Confronting Jesus E-Book

Rebecca McLaughlin

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 285

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Award-Winning Author Rebecca McLaughlin Explores Who Jesus Really Is in This Follow-Up to Confronting Christianity Jesus is the most famous human being in all of history. But while many people have a basic sketch of Jesus in their minds, comparatively few have taken time to read the four biographies of his life in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In Confronting Jesus, Rebecca McLaughlin shares important biblical context to help all readers see why the Gospels should be taken seriously as historical documents. Exploring eyewitness testimony about Jesus, McLaughlin points to him as a first-century Jewish man who is the Son of God, King of the Jews, mighty healer, greatest teacher, lover of sinners, suffering servant, perfect sacrifice, and universal Lord. This follow-up to her first book, Confronting Christianity, helps readers understand the message of the Gospels and explore who Jesus really is. Individuals and groups can work through the ebook together with the Confronting Jesus Study Guide and the Confronting Jesus Video Lectures. - Winsome and Informative: Mixes thorough research with an approachable writing style and cultural references to help readers grasp biblical truths - Great for Apologetics and Evangelism: Presents the gospel clearly and invites readers to study with a friend - Companion Resources for Personal and Small-Group Study: Confronting Jesus Study Guide and Confronting Jesus Video Study also available - Follow-Up to Rebecca McLaughlin's Confronting Christianity: This ebook offers readers a next step and a helping hand as they explore who Jesus is - Accessible: Assuming neither knowledge of the Bible or belief on the part of her readers, McLaughlin provides a clear explanation of the 4 Gospels  - Published in partnership with the Gospel Coalition

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“Who is Jesus, really, and why does he matter? That’s the question Rebecca tackles in this insightful exploration of the life of Jesus, using his four authorized biographies—the Gospels. For the last two thousand years, those who have studied Jesus have found him simple enough for a child to understand yet profound enough to confound the philosophers. Whether you’re exploring who Jesus really is for the first time or just want to learn more about the beauty of our Savior, Confronting Jesus is a must read.”

J. D. Greear, Pastor, The Summit Church, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; author, Just Ask

“In a time when the public witness of the church in America has been profoundly damaged due to scandals, divisions, and culture wars, I have encouraged so many of my friends—from non-Christian neighbors to church planters—to return to the simplicity and the power of Jesus. Albert Einstein once admitted that though he wasn’t a believer in Jesus, he was nevertheless ‘enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’ There couldn’t be a better time than now for us all to be enthralled by him once more, and I can’t think of a better person to (re)introduce us to the luminous figure of the Nazarene than Rebecca. A beautiful and moving book!”

Abraham Cho, Senior Director of Training, City to City NYC and North America

“Among the many books that have been written about Jesus, Confronting Jesus is one of the most carefully written, compelling, and convincing volumes I have seen. What makes it special is how thoughtful and accessible it is, not only to Christians but also to those who have questions or even doubts concerning faith. If you are looking for a resource to help you or a friend encounter and consider Jesus Christ as he really is, look no further. This is that resource.”

Scott Sauls, Senior Pastor, Christ Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee; author, A Gentle Answer and Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen

“McLaughlin offers anyone curious about or interested in Christianity the best entry point by giving her readers a high-definition look at Jesus: who he is, what is unique and significant about him, and most importantly, why it’s worth believing in him. The descriptions of Jesus you will find in this book come together to make an attractive and compelling case for why so many of us love and follow him.”

Vermon Pierre, Lead Pastor, Roosevelt Community Church, Phoenix, Arizona

“No one has been more impacted by the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ than Jesus Christ. The amount of misinformation circulated about this first-century Jewish man is staggering. In Confronting Jesus, Rebecca masterfully unpacks what the Gospels reveal about Jesus. You will be amazed by the good news he delivered, in awe of the life he lived, and compelled by the invitation he extends.”

