gospel-of-john-jan-feb-2019

MODERN REFORMATION VOL.28 | NO.1 | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019 | $6.95

History or Fan Fiction?

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. E X P L O R I N G T H E P E R S O N A N D W O R K O F J E S U S C H R I S T. In 2019, we’re diving into a yearlong study of the Gospel of John. This year, every episode and issue of White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation will grapple with life-changing questions such as “How do we know John’s Gospel is a reliable historical record?,” “Did Jesus ever claim to be God?,” and “What does it mean to be ‘born again?’”

Partner with us as we explore and learn from this rich book of Scripture.

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FEATURES

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The Fourth Gospel: Authentic Artifact or Fake Reproduction?

BY SHANE ROSENTHAL

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John in the Dock: Law, Lawyers, and Evidence in the Gospel of John B Y C R A I G A . PA R T O N

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Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospel of John W H I I N T E RV I E W W I T H LY D I A M C G R E W

COVER AND FEATURES ARTWORK BY MLC

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GET MORE CONTENT AT “THE MOD.” H O M E T O W E B - E XC LU S I V E A R T I C L E S BY M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N .

Every week, we feature brand-new articles discussing the social and theological topics of the day, as well as reviews of the books we and our contributors are currently reading, along with monthly contributions from our esteemed colleague and longtime MR contributor Dr. Carl Trueman.

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DEPARTMENTS 5

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T H E O LO GY

Theology of the Cross

BY CAMERON COLE

10 BOOK REVIEWS EX AUDITU

Creation and Re-Creation by the Word

The Book of Forgiving R E V I E W E D B Y PAT R I C I A A N D E R S

Girl, Wash Your Face

B Y B R I A N J. L E E

REVIEWED BY LESLIE A. WICKE

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White Awake REVIEWED BY ERIC CHAPPELL

64 B A C K PA G E FOCUS ON MISSION

Asking Hard Questions about Bible Translation

The Touch

BY ERIC LANDRY

B Y B A S I L G R A FA S

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Review Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith

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LETTER from the EDITOR

than historical treatise. Maybe, some critics allege, it was written by an early adherent to the Christian faith as a work of “fan fiction.”

Shane Rosenthal, executive producer of White Horse Inn, kicks off this issue by exploring some of the common claims against John, revealing how even within the text itself we find important clues about its historicity and reliability. We’re honored to have an old friend, Craig Parton, join us for this issue. Craig is an experienced trial lawyer and knowledgeable Lutheran layman who brings his education and experience to bear on John and John’s ne of the first lessons you learn in eyewitness claims. Our third feature article Sunday school is that there are four is a transcribed interview of Shane Rosenthal Gospels—four different accounts of with Dr. Lydia McGrew on the undesigned the life of Jesus. What coincidences in the Gospel of John we sometimes forget, however, is that help establish its authenticthat only one of them, the Gospel ity. Over the course of the year, of John, claims to be an eyewitness we will also feature sermons from “ JOHN IS SO account. John’s recall of his parthe Gospel of John in our revived DIFFERENT ticipation in the ministry of Jesus, preaching column, Ex Auditu. This his memories of life with Jesus, are issue features a sermon from Dr. FROM THE his own. That helps to explain why Brian Lee, pastor of Christ United OTHER THREE John is so different from the other Reformed Church in Washington, GOSPELS. . . . three Gospels, which are called DC, and a frequent contributor.

WHILE THE “the Synoptic Gospels.” While the As we begin this new journey, we Synoptic Gospels can be studied encourage you to read John careSYNOPTIC together, John demands special fully and in community. Maybe GOSPELS CAN attention. So, along with our sister your Bible study group can work BE STUDIED radio program White Horse Inn, through these articles together as we’re devoting the entire year to a you seek to grow in your underTOGETHER, study of the Gospel of John. standing of this Gospel, or maybe JOHN DEMANDS Over the course of the next six you can find someone in your SPECIAL issues of Modern Reformation church or neighborhood who magazine, we intend to take our needs to learn how to study the ATTENTION.” readers on a theological and exeBible. Our prayer is that the scholgetical journey of John. We begin arship within these pages in the with this issue, which takes up coming months does more than important questions about John’s veracity. just enlarge your knowledge. May it also increase None of the books of the Bible have escaped your love for and devotion to Jesus, “the Word the critical eye of scholars intent on undermade flesh.” mining the reliability of God’s word, but John has been a favorite target. It is popular in some circles to speak of John as a theological rather ERIC LANDRY exec utive editor

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THEOLOGY

Theology of the Cross

by Cameron Cole

ery often we celebrate the soteriological advancements of the Reformation for the church and individual Christians alike. We remember with gratitude the soothing, Christ-exalting doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Could we ever remember and laud this rediscovery of the biblical gospel too much?

One underrated advancement that people tend to overlook, however, is the pastoral implications of the theology of the Reformation for those who suffer. Until one has suffered under a theology of glory, which Luther critiqued and overhauled with a theology of the cross, one cannot appreciate the pastoral aid that the theology of the Reformers offers to those in tragedy.

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Since the unexpected and sudden death of my three-year-old son, I have spent a great deal of time analyzing and writing about the theological foundations that offer me hope, comfort, and stability. Before Cameron died mysteriously in his sleep, I feared that a tragedy, such as the loss of my child, would ruin my faith. I found myself surprised that, in fact, my confidence in Christ became stronger at his death. I had greater resilience in this “worst of the worst” tragedy than I demonstrated with the commonplace disappointments of my young adult days when I lived under a theology of glory.

I have found that theological orientation has everything to do with our ability to trust God in the wake of tragedy. In particular, the Reformation’s theology of the cross provides a

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foundation that can sustain a person’s faith and comfort their heart, even in unimaginable pain.

SUFFERING UNDER A THEOLOGY OF GLORY I remember my response to commonplace disappointment as a young person who lived under a performance-based understanding of Christianity. While setbacks, such as a sports failure or a dating break-up, compare on no level to losing a child, they demonstrated the emptiness and flaws that a theology of glory necessarily yields for those coping with life’s difficulties.

