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4 January, 2015
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“Jesus: Myth, Madman or Messiah? Who Do You Say I Am?”
Today we’re starting the New Year with a new message series. We’re just coming out of Advent and
Christmas and celebrating Jesus’ birth, and that can stir up a lot of questions for people about Jesus—was he
a real historical person, what did he really teach, was he really God in human form, are the Biblical accounts
about him reliable? So I wanted to start the year by hitting some of those types of questions head on.
But I want to start today with a question that we’ll be coming back to through this message series. But
it’s a question that Jesus asks. One day Jesus is with his 12 disciples and he turns to them and says, “Who do
the people say that I am?” You see, at this point crowds of thousands have been following Jesus and coming
to hear him. So he asks, “Who do the people say that I am?”
The disciples kind of hem haw around a little bit, then one of them says, “I hate to tell you this, Jesus,
but some of them are kind of confused and they think you’re John the Baptist come back to life. Others think
you’re a prophet from old.” Jesus thinks about that for a second and then asks his disciples, “But who do you
say that I am?”
That had to have been a little bit awkward. They’ve been hanging around with him for about a year at
that point, they should know the answer to that, but it seems kind of like a trick question. The disciple Peter is
the one who speaks up and says, “You’re the messiah…” That’s a good answer, but it’s still kind of vague
because there were lots of ways people pictured the Messiah—a warrior king, a peace maker, a shepherd.
But that question that Jesus asked 2000 years ago keeps repeating through history and eventually
comes to you and me. Jesus asks us, “Who do you say that I am?” So in the next few weeks we’re going to
try to figure out the answer to that question for ourselves.
Today I want us to look at two question that really didn’t arise until the 17th century, until the
Enlightenment. The first question is, “How do we know that Jesus really even existed?” Is there historical
proof? The second question is this: “Are the Gospels reliable accounts of who Jesus was?” Is what we read in
our Bibles giving us accurate information about him? People have been asking questions like that for a long
time, some of you are asking them. Some people you know definitely are. So let’s wrestle with these two
questions ourselves today.
Let’s take the first one first. It’s the easiest one to answer. “Did Jesus of Nazareth really exist?”
One well known atheist, Louise Antony, a Harvard grad, PhD and professor of philosophy at the University of
Massachusetts, she debates Christians on college campuses. She said this, “I don’t personally know a single
atheist who would deny that Jesus existed.” I find that interesting coming from a well known atheist. Bart
Erhman is a renowned teacher, author, and agnostic. He gets to the end of his most recent book and says that
as a historian you can’t deny that Jesus existed.
Of course we want evidence beyond the Bible! But you need to know that there are references to Jesus
outside the Bible. The first record of Jesus outside the New Testament is from the Jewish historian Josephus
who wrote about 80AD. In his history of the Jews he mentions Jesus twice.
Three Roman historians mention Jesus. In our New Testament we have 27 documents written in the
first century, by 10 different authors over a period of 50 years, throughout different parts of the Roman Empire
who say that Jesus existed. Some would say, “Well the references to Jesus in the New Testament don’t count
because they’re biased.” But again, many historians who are agnostics or atheists say that you can’t discount
the gospels as historical documents. And some of those documents in our New Testament were written down
as soon as 19 years after Jesus’ death. All this together is more compelling written evidence than you’ll find
about almost any other historical figure in the first century.
The evidence that Jesus existed is pretty compelling. Most informed atheists and agnostics don’t deny
that Jesus really lived. But the question that they ask, and lots of thoughtful Christians ask, is this: “Is the
Jesus who actually lived accurately described in the Gospels?” That’s a harder question to answer, but
it’s not impossible to answer, so let’s do it.
Now this question of the accuracy of the Gospels really came about in the time of the Enlightenment
(the 17th and 18th century). This was the time in history where scholars and theologians and writers began to
put the highest values on reason and scientific discovery rather than on tradition and faith. It was a huge shift
01-04-2015 Jesus: Myth, Messiah or Madman- Who Do You Say I Am?
Aaron A. Brown
Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, 2423 W. 26th St., Joplin, MO 64804. 417-623-7090. www.spwired.com
4 January, 2015
2
in human thinking. In the scientific world the Enlightenment led to great discoveries and the foundation of
modern scientific method.
When it came to religion, the Enlightenment began to look at faith, particularly Christianity, and question
it like any other idea. That meant looking Christianity and the Bible and asking, “What parts of this can be
proven with scientific method, and what parts cannot be proven?” That led to a lot of people questioning things
about Jesus in the Gospels especially the miracles—people being healed, a few loaves of bread feeding
thousands, people being brought back to life, Jesus walking on water and especially his resurrection after
being crucified by the Romans. The Enlightenment and the age of reason gave people permission to say,
“You know, I don’t see things like that happen around me today, did those really happen then?” It made
people wonder if the Gospels are at all accurate and reliable.