Christine Caine, Founder, A21 and Propel Women

“It is no secret that Jesus is the central figure in the Christian faith. However, we live in a day when many do not know why he is so central. Rebecca McLaughlin has done us a kindness by laying out the beauty of Jesus with clarity and conviction. Bring your questions and, through these pages, find Jesus ready, willing, and able to answer.”

Irwyn L. Ince Jr., Coordinator, Mission to North America; author, The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best

Confronting Jesus

Other Crossway Books by Rebecca McLaughlin

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion

10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity

Confronting Jesus

9 Encounters with the Hero of the Gospels

Rebecca McLaughlin

Confronting Jesus: 9 Encounters with the Hero of the Gospels

Copyright © 2022 by Rebecca McLaughlin

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Josh Dennis, Jordan Singer

First printing 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8113-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8116-8 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8114-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-8115-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McLaughlin, Rebecca, 1980– author. 

Title: Confronting Jesus : 9 encounters with the hero of the gospels / Rebecca McLaughlin. 

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2021050694 (print) | LCCN 2021050695 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433581137 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433581144 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433581151 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781433581168 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Person and offices—Biblical teaching. | Bible. Gospels—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 

Classification: LCC BT203 .M3755 2022 (print) | LCC BT203 (ebook) | DDC 232—dc23/eng/20211118

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050694

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050695

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-08-25 02:18:02 PM

For Julia,

who generously read drafts of this manuscript twice,

and for everyone else who does not believe that Jesus is the Son of God,

but will take the time to read this book

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1  Jesus the Jew

2  Jesus the Son

3  Jesus the King

4  Jesus the Healer

5  Jesus the Teacher

6  Jesus the Lover

7  Jesus the Servant

8  Jesus the Sacrifice

9  Jesus the Lord

Acknowledgments

General Index

Scripture Index

Preface

I wrote my first book while pregnant with my third child. But its true gestation was much longer. I’d spent almost a decade working with Christian professors at leading universities in the United States and Europe. I’d heard their stories and how their research and their faith were not in conflict but were intertwined—especially in areas that are supposed to have discredited historic Christianity.

I’d spent even longer interacting with non-Christian friends who had principled objections to my faith. They found it not only implausible but also in important ways immoral. Not only, for example, had science disproved the existence of God, but the church’s track record when it came to racism, to women, and to the treatment of people who identify as LGBT made them uninterested in even considering Jesus. I wrote Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion as a love letter to these friends. I got their questions and concerns but wanted to explain as best I could that, when we look more closely, every seeming roadblock to faith in Jesus becomes a signpost.

I wrote the book that’s in your hands as something of a sequel. It doesn’t focus on the questions that keep people from considering Jesus. Instead, it looks straight at Jesus himself. If you feel curious about Jesus, this book is for you. If you feel like you need to hear a lot of answers to your reasonable questions before you want to spend your time exploring Jesus as revealed in the Gospels, I’d be honored if you’d read Confronting Christianity.

My thirdborn is now three, and he’s exploring Jesus for himself. He and his big sisters recently learned a verse from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). This is the kind of claim that Jesus makes about himself. If it’s not true, this book is worthless, and I’m stumbling around in darkness. But if it is true, I pray that you will find yourself attracted to the light.

Introduction

On my first night out after giving birth to my third child, I saw Hamilton. I was the only Brit in the group. My American companions could enjoy the story of rejecting British rule a little differently. But even I could relish the pacey, punchy, hip-hop history of a man of whom I’d previously not heard. Hamilton was once one of the least known Founding Fathers. But now, this nonstop, shot-taking, revolution-making immigrant is one of the most famous figures in American history.

When it comes to the Bible’s four accounts of Jesus’s life, we find the story of another history maker who was born poor and obscure. But rather than shaping just America, this man’s impact has been felt across the world. Like Hamilton writer Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Gospel authors were writing about a real, historical person, and their goal was to tell his story in a way that would energize their audience. But unlike Miranda, the Gospel writers claim to report the actual words and deeds of Jesus, not just to capture the spirit of their hero. The New Testament Gospels known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are four of the best-selling books of all time. But many of us have not sat down to read even one of them cover to cover.