The performance-based mentality, however subtle and mild, did more to magnify my suffering than it did to alleviate or redeem it.

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My reactions to disappointments as a teenage or college-age Christian with a performancebased bent typically went in one of two directions: shame or bitterness. On one hand, when I injured my ankle five days before the swimming championships for which I had trained my entire senior year, I felt as if God was punishing me in some way. I supposed that I was pridefully focusing on my own glory too much, so God caused me to sprain my ankle to punish me for my lack of spiritual purity.

On the other hand, when I prayed, sought God’s will, and observed proper physical selfcontrol in my dating relationships, I felt a sense of bitterness and anger toward God when girls dumped me. Didn’t God see just how “good” and noble I was, relative to other college students my age? Didn’t my virtue deserve to be rewarded with a nice Christian girlfriend?

In neither circumstance did I really trust the Lord or draw closer to him. The performancebased mentality, however subtle and mild, did more to magnify my suffering than it did to alleviate or redeem it. Some fundamental fallacies of the theology of glory, which undergirded the medieval Catholic theology that Luther and others corrected, resided in my spiritual beliefs.

These views, rooted in my view of salvation, had significant implications in my ability to cope faithfully with suffering.

My soteriological mind-set told me that I retained some credit for my salvation. I was a sinner. God did the hard work in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, I had analyzed the facts and made the right choice in choosing Jesus. A certain percentage of my salvation—however minuscule—involved my response and, therefore, reflected some level of self-generated merit on my part.

No Reformed person would argue against the need to repent and believe. Certainly, we call all people to do just this for salvation. At the same time, the doctrines of grace credit God with every ounce of our salvation. In retrospect, we even attribute our repentance and faith as a passively received gift of grace from

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the Lord, such that he receives all glory for our salvation.

The fundamentals of the theology of glory’s view of salvation can wreck a person in suffering. Certain precepts leave a sufferer with a false notion of God and how he relates to humanity. First, a works-righteousness mentality suggests that God’s disposition toward us depends on our performance. When we choose well, we are accepted. When we choose poorly, then God’s displeasure and wrath now stand against us. Because of the performancebased, works-righteousness orientation of a theology of glory, no true stability exists in our relationship with God. God’s feelings toward us vacillate from day to day, sin to sin, good work to good work.

As a result, the natural temptation at the existential level is to interpret the trials and travails of life as a statement about our performance. The woman who has suffered multiple miscarriages can be misled to believe that her past sexual sins or lack of prayer caused these tragedies. The man whose house flew away in a tornado may believe that his failure to tithe fully instigated this misfortune. The family who encounters tragedy wonders if their lapsed church attendance provoked the wrath of God. While you may dismiss this mind-set, any pastor will tell you that many Christian people live with this karma-like thinking. Such thinking, however, can only alienate us from God at a time when we need him the most.

Second, the works-righteousness orientation of the theology of glory intrinsically breeds a partnership mentality between God and humanity. Several implications of this theology creep into the sinful mind-set of people. The partnership first suggests an unbiblical level of equality between God and humans. If “Jesus is my copilot,” then humanity is elevated and God brought low. While a theologian of glory would never give humanity more than a crumb of credit in his or her salvation, the prideful flesh of a sinner wants to take that morsel and reconceive our salvation as a 50/50 joint

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All kinds of problems occur. A sense of entitlement creeps in.

God has not upheld his end of the bargain.

venture. When this soteriological perspective carries over into our attempt to cope with suffering, all kinds of problems occur. A sense of entitlement creeps in. God has not upheld his end of the bargain. He has failed and broken the contract. The believer feels wronged.

I know these sentiments well from living under such a theological narrative in my youth.

The sense of entitlement and resentment was spiritually toxic. Given how easily I used to slip into this bitter attitude with merely everyday disappointments, I cannot imagine where I would be after the loss of a child were I still living under the same works-righteousness narrative.

In addition, the theology of glory can seduce us into the false notion that we can control God. In extreme manifestations, if I throw the penny in the coffer then my relative escapes perdition. If I believe with enough force, then God will produce health, wealth, and prosperity on my behalf. In more subtle but equally dangerous ways, if I live a pious Christian life, then I can

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insulate myself from heartbreak and pain. I can oblige God to withhold the normal sufferings of this transitory life.

When tragedy enters the life of a theologian of glory, their whole theological framework can collapse. There is no constructive category. The glory story of the god we can manipulate for our comfort and happiness does not have an answer to the questions of why. He becomes simply the god who let us down. I remember thinking as a young adult Christian, “Why isn’t this working?”

I figured I was taking the right steps and following the formula, and yet life continued to be painful and disappointing. My confidence in my faith wavered in moments because my expectations of God’s response to my self-perceived obedience did not match the difficult life I encountered. The theology of glory leaves a person bereft of the tools and resources they need to cling to Christ in tragedy, the very thing that will give them hope and redemption.

Certainly, there is generally no on-paper theology of glory that explicitly states how I’ve described the theology of glory above. However, it’s the notion of our role at the center of the salvation story that our prideful flesh distorts and inflates to land us in these desperate places, where we struggle to trust in God’s grace.

THE THEOLOGY OF THE CROSS FOR SUFFERERS The theology of the cross protects and comforts the believer’s heart in innumerable ways— three of which I found particularly helpful in my own worst nightmare.

First, the theology of the cross shielded me from thinking that my son’s death came as a product of my moral or spiritual shortcomings. It was not a statement of God’s displeasure with me. The penalty of my sin fell fully on Christ on the cross. God’s pleasure with me comes not as a product of my works but entirely from the imputed righteousness of Christ in me. Therefore, my circumstances

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in no way reflect God’s love for me. That love remains stable because it depends on the obedience of Jesus Christ. Therefore, I do not have to worry that my tragedy means that God has a grudge toward me. I know that God’s favor toward me never wavers. This reality enabled me to trust God throughout my darkest hours.

