“The teachings of Jesus are what matter. The rest was all made up.”
I heard that statement recently from a friend—someone I respect and admire. His belief that the divinity, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus were all fabrications places him in some distinguished company.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, held the same belief. He cut up a set of bibles, clipping out gospel passages and rearranging them to create a bible more to his liking.
H. G. Wells thought the same thing. The writer known for fiction also produced a wonderful, comprehensive work of historical non-fiction—The Outline of History. Jesus is treated admiringly in this book, but he is also held at arm’s length. Wells, too, insists that the account of the resurrection could only have been a fabrication that was added to the gospel account after Jesus’ life.
These were intelligent men. However, they were also religious men—in the specific sense that they insisted upon a particular religious understanding of the world. One of the precepts of this religion is that God is irrelevant if he exists at all, because any “God” is aloofly uninvolved in the human world. Thus, Jesus could not possibly have been God living as man, and there could not have been any resurrection. This is the default religion of most who claim to have no religion today. For Jefferson and Wells, trying to reconcile this religious outlook with the surviving documents and the surviving facts of the early church required feats of illogic. The “way of the scissors” as exemplified by Jefferson—that is, the scripture of convenience that insists that “only the teachings are true”—poses at least two great and striking logical problems.
One is that Jesus’ teachings actually include references to his own divinity. In perhaps the most wonderfully ungrammatical statement ever made, Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). His audience certainly got the reference—“I AM” is the way God identified himself in the burning-bush encounter with Moses. Jesus identified himself the same way.
Jefferson chose to leave this quote out of his scissors-bible, along with various other quotes to the same effect. In other words, in trying to focus on “just the teachings,” Jefferson went so far as to exclude many of those teachings. Presumably, he could “just tell” which gospel quotes were really from Jesus and which were not.
The other logical problem is this: From a historical standpoint, it would actually be easier to defend the statement, “The resurrection of Jesus is what matters, and the teachings were all made up.”
For the early believers, there was little more than the resurrection. They did not yet have the teachings. The news of the resurrection was what ignited the spiritual movement in the lands surrounding Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and this spiritual movement lacks an explanation if the resurrection is dismissed.
Paul wrote a letter before any of the gospels were written that records the creed he heard when he first encountered other believers. This statement of shared belief spoke of several things. It spoke of Jesus dying for our sins, rising from the dead, and appearing in the resurrected flesh various times to various witnesses (I Corinthians 15:3-8). Yet it did not say anything about the beauty of Jesus’ wise teachings. Those teachings would not be circulated until years later, after the gospel writers compiled them.
Still, both of these logical arguments are, in a way, beside the point. The way of Jesus Christ extends into areas of our lives and souls that lie deeper than logic. That is why the very idea of “the teachings are all that matter” is in fact the precise opposite of what Jesus taught.
If the value of Jesus is to be found solely in his wisdom, then that would mean Jesus came to persuade. Salvation is external, in other words. We listen to the wisdom, accept various pieces of it here and there, and in this way we put on the “Jesus lifestyle”—and that’s all.
But this is not what Jesus taught. Salvation is internal. It is a matter of the heart. Read again the well-known verse, John 3:16. Jesus came because Jesus himself is the vehicle by which people can be saved. He is the door through reality that leads to freedom. We give him our hearts and those hearts are transformed, so that we can awaken from the perishing life into the eternal life—an eternal life that begins here and now.
This transformation is the factor that the religion of the world cannot accept. That is why no purely logical argument can save someone from the bondage of a perishing life. No one can be changed as a matter of reasoning alone, because the reasoning mind is not powerful enough. That mind is subject to what the heart believes. Rather, we give our hearts to Jesus—once we recognize that the burning we experience in our hearts (Luke 24:32) is God’s call.
Our minds change when our hearts do. We give our hearts, and we see what we never saw before ... at which point we discover—perhaps slowly, like a new sunrise—that now we truly have become receptive to what Jesus taught.