Perhaps your knowledge of Jesus is like my knowledge of Alexander Hamilton before I saw Miranda’s musical. You know the basic outline: a first-century Jewish man, known as Jesus Christ, was born to a virgin named Mary and was believed to be God’s Son. He was seen as a miraculous healer and a great moral teacher, and although he was ultimately crucified by the Romans, Christians believe that he was raised from the dead. Perhaps you know some of his most famous quotes: “Don’t judge” or “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But that’s about it. You haven’t seen the show. Or maybe you know more. Perhaps you grew up in the church, hearing Jesus quoted and reading the Bible, but you’ve moved on since then. You can hum along to Jesus’s highlight hits. But some of the details of his life have become a little hazy over time, and honestly, you wonder if the Gospels are mostly mythical accounts about a fairy story figure from two thousand years ago.

In this book, we’ll explore what the Gospels tell us about Jesus, and we’ll ask how they might be relevant to our own lives today. In chapter 1 (“Jesus the Jew”), we’ll look at the history of the Jewish people prior to Jesus’s birth, the evidence for his existence as a real human being, the political context in which he was born, and the evidence that the Gospels are reliable sources for his life and teachings. In chapter 2 (“Jesus the Son”), we’ll examine what the Gospels say about Jesus’s divine identity. In chapter 3 (“Jesus the King”), we’ll explore Jesus’s claim to be God’s long-promised, everlasting King. In chapter 4 (“Jesus the Healer”), we’ll see how Jesus’s healing miracles illuminated his identity. In chapter 5 (“Jesus the Teacher”), we’ll notice how Jesus’s teachings both ground and disrupt our modern, moral paradigms. In chapter 6 (“Jesus the Lover”), we’ll uncover Jesus’s claim to be the true bridegroom to God’s people and the perfect friend. In chapter 7 (“Jesus the Servant”), we’ll see how Jesus takes a servant role and calls his followers to do so too. In chapter 8 (“Jesus the Sacrifice”), we’ll explore the paradoxical claim that Jesus is both the sacrificial Lamb of God and the temple where the sacrifice is made. Finally, in chapter 9 (“Jesus the Lord”), we’ll confront Jesus’s claim that he is rightful Lord of all and that our truest freedom will be found in serving him. By the end, I hope you’ll want to read a Gospel for yourself to find out more about this first-century Jewish man who claimed he was the maker of all things, the King of the Jews, the mighty healer, the greatest teacher, the ultimate lover, the suffering servant, the perfect sacrifice, and the universal Lord.

In most Broadway shows, the staging hides the lighting. But in Hamilton the lights are deliberately laid bare. This book attempts a similar approach. Each chapter draws on all four Gospels, but rather than just providing a composite image, my hope is that the book will make you curious about the particular angle from which each Gospel shines its light.

Let’s start with the stage set up.

Mark’s Gospel was likely written first: around thirty-five to forty-five years after Jesus’s death. It’s believed to be based on the memories of Simon Peter—one of Jesus’s closest friends—written down by a man named John Mark.1 (As we’ll see in our tour through the Gospels, lots of people at that time had two names!) Mark is the shortest Gospel, and it’s bursting with a Hamilton-like immediacy that fits with the impulsive character of Peter himself. In fact, the Greek word for “immediately” forms the drum beat of Mark’s Gospel, as if the writer were running out of time!

Matthew’s Gospel is traditionally associated with one of Jesus’s disciples: a tax collector known as Levi or Matthew. Matthew records the famous “Sermon on the Mount”—a concentrated dose of Jesus’s teachings, snatches of which you’ll likely know even if you’ve never read his Gospel. It is the most unmistakably Jewish account of Jesus’s life, continually connecting Jesus to Old Testament texts. But Matthew continually weaves in non-Jewish figures, and it ends with Jesus commanding his first Jewish disciples to go and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19–20)

Luke’s Gospel begins by explaining his process. Like a careful historian, Luke has interviewed “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses,” and he has written up their testimony into “an orderly account” (Luke 1:2–3). In Luke we find a particular focus on women, the poor, the weak, the sick, and the marginalized. Luke was a doctor and the only non-Jewish Gospel author. The book of Acts, which tells the story of the early Christian movement, was written by Luke as a sequel to his Gospel.