In addition, knowing that God’s love for me rested entirely on the life and death of Christ protected me from the feelings of entitlement and bitterness that characterized my response to disappointment as a young adult. The partnership mentality no longer existed. Jesus receives 100 percent credit and responsibility for my salvation. All glory belongs to him.

No internal merit or work of my own obligated God to save me. Consequently, no room existed for me to think that God had done me wrong.

Because of my sin, I deserved none of the grace or blessings in my life nor did I deserve any more exemption from sufferings than the next sinner.

Second, the theology of the cross taught me to interpret life through the cross. In point twenty of the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther writes, “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and cross.” A theology of glory tends to delineate comfortable, happy things as “from God” and pain and suffering as from the devil (or some other source, but certainly not from God). The cross leads us into a more mysterious and hopeful place.

The cross tells us that anyone united to Christ will suffer like Christ. The path to redemption always runs through pain. Simultaneously, the cross tells us that pain is not a random, cosmic accident. God has redemptive purposes in our sufferings. While those specific purposes remain a mystery to us in our individual trials, we know our pain is not meaningless.

As a younger person, pain for me just didn’t have a place in the life of a Christian. I considered it an aberration from the normal expectations. As I deepened in the theology of the cross, though, I came to see suffering as

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As I deepened in the theology of the cross . . . I came to see suffering as more of the norm for the follower of Christ.

When tragedy entered my life, my understanding of the Christian life was not rattled.

more of the norm for the follower of Christ.

When tragedy entered my life, my understanding of the Christian life was not rattled.

Finally, a theology of the cross places a believer in a passive position for salvation.

The Christian comes to salvation when they rely entirely on the saving grace of Jesus through faith. Anyone who has suffered deep tragedy knows the red line pain can cross when the idea of picking yourself up by your bootstraps is a despair-inducing thought. On the day after my son’s funeral, I remember finding myself alone for the first time since receiving the horrifying call about his death.

As I cried with my face in the carpet, I felt the sensation as if I would never be able to stand up. Pain consumed me.

As I lay helpless, I remembered what I had read in Scripture and seen reinforced in Luther about our need to passively find God’s grace in our powerlessness. In terms of the theology of the cross, I was in a good place. I was in the place where I knew that my only hope was in Christ and his redemption. I had been conditioned theologically to find and trust Christ in powerlessness. While the misery did not vanish, the

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hope that came from trusting God dwelled in my heart.

THANKFUL God has spared me no ounce of pain that inherently comes with losing a child. Simultaneously, however, I find myself grateful for the ways I have deepened in the gospel over the course of my life. The Lord has helped me understand the cross as my primary lens for understanding the Scriptures, myself, and God. In doing so, he has enabled me to weather the worst storm of my life with hope and comfort. I am grateful for the ways that God protected and sustained me through a cross-centered theology.

CAMERON COLE is the director of children, youth, and fam-

ily at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the founding chair of Rooted, a ministry that fosters gospel-centered youth ministry, as well as the author of Therefore I Have Hope: 12 Truths That Comfort, Sustain, and Redeem in Tragedy (Crossway, 2018) and coeditor of Gospel-Centered Youth Ministry: A Practical Guide (Crossway, 2016).

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EX AUDITU

Creation and Re-Creation by the Word

by Brian J. Lee

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) he opening words of John’s Gospel take us back to the opening words of Moses’ gospel—the Pentateuch, the opening words of the Bible.

They introduce us to the divine Word who was present at the Creation, who was active in the Creation, and they firmly root the good news of Jesus Christ in the creation of the cosmos. Indeed, the world, the cosmos, is at the very center of John 1:1, and the story of redemption that John is introducing us to here is cosmic in the full sense of that word. The

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only begotten God, the Creator Word, has been made flesh, bringing the fullness of grace and truth to those who believe in his name, giving them the right to be children of God. The prologue of John’s Gospel is justly famous. Not only does it introduce to us virtually all of the main themes of the Gospel that follow, but it does so in the form of a hymn. It is poetry, unfolding themes with repetition, rhythm, and meter. Stanza by stanza, it introduces ideas in dense, pithy statements that will unfold over the course of the narrative to follow. In the beginning, that biblical moment before God spoke created things into existence, the Word was, the Word was with God, and the Word necessarily was God. All things—he is

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no mere thing—all things came into being through him. He preexists. He is the life and light of men, the light of the world. He is not a man like John but one more than a man. He is true light, and he has shone into a dark world that does not comprehend and does not receive him. There is conflict in this poem and in this Gospel. Those who do receive him are born of God, born again, not saved by their flesh but by the Word made flesh. And this Word made man, made flesh, is full of truth and grace; his grace and truth are fullness and abound grace upon grace. He accomplished and realized true grace. This Word made flesh earned the right for his siblings to be brothers and sisters. His work brought us more than Moses: not law but grace and truth, and this grace and truth he reveals and accomplishes are explanations of the unseen God. It is a sort of a thesis statement, and by condensing the Gospel, John has given us a confessional document chock-full of theologically significant pearls. But these pearls are strung together, as the hymn of the entire Gospel is strung together, around a central theme and purpose. As John says in concluding his Gospel, “These things have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.” The prologue introduces us to Jesus Christ by telling us where he has come from, his source. “God” appears three times in the first two verses, and twice in the last verse of this hymn, framing up this section and clearly expressing its central idea: Christ is God. The origins of Christ are found back in the beginning, before the cosmos was spoken into existence. The Creation narrative of Moses is not invoked in the opening of John’s Gospel merely for literary style; it is invoked because to know Christ, to believe in Christ, you must know where he has come from, and he was with God before the foundations of the earth were laid.

Jesus Christ is a man, with flesh, yet no man has seen God at any time. The man Jesus is the only begotten God who has come out from the

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very bosom of the Father and presents, explains, “exegetes” the Father to us.