That led a lot of writers in the 1600’s and 1700’s to take the Gospels and rewrite them without the
miracles. They tried to separate the Jesus of faith from the historical Jesus. They tried to separate the things
that reason could prove from the things that were in the realm of faith. One of the more famous people who
did this was Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of the Enlightenment and as he read the Gospels he got hung
up on the miracles, things that could not be proven by scientific method. Jefferson was a truly brilliant man.
He was statesman, writer, philosopher, inventor, farmer—a great man with an incredible mind.
And Thomas Jefferson was also a man of faith and a follower of Jesus. He thought that Jesus was the
most compelling person who ever lived. Jefferson was very active in his church and a leader in his
congregation in Virginia. But he really struggled with anything supernatural in the Gospels. So in 1802 he sat
down with a couple of King James Bibles and a razor blade and literally cut out all the parts that were
supernatural and then he took what was left and created a new Gospel. It’s commonly called The Jefferson
Bible, but his title was The Life and Morals of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
So he created this book about the life and teachings of Jesus but he cut out anything supernatural. No
miracles, no walking on water, no feeding the crowds, no healings. In fact here’s how the book ends: “They
laid Jesus in the tomb and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher and departed.” No mention of the
resurrection at all! Jefferson cut that part out as being beyond reason.
Lots of other people did the same thing over the next 100 years. But the problem with all these rewrites
about Jesus, is that he ends up looking, and acting and thinking a lot like the people doing the rewriting! It still
works this way today. We want to rewrite Jesus to look like us. Think about it, to your friends who are really
conservative Christians, Jesus looks like a conservative. And to your friends who are really liberal Christians,
Jesus looks like a liberal. If you watch any TV evangelists, they believe that Jesus drove a Beemer wore a
Rolex watch. We tend to create Jesus in our image!
And people are still writing books like this, because it attracts our attention, our curiosity. A recent book
called Zealot by Reza Aslan was on the NY Times best seller list for a few weeks. He makes Jesus out to be a
warrior who called people to overthrow the Jewish priesthood and rebel who called for a violent revolution
against the viscous Roman Empire. That’s a very different picture from the Jesus of the Gospels who teaches
to love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, and turn the other cheek, the Jesus who says the
way to defeat your enemies is to love them and do good to them! That makes me ask, what’s a more accurate
depiction of the Jesus of the 1st century? The Gospel writers who wrote about what Jesus did and said in the
1st century, or a guy in the 21st century who looks back and says, “I think Jesus must have been like this…”
All this goes back to the reliability of the 4 Gospels. So how reliable are they? Let’s take a quick look at
how the Gospels came to be. Well, Jesus died around the year 30AD, and right after his death his disciples
started going out and teaching about him. It was an oral culture and very little was written down at that time
because only 3% of the population was literate. Some of the disciples could not read and write.
So the Gospels begin within that oral culture through the first disciples. But 6 years after Jesus death—
just 6 years—a man named Saul, a highly educated Jewish leader, he thinks this Christian movement is
getting out of hand and he starts arresting Christians, throwing them in jail, overseeing executions. But Saul
encounters the resurrected Jesus and his life is dramatically changed, he changes his name to Paul. He goes
from persecuting Christians to preaching about Jesus and starting churches! He starts writing letters to those
01-04-2015 Jesus: Myth, Messiah or Madman- Who Do You Say I Am?
Aaron A. Brown
Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, 2423 W. 26th St., Joplin, MO 64804. 417-623-7090. www.spwired.com
4 January, 2015
3
churches and those become the earliest documents in the New Testament. The earliest letter he wrote, that
we have, was written 19 years after Jesus’ death.
About that same time others were starting to collect the sayings of Jesus and stories about his life and
write them down. They start writing it down because they realize that time is passing and it needs to be
preserved. Early on, the disciples would travel around to little clusters of believers and teach about Jesus, but
as more and more people believed the disciples couldn’t get around to all those little clusters of new believers
to teach them, so those teachings were written down to help do that.
Then about 30 years after Jesus’ death, the disciples are being hunted down and killed off. That’s
when there is a more structured effort to write down coherent accounts about Jesus. Mark was the first Gospel
written down about 60AD. His Gospel is simple and straight-forward. Almost all of Mark’s Gospel, word for
word, is in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels. It’s like they had a copy of Mark and read it, and said, “Mark did a
great job, but there are things he didn’t write down that need to be preserved.” So they made sure those things
were included. John’s Gospel was written last, around 80 or 90AD. John’s an old man at that time, the only
living original apostle, and it’s like he’s read all the other Gospels and is saying, “They did a fine job of telling
the story, what I want to do is explain it in deeper, more poetic ways.”
The Gospels we have weren’t just thrown together. In fact Luke tells us what he was doing at the start
of his Gospel. He writes, “Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been
fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples.
Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful
account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were
taught” (Luke 1:1-4).
Luke is telling us that he didn’t just sit down to make this stuff up. He had the accounts of others, he’s
listened to those who were there with Jesus, eyewitnesses and the other writings and people available to him.