The last Gospel to be written down was John, likely sixty or so years after Jesus’s death. It’s more philosophical in tone—more like an opera than a musical. John skips many incidents in the other Gospels and includes others that don’t feature elsewhere. But as we’ll see in chapter 1, we can’t dismiss John as historically unreliable because it was written later. Some of the most respected scholars believe that this Gospel was written by one of Jesus’s first followers, who as a young man witnessed much of what he records.2

You can read even the longest Gospel (Luke) in the time it takes to watch Hamilton, and just as I enjoyed Miranda’s musical in the company of friends, you might find it helpful to read a Gospel with a friend or two as well: maybe with a friend who sees Jesus differently than you do. Perhaps together you can try to account for his rise to the top: how this man who lived poor and died young—who never wrote a book, raised an army, or sat on a throne—became the most life-transforming, earthshaking, history-making human of all time.

1  The claim that Mark was acting as Peter’s interpreter and scribe appears in very early writings—for example, by Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, writing early in the second century.

2  See, e.g., D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 68–81; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 6; Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Belief (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2016), 153–59.

1

Jesus the Jew

The 2017 movie The Zookeeper’s Wife begins with a mother watching her young son nap. Two animals lie with him. At first, I thought they must be piglets. But as the camera moved from soft focus to clarity, I realized that they were baby lions. The early scenes depict an almost literally Edenic life. This woman, Antonina, walks fearlessly into the elephant enclosure to resuscitate a newborn calf. With one hand, she clears the baby’s airways. With the other, she calms its anxious mother, who could have trampled her at any time. The love that binds her to her husband, Jan, flows out into their love for their creatures. But from the first, we know this scene is set in Warsaw and the date is 1939. When Jan has no choice but to help some little Jewish kids to board a train, we know where they are going. As he pulls Jews out of the ghetto and hides them in the basement of their zoo, we know what fate awaits them if they’re found.1 The film is arrestingly beautiful, but the horror of the Holocaust is continually pressing in. I had to pause it multiple times to weep.

Likewise, when it comes to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life, the story of the Jewish people saturates the text. But for many of us, the contours of that story are unknown. We know what happened after Jesus’s life on earth, but not before. We’re so used to Jesus’s unrivaled impact on the world that it’s hard for us to see him as he first stepped onto the stage of human history. We’re so used to the dominance of Christianity—which is now the largest and most diverse belief system in the world—that it’s hard for us to imagine Jesus as a member of a subjugated ethnic group. We’re so used to Jesus’s influence on Western culture that it’s hard for us to remember his profoundly Middle Eastern roots. We’re so used to Christianity that we forget how deeply Jewish Jesus is.

In this chapter, we’ll glimpse where Jesus came from: literally, politically, and theologically. We’ll ask whether Jesus was a real man, who worked and walked and wept two thousand years ago, and whether we should see the Gospels as historical accounts that can truly give us access to Jesus the Jew. But first, we’ll excavate the ancient history of the Jewish people. When Jesus walked onto the stage, it wasn’t act one. It was the first scene after the intermission. So we’ll begin with a whirlwind, snatch-and-grab tour of the plot of the Bible up to that point, and we’ll start to notice the ways in which Jesus’s story is best understood in light of Jewish history.

In the Beginning

For many in the West today, believing that there is one true Creator God who made the universe can seem implausible. Not believing that there is a God at all is seen by many as the default setting. You’d need real evidence to believe in a Creator. In the ancient Near East, the Jewish belief in only one Creator God was also highly countercultural. But the alternative wasn’t atheism or agnosticism; it was polytheism. Most people believed in many gods. Against this majority view, the Bible’s first chapter boldly proclaims that there is only one Creator God, who made all things, and who made human beings in his image (Gen. 1:26–27).