The prologue is a hymn to Christ. It begins with the Word, traces Creation and incarnation, and ends with Jesus Christ, a man who is not a mere man but who is the only begotten God, coming from and returning to the very bosom of his Father. In opening his Gospel with a hymn to Christ—not a birth narrative, a genealogy, or an Old Testament quotation—John introduces us to a preeminently Christocentric Gospel. There are other characters in this drama, to be sure—God the Father, the Creation, John the Herald, those who do not receive the light, and those who do. While all the Gospels are about Christ, John uniquely signifies the true identity of Jesus. John, the Gospel of the “I Am” statements, distinctively describes the Jesus who not only takes the self-existent name of God on his lips — “I Am who I Am”— but who further explains who he is for us as incarnate God: I am the bread of life.

I am from above.

I am the light of the world.

I am the door.

I am the Good Shepherd.

I am the Son of God. I am the Resurrection and the Life.

I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I am the True Vine.

John’s Gospel breaks down into two major parts: chapters 1–12 comprise the “Book of Jesus’ Signs,” and chapters 11–21, the “Book of Jesus’ Hour.” Chapters 11–12 are a central hinge for the whole, the climactic sign of the resurrection of Lazarus and the resultant coming of the hour of Jesus. As you read the first half of this book, note how the signs, the encounters, the words, and the deeds of Jesus validate him as the one who was sent from above, sent from his heavenly Father. The first sign recorded—the changing of water into wine at Cana—is pointedly identified by John as “the beginning of the signs Jesus

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did,” a new beginning that explicitly echoes “the beginning” of the first creation, “the beginning” of the opening words of the Gospel. The one who is mighty and powerful in Creation, here on earth at Cana of Galilee, has manifested his glory in history. Again, John’s concluding summary tells us that many other signs were performed that weren’t written down, but these were written so we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we may have life.

John’s Gospel is true, it is history; but above and beyond that, it is a literary creation. He had so much material to work with, and he carefully selected the choicest individual elements, like tiles chosen by an artist to form a mosaic. A close study of John’s Gospel shows this to be the case.

The book is a deliberately structured literary work. Biblical books were not written with chapter divisions, or even paragraphs; but instead, key words and literary devices were deployed to convey units of thought and central themes.

Scenes were introduced by markers of time and indication of setting, as in chapter 2: “And on the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” At the end of chapter 4, we are told that Jesus “came therefore again to Cana of Galilee where he had made the water wine” and performed “a second sign in Galilee.” John is telling us that in chapters 2-4 there is a self-contained unit, and he does so throughout the book. As we read, these scenes, the setting, and the time all come together to advance the goal of our author and the goal of the Spirit: To portray to us the only begotten Son of God who was sent by the Father, so we might believe in him and have life.

Given the Christ-centered focus of this book, we should stop and pause as we read through these scenes presented to us by the evangelist and ask how Christ is presented to us, how his glory is made manifest. In the prologue-hymn, this is condensed—Christ is presented to us as divine, the source of all life—and at the point of creation and regeneration—light and truth. He is presented to us not as a teacher or moral example but as an object of faith, one who is to be believed in. He is the incarnate envoy of God the Father.

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But throughout the Gospel, each of these aspects of his personality will expand and flower.

Importantly, the prologue of John’s Gospel does not reveal the nature of Christ for its own sake. The goal of the manifestation of the glory of the Son is not merely contemplation or mystical meditation. It is salvation. John writes so we might believe and have life. John the Baptist was sent as a witness, that all might believe and have life. Yet the world did not recognize him.

The world, which he brought into being, to which he gives life, didn’t know him. Even his own— Israel—did not receive this glory as it came into the world. “But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name.”

Isn’t it glorious that at the heart of this grand poem to the divinity and glory of our incarnate Lord—this hymn that sings of creation and the unknown, unseen bosom of our heavenly Father—our salvation is described in such a simple, precious, concrete way? Those of us who receive the Son, who believe in his name, are given the right, the power, to become children of God. Jesus not only makes the unseen Creator God—whose glory could not be revealed fully to Moses—clear and present to us, but he also makes him our Father. No, not everyone is a child of God; we need to become such, to believe in his name, and to be born of God. Here is the seed of the idea in John that has come to mark a movement in America: “born again.” How ironic that this catchphrase today primarily means a personal experience and emotional surrender to God, which is meant to set apart vital, Bible-believing Christians (the ones who really mean it) from all other sorts who might have a less-expressive, less-vital faith. A better translation from the text is probably “born from above,” because the idea is clearly in direct parallel to the expression from the prologue, “born of God.” We must be born of the Spirit, not of the flesh. Being creatures crafted by our heavenly Father is insufficient. It is by faith that we become children of God—which is not of blood, the will of the flesh, or the will of man. How ironic that the

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John paints Christ and the heavenly Father with such a glorious brush that he conveys the sense of the world’s darkness. It is as though he has been given a vision of the light that makes his sense of our darkness acute.

born-again experience has created a quest for a feeling, when John says that the children of God do not quest but rest in that name, in the glory of the Son who has come down from heaven.

So even though John’s prologue focuses on Christ, on his divinity, on his heavenly origin, and his mission of revelation, it also introduces us to salvation as the purpose of this mission.

Belief in the name of Jesus is the goal of the Baptist, it is the goal of the Evangelist, and it is the goal of the mission of Christ. It is the goal of this Gospel. For those of us who believe, we know that we have received this fullness, that we have received grace upon grace. Our incarnate Lord has made us children of God, and no one can snatch us from his powerful hand.

But there is more than Christ and salvation in the apostle John’s opening words. There is history, and not just the cosmic history of Creation. John, the witness to Christ, comes into being; he bears witness of the coming one.

And something truly cosmic and historic happens: the Word becomes flesh. The One who existed before John comes after him. The law was given through Moses, and grace and truth through Jesus Christ. He realizes grace and truth, which dwell fully in his glorious appearing. Jesus did not come to amplify the code of the law. He did not restate, clarify, or expand upon what Moses taught—nor did he deny it, reject it, or violate it. But he did transcend it; he went beyond it by bringing, by accomplishing, the fullness of grace and truth.

