“Jesus was NOT a Good Moral Teacher”
By Matt Birchmeier, Ph.D
Imagine
that you are taking a college-level ethics class. The professor would stand at the front of the room and lecture
you about appropriate and inappropriate behavior, from business and financial
dealings to interpersonal interactions.
Now imagine if that same professor started each lecture by yelling out
to the class, “Bow down to me, for I hold the keys to all knowledge! I am Almighty, and you are to worship
me!” His words would echo throughout
the lecture hall, as the students shifted uneasily in their seats.
What
arrogance! Where does he get off? You would probably have a hard time
listening to the moral guidance from such a man! Yet that is exactly what we are expected to do if we claim that
Jesus was just a good moral teacher. In
post-modern, pluralistic society of today, many people consider Jesus to be
another good moral teacher, like Buddha or Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. But Jesus claimed to be God, by forgiving
others’ sins (Mark 2:9), by claiming to be the long-awaited Messiah (John
4:26), by offering entrance into Heaven (Luke 23:43), and by claiming to be the
only way to God (John 14:6). As we
attempt to evaluate whether the Christian Bible is true, we must figure out
whether this Jesus of Nazareth really is God.
We must decide whether this Jesus fellow was a lunatic and downright
crazy (he thought he was God, but really wasn’t), he was a liar (he knew he
wasn’t God but he claimed to be anyway), he was a legend (his followers
contrived his life story and teachings), or he really was Lord and God, as he
claimed. Like any historical or
scientific investigation, we should look at all of the evidence and decide
between the logical options available to us.
Lunatic
If
we theorize that the character of Jesus described in the Christian Bible was a
lunatic who claimed to be God, then we have great difficulty explaining two
aspects of the Biblical account:
(1)
How did he
understand humanity, sin, and moral living so well?
Consider
the following teaching of Jesus:
“If
someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take
your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not
turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you…. Love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:39b-42, 44, New International
Version [NIV])
This
sort of humility, love, and forgiveness is the epitome of human goodness. His teaching alone makes it very difficult
to believe that Jesus was insane.
(2)
How did he rise
from the dead and convince people to follow him even after his death?
Many
charismatic yet mentally unbalanced people have lived throughout the ages; some
of these people even led “religious” cults and took followers to their deaths,
such as David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, or the Marshall Applewhite of the
Heaven’s Gate cult. History clearly
shows that these cults normally die out with the death of their leader, but the
Christian movement had only barely begun at Jesus’ death. After his death on the cross, his followers
were dejected (Luke 24:17-21) and afraid (John 20:19), but they soon became
emboldened to spread the news of Jesus’ teachings after they found his tomb
empty (Matthew 28:1-10, Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24:1-12, John 20:1-9). If Jesus really were a lunatic, we would
have no reason to expect him to reappear after he was killed on a Roman
cross. Nor would we expect his
followers to steal his body to create the empty tomb (Matthew 28:13), because
the body of a crazy dead man would have no intrinsic value. One can only imagine the laughable situation
if Jesus’ followers had stolen his body and propped his corpse up in a chair,
in a situation similar to that depicted in the movie Weekend at Bernie’s. We cannot conceive of a logical reason why
these men would want a dead body in their midst.
Other
theories may be proposed to explain the apparent observation of the empty tomb,
and a refutation of each one is not the focus of this work; the interested
reader is referred to resources such as Evidence that Demands a Verdict
or More than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell, Letters from a Skeptic
by Gregory Boyd and Edward Boyd, Resurrection by Hank Hanegraaff, or The
Case for Christ and The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel. For our purpose here, it suffices to say
that we have no reason to suspect that the followers of a crazy man would claim
that he was alive after he had been publicly killed.
We
may theorize that Jesus knowingly lied about being God. Certainly, anyone can walk down the street
and claim to be God. In that scenario,
we cannot say that Jesus was a good moral teacher, while assuming that this
same Jesus lied about his very identity.