The global success of Christianity has made belief in one Creator God the most widespread view across the world today. (The proportion of people who don’t believe in a Creator is actually much smaller than many in the West assume, and the proportion is shrinking globally, not growing!) But both at the time when Genesis was written and at the time when Jesus was born, monotheism would not have seemed plausible. To make the claim still more preposterous, the Gospels insist that Jesusis this one Creator God: not a demigod, or another god, but the one true God made flesh. So why would this Creator God become a man? The first three chapters of the Bible’s first book set a scene that makes us long for a solution.

Genesis 2 paints a picture like the opening of The Zookeeper’s Wife: human beings in loving relationship with each other, charged with caring for the rest of God’s creation. But while for Jan and Antonina, hatred, sin, and death invaded from outside, in Genesis 3 the rot comes from within. God’s prototypic people break God’s prototypic law. This ruins their relationship with God and with each other. Like an asteroid strike ravaging the atmosphere, their turn away from God spoils everything. But just as the The Zookeeper’s Wife takes us from Eden through pain and death and heartache to redemption, so God was working in the darkness to unfold his life-restoring plan—a plan to bring human beings back into intimate relationship with God and with one another, a plan that hinged on Jesus.

God’s plan began with a promise to a quite unpromising man who came from a city that in modern-day terms is in Iraq. Abraham was old and childless. But God promised to make him into a great nation and to bless all the families of the earth through his family (Gen. 12:1–3). And Abraham believed God. Well, eventually. Like many figures in the Bible’s cast, Abraham hit some spectacular fails. But in the end, he believed. His wife Sarah got pregnant and their son Isaac was the seed from which the Jewish people grew. Both Matthew and Luke offer genealogies to show that Jesus was descended from Abraham (Matt. 1:1–17; Luke 3:23–38). Jesus’s Jewish identity is vital to his mission in the world.

Isaac married Rebekah (which is a brilliant name), and they had two sons: Jacob and Esau. Jacob was renamed Israel, and his twelve sons started Israel’s twelve tribes. In another stunning fail, one of the twelve sons, Joseph, was sold into slavery by his brothers. But as Joseph later explained to them, what they intended for evil, God intended for good (Gen. 50:20). Joseph became overseer of Egypt under Pharoah and saved both Egypt and his family from famine. He married an Egyptian woman, and their two half-Egyptian sons became founders of the half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. So from the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel, people from different ethnicities were spliced into God’s covenant people. These are the first murmurings of the fulfillment of God’s promise to bless all the families of the earth through Abraham’s family. But after four hundred years in Egypt, the Israelites had gone from being honored immigrants to subjugated slaves.

The Birthing of a Nation

After helping hundreds of African Americans escape slavery, Harriet Tubman was nicknamed “Moses.” It was a fitting moniker. Tubman had experienced slavery herself before leading others out of it, and the original Moses had experienced oppression as a baby—when Pharoah had ordered the death of all the Israelite baby boys—but went on to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses only escaped by being hidden in a basket that was floated on the Nile and found by Pharaoh’s daughter, who raised him. But when God called Moses from a supernaturally burning bush, he’d been living away from Egypt for years. Moses made every excuse he could think of as to why he shouldn’t go back and demand that Pharoah let God’s people go. But the God of the universe didn’t take no for an answer.

When Moses asked for God’s name, he replied, “I amwho I am. . . . Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:14). The God of the Bible is the one who simply is. But he also identifies himself with his people: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (3:6). The one who is, is Israel’s promise-making God. The enigmatic divine name, Yahweh, that appears in the Old Testament is a form of the Hebrew verb “to be” used in the expression “I am.” For Jews, the name Yahweh was so holy that it was never read aloud. They substituted “Adonai,” which means “my Lord.” This was later carried over into the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which rendered Yahweh with the Greek word kurios—that is, “Lord.” Following this practice, most English translations of the Bible substitute “the Lord,” using small capital letters, for Yahweh. But as we’ll see in chapter 2, Jesus does an utterly outrageous thing: he takes this divine name—“I am”—upon himself.