By introducing this historical element, John inserts a difference between the time before

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and after Jesus. There is a difference between Moses and Christ. John further tells us that there is difference in the concepts of law and grace—this against Pelagius and all other heretics who maintain that the best thing God can do for us is tell us, show us, really make it clear to us how we are supposed to fulfill the law. The distinction between law and gospel—between God’s holy demands and his precious gifts and promises—is clearly taught here.

Grace and truth are so clearly what we need.

While John doesn’t trouble us with a discussion of sin in this hymn of glory, we know we are in darkness and need to be enlightened. We need to know our Creator God better than we would when left to our own devices, and for this reason, we must be born of God. We must believe, and this belief he brings and gives to us. God is made our heavenly Father when Christ our brother comes down and dwells with us.

John paints Christ and the heavenly Father with such a glorious brush that he conveys the sense of the world’s darkness. It is as though he has been given a vision of the light that makes his sense of our darkness acute. His heavenly vision—a vision conveyed by beholding the incarnate Christ who came down from heaven—rightly chastens his own self-confidence. Grace and truth are what we need to become children of God, to live in the light, and to possess true life.

DR. BRIAN LEE is pastor of Christ United Reformed Church (URCNA) in Washington, DC, and a frequent contributor to Modern Reformation.

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FOCUS ON MISSION

Asking Hard Questions about Bible Translation

by Basil Grafas

he work of Bible translation has been an exciting and unifying endeavor for generations of American and other Western evangelicals. Translators were recruited from among our best and brightest church members, and churches themselves went with them by financially supporting this brave new work. We were all in a hurry to gift the world with Bibles they could understand in their own languages. But translation is, to say the least, a tricky business. There are so many variables, so many difficult decisions, and so much to master—maybe too much.

Umberto Ecco’s Mouse or Rat and Robert Fagles’ introductions to his modern translations

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of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid illustrate, from one translator’s point of view, the serious complexity involved. Bible translators have additional burdens. They are not simply translating just any book. They are trying to faithfully translate the word of God. These are the words of God, the thoughts of God, and the purposes of God for human beings. There were few, if any, evangelical churches in most of the places that needed translations. This meant that translations had to be extremely clear, so that people not immersed in a Christian world and life could understand them. One had to safeguard the intended meanings of biblical texts from being wrongly understood by cultures that were unlike those of either the Bible itself or of the

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translators. These can all be moving targets.

Eventually, all of that complexity erupted into vast specialization: speech pragmatics, relevance theory, semiotics. Translators had to form teams. Being Westerners, we learned more to rely on automation to do the donkey work.

Even more importantly, the translators and the teams that coalesced around them had to create products that filled many purposes. In the Bible, there is no gap between the written word and preachers and teachers who convey it. The Bible was not given to the church so that each and every person would read it independently, making up their own minds about its meaning and imperatives. Nor was it given to be read in a group so that a simple consensus occurred. Nor was it to be read like any other book (pace Gordon Fee). It was given to the historical church that had a covenantal hermeneutic (interpretive framework) we all could understand. Although that framework was not equivalent to the Scripture itself, it could reliably teach the Bible’s contents. In the challenging world of Bible translation into new languages, this meant that translators took it upon themselves to serve as both translators of what the Bible said and teachers or commentators of what it meant. What an immense burden: To be authoritative experts in the theological meaning of individual texts that are part of a larger, theologically coherent whole, and then to communicate that entire content (speech acts) in almost entirely foreign cultural contexts! The more complex the problems, the greater the degree of sophistication needed and the more complex the web of relationships required to get the job done.

Let’s illustrate the point. Let’s say that you are in the work of Bible translation. There are thousands of different languages in the world, and as we know, many do not have a translation of the Bible in their own tongue. How do you choose which to translate? How do you choose whether or not to translate? Who makes the decisions?

Why do they choose to pursue some languages over others?

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[The Bible] was given to the historical church that had a covenantal hermeneutic . . . we all could understand.

There are many ways in which we may answer these questions. Given the fact that we live in a Western world not only assisted by but often driven or directed by technology (Neil Postman’s Technopoly), perhaps we choose to translate because we can. Machine translations are not magic, but they do help stretch capabilities.

Translation agencies are also, to some degree, market driven. They depend on funding derived from donor individuals, churches, and Christian nonprofits (probably not in that order). The more translations you attempt and the more you field, the better your marketing and the greater your sales. I know that sounds crass, not to mention unspiritual, but it is a reality that stands behind so much of what missions do. Some people plead for the universal need to have Bibles translated into everyone’s “heart languages.” Accordingly, translations in other than someone’s birth or even original religious

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FOCUS ON MISSION

language cannot be heart languages. This is problematic. If Hebrews 4:12 declares that the word of God itself is alive and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, is that not heart language in and of itself? In other words, the Bible is already a heart language. It is written by God, and God brings life. That does not determine whether the Bible should be translated into a given language. It does, however, demonstrate that birth languages are not, at least in a Christian sense, heart languages.

So then, how do we decide and who should decide? If ethnographers do their research and discover a language that doesn’t have its own translation, does that settle the matter? I know from my own experience that new translations are floated because a decision was made that a previous translation was not adequate. But this also leads to another question: Adequate according to whom? “Insider movements” working in Asian Muslim communities, for example, claimed that existing translations were not satisfactory. They were not translated, as the story went, into the “heart language” of Muslims. The effort to create these, however, invariably Islamized the Bible translation itself. “Father,” “Son,” and “Son of God” were purged from these translations. Functional equivalents were substituted, but—as any decent biblical theologian knows—there are no functional equivalents for words that serve as the backbone for biblical Trinitarianism.

Furthermore, who made that decision? In 2005, I sat in a meeting when an irate Bengali Christian asked that very question. When he received his condescending and completely inadequate reply (“Well, if you simply understood that ‘Son of God’ simply means ‘messiah’”), he followed up with another question: “Who gave you the right to change the words of the Bible?” Here is my point.