He’s assimilating information, not creating it. Some people say, “Yes but what he wrote down 2000 years ago
has been copied and translated and what we have today isn’t close to what he originally wrote.” But that’s
simply not true. We have very early manuscripts from the 2nd century, and fragments from even earlier, and
what we have today is word for word what was written then.
It’s not unreasonable to think that the Gospels are reliable sources about Jesus’ life. I say “reliable
sources” because they’re not perfect and they don’t always exactly match up with each other. Some churches
believe that there are no errors, no disagreements, in scripture, but we’re not one of those churches. We
recognize that Matthew remembers something one way, and Mark another. But when you look at all the
Gospels together you realize there is a huge amount agreement about who Jesus was and what he said and
what he did. But in the end you have to decide for yourself about their reliability, their accuracy. You have to
decide for yourself about the miracles and the supernatural parts in there.
And that leads me back to Thomas Jefferson. This is a very intelligent man who struggled with the
supernatural and cut those parts out of his Bible, but he was still deeply devoted to this Jesus who said to love
your neighbors, and love your enemies, and help those who are in need, and bear fruit in life, walk with
integrity and truth…this Jesus who would lay down his life for others. There are a lot of people I know, people I
care a lot about, who say, “I really love Jesus, I just don’t know about all the walking on water stuff, and the
healings, and the resurrection thing.” I’ve been asked a few times from people like that, “Can I still be a part of
Saint Paul’s?” What’s the right answer to that question? “Yes, we want you here! We exist for people like you
who have questions and aren’t sure about things. We’re a place for you to explore these things.”
I would tell people in that place to just start where you are. That’s what Jesus did when he called his
disciples. He didn’t explain a whole bunch, or answer questions, or challenge what they believed the moment
he called them. If he would have told them at the beginning what they would see and do, they would have
thought he was nuts! He just said, “Come follow me and we’ll change the world together.” And then they
figured out the rest of the stuff along the way.
That’s what I’d tell people who have questions. It’s OK. But when you read about Jesus in the
Gospels, I’m pretty sure you’re going to want to follow him. So why don’t you just follow him? And let’s figure
out the rest of the stuff along the way. I want us to always be a church like that. A place where it’s safe and
01-04-2015 Jesus: Myth, Messiah or Madman- Who Do You Say I Am?
Aaron A. Brown
Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, 2423 W. 26th St., Joplin, MO 64804. 417-623-7090. www.spwired.com
4 January, 2015
4
OK for people to say, “I’m not sure I have it all figured out, but I love Jesus.” Like Thomas Jefferson. If
Jefferson were alive today, I hope he’d feel welcome at Saint Paul’s.
I want to share just one last scripture. There’s a time where the disciples come to Jesus with a
concern: “John said to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried
to stop him, because he was not following us’” (Mark 9:38). In other words, “He wasn’t believing all the
right things and doing things our way.” I imagine Jesus saying, “Have you lost your minds?! He’s doing
something good in my name, how dare you tell him to stop! Are you stupid?!” That’s reading between the
lines, but I thinks it’s there! Jesus says, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my
name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I
tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no
means lose their reward” (Mark 9:39-41). Jesus is saying, “They may not have figured it all out, or be
following the way you are following, but they are doing things that are of me, and they will be rewarded.”
I have a number of friends who don’t know exactly what they think of Jesus yet, but they find him
compelling and they’re a part of our church because they see this place changing the world—whether that’s
through what we’re doing in Nicaragua, or through Bright Futures, or Ascent Recovery, or Circles out of
Poverty, or our connection to Watered Gardens Rescue Mission, or Crosslines, or Rebuild Joplin. They’re like,
“If following Jesus does all that in the lives of real people, I want to be a part of that, I want to follow too, even if
I don’t believe it all yet.” There is a place for them here. So start where you are, follow him as you are. Get in
a group of people who are learning more and growing. Continue to serve, and along the way I trust that you’ll
figure out the rest, or maybe you won’t, but you still will have been a follower of Jesus Christ. Who do you say
I am? I challenge you, I dare you, to answer that for yourself and follow Jesus from where you are. And for
today that is the Good News. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Since this is the first Sunday of the New Year I’d like to close with a prayer that John Wesley started
using in 1780. He was the founder of the Methodist movement and this is a great prayer of surrender to start a
new year. Let’s pray it out loud together.
“I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, place me with whom you will. Put
me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be put to work for you or set aside for you, praised for you or
criticized for you. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely
and fully surrender all things to your hope and service. And now, O glorious and blessed God,
Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, you are mine, and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant which I
have made on earth, let it be made also in heaven. Amen.”
I thank Adam Hamilton, Senior Pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, for his resources
from which I’ve drawn for this message.
01-04-2015 Jesus: Myth, Messiah or Madman- Who Do You Say I Am?
Aaron A. Brown
Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church, 2423 W. 26th St., Joplin, MO 64804. 417-623-7090. www.spwired.com