tell us that other events are more certain, because they have found more documentation, more historical validation.
Let's give you the bottom line about Jesus. There is more validating evidence inside and OUTSIDE of the Bible concerning the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ than there is validating evidence to prove that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Josh McDowell first confronted me with that information in the early 1970s. It knocked me for a loop.
Mr. McDowell began to point out to me the names of great lawyers of history who were skeptics, who thought they could disprove the resurrection and neutralize Christianity. But they ended up becoming converts to the faith. The historical evidence is overwhelming concerning Jesus and HIS life and resurrection!
This evidence is so overwhelming that Saint Paul had no worries about marching up Mars Hill in Athens, Greece and confronting the Greek Philosophers with this statement:
"Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent, because HE has fixed a day in which HE will judge the world in righteousness through a Man (Jesus Christ) whom HE(God the Father) had appointed, having furnished PROOF to ALL men by raising Him (Jesus) from the dead." [Acts 17:30-31 NASB, parenthesis mine]
Not only did Jesus come back to life from the dead, but HE predicted His own death and His own resurrection before it happened. No other religious founder is even in that ball park! This makes the words of Jesus Christ miles above all the words of all the religious founders of all history. All of them are dead, and they stayed dead in their graves. They didn't know exactly when or how they were going to die and they didn't say when they would come back. And they haven't come back! But Jesus Christ did foretell his death and did return to life on the very day HE predicted. History stands more strongly behind those facts than it stands behind the details of who murdered Abraham Lincoln! In the light of those facts, all of Jesus Christ's words have a validity that are light years beyond the mutterings of all other religious founders!
To be very blunt we can say it this way. If a founder of a religion can predict his own death and resurrection and have every detail fulfilled, and indeed come back from the dead, then everything else he says is extremely believable. {I might add that Satan knows this resurrection business validates and certifies, and so Satan has planned to have his world dictator killed and resurrected too.}
So if you reject Jesus as a con-man, or as anything less than HE says HE is then you need to stop believing the newspapers, stop believing anything that anybody says about the past, because you don't dare believe any of history when you cast out history's pillar event, ancient history's most validated event. If you believe Jesus' death and resurrection are a myth then you live in a world where all history consists of any pretend story anyone wants to make up about the past.
Plato and Aristotle don't have the historical validation that Jesus Christ has. Even William Shakespeare is a flaky historical figure that you are going to have to disbelieve existed if you doubt the historicity of Jesus Christ. If you don't accept the authenticity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, then you must also declare Alexander the Great a legion. All of the history of mankind is based on historical, non-scientific, non-repeatable evidence.
Let me make my premise clear again. I didn't originate this idea. Josh McDowell, once an atheist who himself became a Christian when he tried to disprove the resurrection of Jesus, spoke of this in the early 1970s. I heard him in a conference. Josh brought out the fact that you cannot prove anything scientifically unless that something is infinitely repeatable. For example, if someone doubts that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen we can do the electrolysis experiment over and over again. But with history we cannot repeat any of it. And so history can never be proven scientifically, only historically, by a gamblers percentage of odds, good or bad, but not absolute.
So, God the Father has gone the extra mile to show that HIS Son, Jesus Christ, is the unique religious founder above every other religious founder. God went that extra mile by raising HIS Son back to life, even though Jesus' blood was all drained out upon the ground as the soldier's spear opened a hole bigger than a man's hand in HIS side. The speer went up into the torso of Jesus, ripping Jesus' internal organs irreparably as the barbed spear tore it's way in and out! Jesus wasn't resuscitated! Jesus was totally executed and miraculously resurrected! The Roman soldiers were expert killers who didn't mess around. They made sure their crucifixion victims fully departed this World, before they let a victim be taken down from a cross!
God, our Heavenly Father, has literally written Jesus right into history. And if you reject Jesus' validity then you reject history itself! You cause all the recorded events in all the history books to be untrustworthy, unacceptable because the Jesus event is a cornerstone of history in that it is so well validated historically that it makes many other less historically validated events believable..
Why would anyone reject the strongly validated history of Jesus Christ? It is because they don't like what Jesus' death and resurrection imply. The Jesus part of history says that there is only one true plan for life. The story of Jesus reveals that the back drop, the background, the scene in which life is caste has already been set up and will not be changed.
Most of mankind wants to set their own scene and write their own play. They want to be the screenwriter, the play write of their own life. They refuse to admit that God has already come along and built the theater, the props, the scenery, written much of the script, painted the back drop and long ago cried, "lights, camera, ACTION!" All we can do in this play is ad lib our part or get in touch with the script. But we cannot change the basic motion of the drama that is going on around us. This is not a rehearsal! It's happening and we are caught on stage either making up our own malarkey or getting aligned with the director, God Almighty!
But, most of mankind has said, "No, I will not accept that. The scene is not that foolishness you Bible thumpers claim. The scene and the story and the cast and the stage and the theater are all up to me because I'm the director of my drama and I don't accept that there is any other director."
Most human beings live in denial of history. They would rather live in a little world of their own making. But God is going to judge every little world that many of us have invented.
Not believing history will cost you your life! Stop!! Get the source history books out, not this "politically corrected" stuff. Modern historians love to skip over certain facts in order to paint history their way. No, you go dig around until you find the old volumes of ancient history. Read Josephus's ancient history. These modern historians are not necessarily to be trusted. They find some history distasteful, so they skip over it. Like for example they don't like to report that many of the federal buildings in Washington D.C. were regularly used to hold Christian church services for many, many years. That really bugs them, so they leave it out.
Check out the facts on the life of Jesus Christ. I dare you! Just try and disprove HIM. Everyone else has failed to do it thus far. They write books and say they have succeeded, but it is just their own deception swallowing them up. Go read the biographies of the great lawyers of the 1600s through the 1800s who tried and failed to disprove the resurrection.
When Saint Paul was alive there were still 500 eye witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. How do you argue with 500 eye witnesses???
Not too long ago I was talking to a pretty knowledgeable individual who told me that he did not accept the Bible because it is quite well known that the Bible translators added errors and the Bible is a very erroneous book. I listened to the man politely, but because of his age and the fact that I could tell he had long ago poured his ideas into cement and the fact that debate does little good, I did not try to change his mind. But, in myself I felt very saddened. For this was a man who though very intelligent was very, very historically ignorant. He had been lied to by other misguided intellectuals.
The Bible is the most accurate book of all the ancient books in the libraries of this world!! The Bible has so many thousands of ancient copies and fragments that scholars have been amazed at how unified and without errors the Bible truly is. It is the one ancient book you can pick up and trust. It has not changed in any compromising way for thousands of years. We have the textual evidence that historically proves it, evidence that you can take to the repositories of ancient manuscripts and compare the bible in your hand with. The Book of Isaiah is one example of this. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain a copy of Isaiah that is perhaps 900 years older than anything we had seen prior to about 1947. But the only differences between the text we use today and the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Isaiah was a few spelling errors! But the text is the same! How can bunches of unrelated hand copiests in different times, cultures, countries and situations over thousands of years make so few errors between 200 b.c. and say 1450 a.d. when the printing press first reproduced a Bible??
My closed minded intellectual and elderly friend would never have accepted these facts. He was happy with his little mythological quote, "Oh, the Bible. I don't trust that! It has errors. Everyone knows that!" I remained politely quiet, but inside I was saying to myself, "Give me a break!! I have post graduate work in that area. You're very mistaken!" My poor intellectual friend was spouting myths. I dare you to check it out for yourself.
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