On that day, he represented the silent witness of national Christians and members of visible churches of converts. They are silent,

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because we do not have the ears to hear them.

Translation agencies do not consult national churches. They do their own thing or, to dot every i and cross every t, they ask nationals.

The small print, in this case, is that these nationals are not only members of independent convert churches. Most often, they are employees of Christian missions organizations. It is the church that is ignored, and it is ignored at both ends. And while American churches are pursued for funding, they too are ignored.

We ignore the church in contradiction to the Bible itself at our peril. As it happens, I work not only in the Muslim world but also in a Native American church plant: Great Plains Gathering in Billings, Montana. We are a family of ancestral Native enemies, white people, Latin Americans, and African Americans. It is easily the most multicultural place in sight. Each of our separate cultures cherishes its identity, but our common heart language—the one Bible we share—pulls us together. Creating separate translations for each cultural identity would be incredibly self-defeating.

My point in mentioning this is not to say that we don’t need more translations—I am sure we do. I am saying, however, that the decision itself is inherently theological and bound up in the sphere of the church. It is not fundamentally either a technical question or a purely missiological one. Another way to get at this is to ask: What kind of church will this translation create? What will happen to the native Christian community if I produce this new translation?

Muslim Idiom Translations (MIT), such as those I described earlier, tear believing communities apart. They scar the bride and body of Christ.

Because they do this, evangelical missions must listen to those silent witnesses.

BASIL GRAFAS is the pen name for an American mission-

ary who has spent more than thirty years in cross-cultural missions.

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If it can be demonstrated that the Gospel of John is actually the product of an eyewitness who gives us solid historical information, . . . then this would give us a solid basis for trusting the author as a reliable source.”

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THE FOURTH GOSPEL: AUTHENTIC ARTIFACT OR FAKE REPRODUCTION?

JOHN IN THE DOCK: LAW, LAWYERS, AND EVIDENCE IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

UNDESIGNED COINCIDENCES IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN 19

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here once was a man who claimed to be in possession of a lost painting of Leonardo da Vinci. Upon hearing this claim, the curator of a prestigious museum asked him if it had ever been appraised.

“No,” said the man. “No one outside my family has ever seen the portrait, but all of us know in our hearts that it’s the real McCoy!” The curator then asked, “How do you know that it’s truly authentic and not a fake reproduction?”

The man emphatically replied, “Because it has changed our lives.”

Although the above parable may sound a little far-fetched, it’s actually the approach many Christians take when it comes to authenticating the story of Jesus. How can we know if the picture we find of Jesus’s life and ministry as outlined in the four Gospels is truly authentic?

That’s easy. Simply read the texts for yourself and apply them to your life. Then, when you begin to encounter Jesus, you’ll begin to know and experience the truth for yourself.

Of course, the problem with this approach is that it’s basically the same method used to authenticate Scientology, Mormonism, and countless other sects and cults. “Try it, you’ll like it!” Though the use of counterfeit bills may end up changing my life for the better (at least in the short term), that doesn’t make it either good or worthwhile. As the case of the da Vinci painting demonstrates, there’s a huge difference between the subjective appreciation of a given artifact and its objective evaluation. This can regularly be witnessed on a program such as PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, where people bring in their favorite family treasures to be appraised by the experts. Whether a person brings in a painting that has been passed down in the family or an antique desk recently acquired at a garage sale, the appraiser doesn’t take into consideration how much the item is loved by the owner but simply begins the process of analyzing the artifact by looking for objective clues regarding its origin, age, and history.

Let’s face it: Those whose job it is to authenticate various kinds of artifacts have taken the time— usually a lifetime—to study all those small little details few of us ever notice. This particular notch

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or engraving indicates that the desk was made in Boston in the late 1700s by a particular manufacturer. The composition of the oils and the style of the signature reveal that the painting that has been passed down through the family for decades is actually a reproduction. This is the approach I’d like us to consider using as we evaluate the Gospel of John. You and your family may treasure this particular book of the Bible, and you may even have the text of John 3:16 on a plaque somewhere in your home. But if you’re like me, you probably have relatives who think it’s all a load of bunk. No matter how much you try to get them to admire the sentiment of your plaque, they turn away in disgust and eventually change the subject.

All of this, however, is completely subjective.

In such a state of affairs, the only factor taken into consideration here is one’s own subjective preferences: “I like this book” or “I don’t like this book.” But if we examined the Gospel of John as we would evaluate a painting someone claimed was a lost da Vinci, then perhaps we could begin to move from our own individual evaluations of this text to more objective considerations.

If it can be shown that various internal clues point to the fact that this document was not actually written by an eyewitness who was close to Jesus, but that this text is actually a kind of ancient fan fiction written at a much later time, then its historical value would essentially be worthless, no matter how much we personally treasure its words and phrases. On the other hand, if it can be demonstrated that the Gospel of John is actually the product of an eyewitness who gives us solid historical information about first-century Palestine that can be verified by other means, then this would give us a solid basis for trusting the author as a reliable source concerning the words and deeds of Jesus.

The first thing that needs to be said as we evaluate this text is that although most scholars argue it’s the latest of all the four Gospels, it claims to have been written by an eyewitness who was with Jesus “from the beginning” (John 15:27). Notice, for example, the words of the narrator at the time and place of Jesus’ crucifixion: “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. He

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who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth— that you also may believe” (19:34–35). Then at the conclusion of the book, the author makes a similar claim: “This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (21:24). So at this point, we really have two options to consider: the Gospel of John was either written by an actual eyewitness, or it was written by an ancient forger who was merely claiming to be one. This is either a real historical narrative written by someone close to Jesus, or it is a worthless piece of fan fiction or, as scholars prefer to call it, pseudepigrapha.

HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL CLUES So how are we to tell whether the writer of this text is actually telling the truth when he claims to be an eyewitness? When we interviewed Cambridge New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham on the White Horse Inn radio program some years ago, he said something worth repeating here. The term “testimony,” he argued, “implies that we can’t independently verify everything a witness says. The whole point of a witness is that they tell you something you don’t know yourself. But what you can do is assess witnesses as either trustworthy or untrustworthy.