How can we trust the moral teachings of a man who knowingly
misrepresented his identity? If Jesus
lied about something so important, why should we listen to him at all? Clearly, we would not.
The
second significant difficulty we face in saying that Jesus lied about his deity
is that he went to his death for that very claim. Let us consider the story of the encounter between Jesus and the
authorities just before his crucifixion.
If Jesus was lying about being God, then he certainly knew that his
bluff was about to be called. A group
of people came to arrest him (Matthew 26:47-56). He was beaten and questioned by the authorities, and their questioning
focused on that very issue: did this
man, Jesus of Nazareth, claim to be God? (Matthew 26:57-68) If Jesus had wanted to save his own life,
then he easily could have, by merely saying that he was just a man, just a good
moral teacher with some followers. In
order to believe that Jesus lied about being God, we also have to believe that
he was crazy enough to knowingly die for this charade. Instead, he claimed to be the Messiah, the
Christ (Matthew 26:63), and that “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John
18:36) He left no ambiguity.
The
third difficulty in assuming that Jesus lied about being God is the
resurrection, as discussed above. How
could a serial liar construct such a resurrection account after his own death?
We
may also theorize that Jesus was a rebel against the Roman and Jewish
authorities of the day, and that his followers subsequently exaggerated his
life, death, and resurrection when they wrote the New Testament (NT)
books. There are at least three major
problems with this theory: (1) many of
the close followers of Jesus were persecuted and killed for their teaching of
the resurrected Jesus Christ, so they would have had to die for a big hoax or
for some legendary stories, (2) the historical time frame was too short for
significant legendary attributes to have gotten into the NT writings, and (3)
the NT writings contain many details that are inconsistent with legendary
tales.
If
the apostles wanted to fabricate a story, they could have fabricated many other
stories that could have spared their lives.
For example, they could have offered a story of a merely spiritual
resurrection of Jesus – instead, they told a tale of a bodily, flesh-and-blood
resurrection (John 20:24-28). They
could have exalted Jesus as a humble, moral teacher – instead, they wrote and
taught that he claimed to be God. They could
have claimed that he loved and cared for the sick and the blind – but the NT
contains many accounts of miraculous healings.
Their writings also appealed to the historical importance of Jesus’
resurrection: “If Christ has not been
raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17, NIV). The Gospel writers had plenty of leeway, and
plenty of motivation in the face of persecution, to claim that Jesus was
someone other than God. Instead, their
writings clearly convey that Jesus claimed to be God (John 20:28), the one Way
and Truth (John 14:6), the King of the Jews (Matthew 27:11), the Messiah (John
4:26) – and that he rose from the dead to prove it.
The
dates of the writings of the books that comprise the NT cannot be exactly
determined, but we know that they were written between about 50 A.D. and 95
A.D.. Many were written by eyewitnesses
of Jesus’ ministry: for example, John
wrote, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard…” (1 John 1:3,
NIV [emphasis added]); Peter wrote, “we were eyewitnesses of his
[Jesus’] majesty” (2 Peter 1:16, NIV [emphasis added]). Paul recognized that many people who saw
Jesus were still alive at the time of the writing of his letters, for he wrote
that Jesus appeared to 500 people, “most of whom are still living” (1
Corinthians 15:6, NIV). Given that some
readers of the NT writings would be people who knew what really happened, it
seems highly unlikely that they would fabricate easily refutable stories and
still claim that the events were real.
We can further note that the earlier NT writings by Paul (ca.
48-61 A.D.) and the later NT writings by John (ca. 85 A.D.) both teach
the same message of a resurrected Christ (1 Cor 15:17-19, John 20:1-9), so we
would have difficulty in theorizing that the legend of a resurrected Christ
could grow up within a few decades and then cease to grow after that date.
A
full reading of the New Testament books reveals many, often unflattering,
aspects that one would not expect to find in legendary accounts, as well as
instructions for discernment. Several
examples come to mind:
Luke writes that he wrote an orderly
account since he carefully investigated everything from the beginning, so that
his reader may know the truth of what he had been taught (Luke 1:3-4, NIV).