I heard that statement recently from a friend—someone I respect and admire. His belief that the divinity, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus were all fabrications places him in some distinguished company.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, held the same belief. He cut up a set of bibles, clipping out gospel passages and rearranging them to create a bible more to his liking.
H. G. Wells thought the same thing. The writer known for fiction also produced a wonderful, comprehensive work of historical non-fiction—The Outline of History. Jesus is treated admiringly in this book, but he is also held at arm’s length. Wells, too, insists that the account of the resurrection could only have been a fabrication that was added to the gospel account after Jesus’ life.
These were intelligent men. However, they were also religious men—in the specific sense that they insisted upon a particular religious understanding of the world. One of the precepts of this religion is that God is irrelevant if he exists at all, because any “God” is aloofly uninvolved in the human world. Thus, Jesus could not possibly have been God living as man, and there could not have been any resurrection. This is the default religion of most who claim to have no religion today. For Jefferson and Wells, trying to reconcile this religious outlook with the surviving documents and the surviving facts of the early church required feats of illogic. The “way of the scissors” as exemplified by Jefferson—that is, the scripture of convenience that insists that “only the teachings are true”—poses at least two great and striking logical problems.
One is that Jesus’ teachings actually include references to his own divinity. In perhaps the most wonderfully ungrammatical statement ever made, Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). His audience certainly got the reference—“I AM” is the way God identified himself in the burning-bush encounter with Moses. Jesus identified himself the same way.
Jefferson chose to leave this quote out of his scissors-bible, along with various other quotes to the same effect. In other words, in trying to focus on “just the teachings,” Jefferson went so far as to exclude many of those teachings. Presumably, he could “just tell” which gospel quotes were really from Jesus and which were not.
The other logical problem is this: From a historical standpoint, it would actually be easier to defend the statement, “The resurrection of Jesus is what matters, and the teachings were all made up.”
For the early believers, there was little more than the resurrection. They did not yet have the teachings. The news of the resurrection was what ignited the spiritual movement in the lands surrounding Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and this spiritual movement lacks an explanation if the resurrection is dismissed.
Paul wrote a letter before any of the gospels were written that records the creed he heard when he first encountered other believers. This statement of shared belief spoke of several things. It spoke of Jesus dying for our sins, rising from the dead, and appearing in the resurrected flesh various times to various witnesses (I Corinthians 15:3-8). Yet it did not say anything about the beauty of Jesus’ wise teachings. Those teachings would not be circulated until years later, after the gospel writers compiled them.
Still, both of these logical arguments are, in a way, beside the point. The way of Jesus Christ extends into areas of our lives and souls that lie deeper than logic. That is why the very idea of “the teachings are all that matter” is in fact the precise opposite of what Jesus taught.
If the value of Jesus is to be found solely in his wisdom, then that would mean Jesus came to persuade. Salvation is external, in other words. We listen to the wisdom, accept various pieces of it here and there, and in this way we put on the “Jesus lifestyle”—and that’s all.
But this is not what Jesus taught. Salvation is internal. It is a matter of the heart. Read again the well-known verse, John 3:16. Jesus came because Jesus himself is the vehicle by which people can be saved. He is the door through reality that leads to freedom. We give him our hearts and those hearts are transformed, so that we can awaken from the perishing life into the eternal life—an eternal life that begins here and now.
This transformation is the factor that the religion of the world cannot accept. That is why no purely logical argument can save someone from the bondage of a perishing life. No one can be changed as a matter of reasoning alone, because the reasoning mind is not powerful enough. That mind is subject to what the heart believes. Rather, we give our hearts to Jesus—once we recognize that the burning we experience in our hearts (Luke 24:32) is God’s call.
Our minds change when our hearts do. We give our hearts, and we see what we never saw before ... at which point we discover—perhaps slowly, like a new sunrise—that now we truly have become receptive to what Jesus taught.