When Moses told Pharoah to let God’s people go, Pharaoh refused. So God sent ten horrific plagues. Pharoah kept agreeing to let the Israelites go but then changing his mind. The last plague echoes the slaughter of the Israelite boys from which Moses himself had escaped. Moses warned Pharaoh that if he still refused, the firstborn child in every house would die. The Israelites were told to daub the blood of a lamb on their doorposts so that death would pass over their homes. Here, as in many Old Testament moments, we have a foreshadowing of Jesus, who (as we’ll see in chapter 8) is hailed in the Gospels as the Lamb of God: the one who’s sacrificed like a Passover lamb, so that everyone who trusts in him can live.

At last, Pharaoh consented to let God’s people go. But then he changed his mind again and sent his armies to pursue the Israelites—trapped between their enemies and the Red Sea. In a final act of rescue, God sent a great east wind to part the sea. His people walked across, before the waters closed back on their pursuers. This moment of release—the exodus—became the birthing of a nation. In some respects, it stood in Israel’s memory like the War of Independence in the minds of my American friends. “We roll like Moses,” sings Hamilton, “claiming our promised land.”2 But instead of fighting their own battles, the Israelites had been fought for by God. And unlike America, ancient Israel had a unique relationship with God. The Jews of Jesus’s day were clinging to this hope. Despite oppressive Roman rule, they still believed that they were God’s own people: descended from Abraham, rescued from slavery, and—just as importantly—given the law.

The Rules of the Relationship

When my husband complains that I’ve stolen his favorite hoodie or charger or keys (I’m quite the conjugal kleptomaniac), I parrot back our wedding vows: “All that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you.” Marriage frees me up to take my husband’s stuff. But it severs other freedoms. I’ve turned away from every other possible spouse to bind myself to him. He’s done the same. This vow of exclusivity is not designed to stunt the relationship but to protect it.

After Yahweh rescued the Israelites from Egypt, he gave them the law to show how to live with him. The first of his famous Ten Commandments reads, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:2–3). Like wedding vows, God’s law established the norms of the relationship. Worshiping God alone came first, and from it flowed a wealth of other moral acts: like loving others as yourself, providing for the poor, defending the oppressed, living in sexual faithfulness, and speaking the truth. But even while Moses was receiving these divine commands, God’s people were breaking them by worshiping a golden calf.

As the story of Israel unfolds, we see this pattern again and again: God’s people turn from him. They worship idols and oppress the poor. So God sends judgment. They repent. He rescues them. The cycle starts again. Like a serially unfaithful spouse, God’s people kept violating the rules of the relationship. We’ll see in chapter 5 that Jesus lived and taught God’s law in radical and life-affirming ways, and in chapter 6 we’ll see how Jesus stepped into the shoes of Yahweh, the faithful husband to his all-too-often unfaithful people, and how his coming finally dealt with the intractable problem of their sin—a problem that was frequently made worse by their leaders.

Kings and Catastrophes

One of my favorite Hamilton songs is, “You’ll Be Back.” It is a comic pseudo love song, sung by the deranged British monarch, that features the timeless lyric, “Da da da dat da dat da da da da ya da.”3 It’s not an attractive depiction of royalty. From the American perspective, King George is just a subjugating, tax-demanding nuisance. For a thousand years after they entered God’s promised land, the Israelites had leaders and judges, but no king. When they requested one, God told them that a human king might not be all they hoped for. In fact, the description God gives of how a king would treat them is not unlike the depiction of King George in Hamilton (see 1 Sam. 8:10–18). But God consented to the people’s plea, and Israel’s first king, Saul, was anointed.