And if you decide that a witness is trustworthy, then you trust them.” So how exactly does one go about this? How are we to verify whether or not the author of this ancient text is a trustworthy and reliable witness? Bauckham went on to say that the Gospels are actually full of “all kinds of little details about people and places . . . and the controversies [of the period], all kinds of stuff about the historical context in which the stories take place. So that’s one way of verifying that the Gospels are credible from that geographical, his1 torical context that they claim to be about.”

A quick evaluation of the content of a typical gnostic gospel will be instructive at this point.

Most New Testament scholars freely admit that texts such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene contain almost

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BY CONTRAST, THE FOURTH GOSPEL CONTAINS NUMEROUS TEMPORAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES THAT PLACE IT SQUARELY IN EARLY FIRST-CENTURY PALESTINE. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

no temporal or geographical indicators, thus failing to provide any internal evidence that they were actually written by Jewish residents of early first-century Palestine. Instead, they claim to record various esoteric ideas that Jesus revealed “privately” to a given disciple—ideas that have numerous affinities with second- or third-century Gnosticism rather than with any form of first-century Messianic Judaism. In short, the gnostic gospels show clear evidence of being ancient forgeries and provide us with no reason to trust that they are authentic artifacts from the time of Jesus.

By contrast, the Fourth Gospel contains numerous temporal and geographical references that place it squarely in early first-century Palestine. For example, in John 2:11–12, Jesus leaves Cana and goes “down to Capernaum.”

Whoever wrote this was familiar with the topography of the region, for as travelers follow this route from Cana to Capernaum, they would be forced to make their way down the hills to the basin of the Sea of Galilee. Then during the narration of the raising of Lazarus in John 11, we’re specifically told that the village of Bethany “was near Jerusalem, about two miles off” (fifteen stadia), which is a precise measurement that has been externally verified. Finally, in two places, the author refers to a town by the name of Bethsaida (1:44; 12:21), yet according to Josephus, Philip the Tetrarch completely renovated this town sometime before his death in AD 34 and renamed it in honor of Tiberius’s mother Julias. Writing between AD 73 and 95, Josephus refers to the newer town name (Julias) some sixteen times and only once refers to the older name (Bethsaida), during the account of 2 the name change. In other words, John (along with all three of the other evangelists) referred to the city by the right name and at the right time.

We discover something else curious when we consider another town renovated by Philip.

According to Josephus and other sources, sometime between AD 14 and 28, this ruler rebuilt a town called Paneas, and renamed it in honor of both Caesar and himself; thus it became Caesarea 3 Philippi. Yet, when both Matthew and Mark refer to events that took place here, most likely

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THIS FINDING IS SIGNIFICANT, FOR IT IS STRONG PROOF THAT JOHN’S GOSPEL WAS WRITTEN

BY SOMEONE WHO LIVED DURING THE EYEWITNESS PERIOD, SINCE HE APPEARS TO HAVE ACCURATE FIRSTHAND INFORMATION ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR POOL THAT LAY COVERED FOR CENTURIES.

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between AD 28 and 29, they refer to the town by its newer name (cf. Matt. 16:13; Mark 8:27).

In other words, once the town was renovated, the updated name seemed to catch on rather quickly. Yet in the case of Bethsaida, for some strange reason, all four Gospel writers (unlike Josephus) continued to use the older name without any additional comments. Why is this? One reasonable explanation could simply be that all four Gospels, including John, were written earlier than when Josephus wrote his histories.

In the case of the Fourth Gospel, there may actually be internal evidence of a pre-AD 70 date.

In John 5:2–3 we read, “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids.” Once again, John reveals that he is intimately familiar with the location in which his Gospel is set; for here he not only refers to a specific pool in Jerusalem, but he also indicates to his readers that he’s particularly thinking of the one “by the Sheep Gate” with “five roofed colonnades.” Yet according to Josephus, during the Jewish War of AD 70, “Caesar ordered the whole city and the temple to be razed to the ground . . . as to leave future visitors no ground for believing that it had ever been 4 inhabited.” In an essay titled “Archaeology and John’s Gospel,” Urban von Wahlde notes, Until the nineteenth century there was no evidence of this pool, which caused some scholars to doubt whether John had actual firsthand knowledge of what he was reporting, but archeologists later uncovered the pool with the five colonnades just as John 5 had described.

This finding is significant, for it is strong proof that John’s Gospel was written by someone who lived during the eyewitness period, since he appears to have accurate firsthand information about this particular pool that lay covered for centuries.

Many scholars have also noted that there are actually three present tense verbs found in this passage, and this is taken as evidence that the city of Jerusalem, the Sheep Gate, and this

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particular pool with five porticoes were all still in existence at the time John narrated this scene (that is, before AD 70 when all these were destroyed). A good analogy here might be the experience of seeing a plaque on the wall of a New York restaurant that reads, I Love the Twin Towers. As we know, the present-tense language isn’t accurate today since the Twin Towers are longer standing. So the best explanation for those printed words is most likely that the plaque was created sometime before Sept 11, 2001.

Late-date advocates typically respond to this argument by saying that John simply used a literary device known as the “historical present.”

New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace has done some extensive research into this claim. He discovered 415 examples of the historical present in the Gospels and Acts and concluded, “All are in the third person, in narrative, surrounded by secondary tenses, and eimi (i.e., the Greek verb 6 ‘to be’) is not on the list.” Wallace goes on to say that “since eimi is nowhere else clearly used as a historical present, the present tense should be taken as indicating present time from the view7 point of the speaker.” In other words, Wallace claims that this passage should be taken as evidence that John wrote his Gospel at a time when the temple, the Sheep Gate, and pool with five covered porticoes were all still standing, which means that it was written sometime during the crucial eyewitness period before AD 70.