Luke also wrote the book of Acts, which
contains innumerable minor details of Paul’s early missionary journeys.
The three synoptic Gospels – Matthew,
Mark, and Luke – contain many of the same accounts with some variations in
order and the details that were included; these variations indicate that the
writings were not collectively fabricated, but rather were attempts to relate
real happenings in an accurate fashion.
Peter directly rejects the idea that the
stories of Jesus are legendary or made-up: “We did not follow cleverly invented
stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2 Peter 1:16, NIV)
Paul writes to the church at Philippi and encourages the believers to
settle differences that they may have between themselves (Phil. 4:2). Such teachings about disagreements in the
early church were not noble fiction, but were necessary encouragement to
imperfect humans who were members of the early Christian church – not exactly
the stuff of legends.
Paul also wrote that we should question things rather than blindly
believe (“Test everything. Hold on to
the good.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21, NIV).
John instructed people to discern what is true when he wrote, “Dear
friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they
are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world…. Every
spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.” (1 John 4:1, 3a, NIV)
These
and many other portions of the NT writings should convince the objective reader
that the substance of the writings is not attributable to legendary influences,
but was rather written by people striving to know and relate the truth of the
events of the life of Jesus.
The
critic of the New Testament, who may still want to attribute the NT writings to
legend, might argue that the word-of-mouth teachings of the early Church (30
A.D. to ~50 A.D.) could easily be corrupted before the presence of the written
texts, like in the childhood game of “telephone,” in which a phrase is passed
from person to person. In the game, the
final phrase is nothing like the original.
But the rules of “telephone” are designed to prevent clear transmission
of the phrase: the person speaking can
say the phrase only once, and at a whisper so that others cannot hear. The hearer cannot ask for confirmation or
clarification of the phrase before speaking to the next person in line. However, in the teaching of the Gospel
message, the teachers could clearly repeat the same teachings, to hearers who
could question whether they understood correctly. The doctrine could be, and would be, discussed at length, rather
than just handed off to the next person in line. Furthermore, some of the Pauline letters (e.g., 1 Corinthians 1)
contain doctrinal corrections, so there was clearly an effort to maintain
consistent teaching within the early church.
Therefore, attempts to attribute the NT accounts to errors analogous
with the game of telephone break down quickly.
Lord
Because
none of the above possible answers – lunatic, liar, or legend – to the question
“Who was Jesus” makes logical sense in light of historical dates, human
tendencies, and the written accounts of the New Testament, we must consider the
possibility that Jesus really was the Lord that he claimed to be, as described
in the NT:
The Son of God, in whom we must believe for eternal
life in Heaven (John 3:16)
The miraculous healer (e.g., Matthew 8, Matthew 9,
Luke 5, John 9, John 11)
The atonement for, and forgiver of, our sins (Romans
3:25, 1 John 1:9)
The resurrected Lord and God (John 20:28)
The long-awaited Messiah (John 4:25-26)
This option, of Jesus as Lord and God, may not sound
appealing to the skeptic or the avowed atheist, but an honest, logical
evaluation of the New Testament writings gives us no other choice. I invite the reader to examine the Bible,
and the New Testament in particular, to see for himself whether the person of
Jesus of Nazareth really could be a good moral teacher, a chronic liar, a
raving lunatic, or a mythical legend – or perhaps Jesus really was the Lord God
made flesh, who came to give us eternal life in Heaven if we believe in Him.
Bibliography
and Suggested Readings
Mere
Christianity, CS Lewis
Evidence
that Demands a Verdict, Volumes 1
and 2, Josh McDowell
The
Case for Christ and The Case for
Faith, Lee Strobel
Resurrection, Hank Hanegraaff
Letters
from a Skeptic, Gregory Boyd and
Edward Boyd
The
Holy Bible, New International
Version. Dates in this article were
taken from the NIV Study Bible, published by Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2002.
Copyright © 2003 by Matthew
Birchmeier. All rights reserved.