Saul began well, but ended badly. He disobeyed God, and God rejected him. Saul’s replacement, King David, started as a shepherd boy who famously defeated the gigantic Philistine, Goliath. God called David “a man after his own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14), and David wrote many of the stunning Old Testament psalms. He was the archetypal king of Israel, and Jesus (who descended from him) is often hailed as “Son of David” in the Gospels. And yet, like so many of the scriptural would-be heroes, David had his own spectacular fails. One day he saw a beautiful woman bathing on a roof, summoned her to sleep with him, and then when she got pregnant arranged for her husband to die in battle. God sent a prophet to expose David’s sin, and he mournfully repented. But still, his moral failure and his role in Israel’s wars meant he could not be the one to build God’s temple. That fell to his son Solomon.

Solomon was known for his God-given wisdom. But even he could not escape the cycle of sin. Like the pagan kings around him, he started a harem and ended up worshiping many gods. We’ll see in chapter 3 that Jesus is the long-promised, ultimate King of the Jews, who alone could rule with justice. But we’ll also see in chapter 8 that Jesus is the real temple: the place where God would truly dwell and where the real sacrifice was made.

After Solomon’s death, the land was split into a northern kingdom (Israel) and a southern kingdom (Judah), and the cycle continued. Like a loving father, God sent prophet after prophet to call his people back and warn them of impending judgment. But finally, the hammer fell. In 725 BC the northern kingdom, Israel, fell to the Assyrians. The king of Israel and many of the people were exiled. Then, in 597 BC, Jerusalem (in the southern kingdom of Judah) was captured by the Babylonians. Its leaders were exiled. Ten years later, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed, and many of the people were deported. “By the waters of Babylon,” one of the psalms laments, “there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Ps. 137:1).4

By the time of Jesus’s birth, God’s people had been allowed to return to their land and to rebuild their temple. But rather than being sovereign, they were living as a subjugated race. And yet, faithful Jews were clinging to their scrolls and hoping God would send the Savior-King he’d promised by his prophets. But so far, every hope had been destroyed.

Enter Jesus.

Jesus of Nazareth

If you scrolled back two thousand years, you would not have zoomed in on Nazareth as the likely hometown of the most influential man in all of history. First-century Israel was a backwater of the Roman Empire, and Nazareth was a backwater of Israel. When one of Jesus’s followers, Philip, told a fellow Jew, Nathanael, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” Nathanael replied, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:45–46). It was a good question.

Nazareth was a marginal town in a troubled area. In 4 BC a group of Jews in the region rebelled against Rome and captured the Roman armory in Sepphoris, a town four miles from Nazareth.5 The Romans retaliated. They burned Sepphoris to the ground, sold its inhabitants into slavery, and crucified about two thousand Jews.6 This was the world in which Jesus was raised. Resisting Roman rule bought you a one-way ticket to a cross.

Things could have been worse. The Romans generally tolerated Jewish religious practices. King Herod, who was not ethnically Jewish, was installed by Rome as “King of the Jews” in 37 BC and enjoyed significant autonomy to rule—including remodeling the temple in Jerusalem to make it one of the most impressive buildings of its day. But Herod never really won his subjects’ hearts. He was a brutal man, even having several of his own sons executed, and is best remembered in Matthew’s Gospel for ordering the slaughter of the baby boys and toddlers of Bethlehem (Matt. 2:16). In the decades following Herod’s death, multiple Jewish freedom fighters attempted insurrections against Rome.

When Jesus began his public ministry, likely in the late 20s, he was stepping into a political landscape that was already highly charged. Hamilton declared, “I will lay down my life if it sets us free,”7 and like many other would-be Messiahs, Jesus died nailed to a Roman cross. But unlike any other leader of the day, his life and teachings changed the world. Or so we’ve been told. But how can we know that Jesus even existed, let alone that the stories we have in the Gospels are true?

In his 2012 book, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman answers the first question for us like this: “The reality is that whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist.”8