NAMES IN THE GOSPELS So far we’ve looked at some of the temporal and geographical indicators in the Fourth Gospel, and thus far this ancient text seems to bear all the marks of an authentic document written by someone with accurate knowledge of Jerusalem before it was destroyed by the Romans. But there is another test we can use to further establish John’s credibility, and that is by considering the names that appear throughout his Gospel.

Israeli scholar Tal Ilan compiled a database of ancient Palestinian Jewish individuals named in various inscriptions, texts, coins, and so on; currently, her database contains over three

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thousand male individuals. Richard Bauckham analyzed this data and discovered that when one compares the top ten most popular names of Jewish Palestinian males who lived around the time of Jesus, that list ends up looking remarkably similar to the list of the most frequently occurring names that appear collectively in the Gospels and Acts. This fact led Bauckham to conclude back in 2006:

appear to be the right names, in the right proportions, at the right time, which is a fact that would be essentially impossible to fake. In short, these names appear to be those of real historical individuals rather than fictional characters who were invented for purposes of religious propaganda.

These features of the New Testament data would be difficult to explain as the result of random invention of names within Palestinian Jewish Christianity and impossible to explain as the result of such invention outside Jewish Palestine. All the evidence indicates the general authentic8 ity of the personal names in the Gospels.

Though the analysis of named individuals is indeed compelling, it’s also worthwhile to consider various unnamed or anonymous individuals who appear in one or more of the Gospels. For example, in Matthew 26:51 we read, “And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear.” We find this same story recounted in Mark 14:47 and Luke 22:50 as an unnamed assailant injures the high priest’s servant. Readers familiar with John’s Gospel, however, already know the identity of both the assailant and the victim: “Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus” (John 18:10). But we should stop to ask the question, why it is that the first three Gospels omitted Peter’s name from this narrative? After reflecting on this question, New Testament scholar and theologian Gerd Theissen concluded,

In 2008, New Testament scholar Jens Schroeder offered Bauckham some pushback on this particular point. Schroeder wrote that this “simply shows that the Gospel authors gave their narratives a ‘realistic effect’ by choosing names that were common in the Jewish context 9 of ancient Palestine.” In the second edition of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (released in 2017), Bauckham responds specifically to this objection: Even supposing that a Gospel writer would try to make the range of his names realistic . . . he was only responsible for one Gospel.

Nobody planned the [name] data we get from putting all four Gospels together. . . .

We should also note that, while contemporaries would realize that some names were common and others rare, they are unlikely to have known . . . the relative proportions of name usage. . . . The evidence is therefore much more precise than that “persons mentioned in the Gospel stories bear common Jewish names,” and strongly suggests that in most cases the names are those of his10 toric individuals.

The end result is that the male names that appear in the Fourth Gospel, combined with those we find in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts,

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UNNAMED PERSONS IN THE GOSPELS

It seems to me that the motive for this anonymity is not hard to guess: both of them [had] run foul of the “police.” The one who draws his sword commits no minor offense when he cuts off someone’s ear. . . . As long as the high priest’s slave was alive . . . it would have been inopportune to mention names. . . . Their anonymity is for their protection. . . . Only in Jerusalem was there reason to draw a cloak of anonymity over followers of Jesus who had endangered 11 themselves by their actions.

As far back as 1874, F. W. Farrar came to nearly the same conclusion: “The name of Peter may have been purposefully kept in the background

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in the earliest cycle of Christian records.” 12 Similarly, C. H. Dodd observed, If we are to take account of the general probabilities of the situation, we should reflect that if there were two swords among the Twelve, as Luke says there were (22:38), it is more than likely that Peter had one of them, and if he had, he was (so far as we know him) not the man to let it rest in its sheath. . . . [I]t is not difficult to see why it might have been covered over at a time when Peter was a marked man (cf. Acts 12:3, 17) and it was not politic to let him be represented as a man of violence—above all, as one who deliberately affronted the High 13 Priest in the person of his servant.

IN SHORT, THESE NAMES APPEAR TO BE THOSE OF REAL HISTORICAL INDIVIDUALS RATHER THAN FICTIONAL CHARACTERS WHO WERE INVENTED FOR PURPOSES OF RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

This idea of “protective anonymity” is actually quite intriguing, for if it really is the best explanation for the anonymity we find here in the Synoptic accounts of the attack on the high priest’s servant, then it also suggests that those versions were written at a time when Peter was still alive and in need of protection. Since most scholars conclude that Peter was martyred sometime between AD 64 and 65, one would need to push the date of the Synoptic Gospels to a time before this period. On the other hand, since the Gospel of John records names, some scholars have argued that this should be taken as evidence that Peter had already died by the time of its writing. But there may actually be a clue in chapter 21 that the chief apostle was still alive and well.

As Jesus instructs Peter to tend and feed his sheep, he also says, “When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” But then the narrator steps in and explains, “This he said to show by what kind of death he will glorify God” (21:18–19). What’s really curious is the fact that this phrasing follows a similar structure we find in John 12:33 and 18:32 in which the narrator speaks of the kind of death Jesus “was going to die.” But here in John 21:19, as Peter is called to follow in his master’s footsteps, the narrator for some reason changes the grammatical structure of this repeated phrase and uses a verb in the

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This idea of “prot is actually quite intri is the best explanation find here in the Sy the attack on the high it also suggests that written at a time whe and in need 28

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ective anonymity” guing, for if it really for the anonymity we noptic accounts of priest’s servant, then those versions were n Peter was still alive of protection.

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future tense (though this is not easy to see in most English translations) when he speaks of Peter’s coming death. Thus it seems to be a reasonable inference that Peter’s martyrdom, from the perspective of the narrator’s position in time, was still yet in the future.

But if Peter was still alive when the Fourth Gospel was written, then why did the author fail to shroud his identity when he narrated the scene about his taking up the sword and assaulting the high priest’s servant? Recall for a moment Theissen’s comment that “only in Jerusalem was there reason to draw a cloak of anonymity over followers of Jesus who had endangered themselves by their actions.” If this is the case, then it’s quite possible the Gospel of John could have been written sometime after Peter had fled far from Jerusalem during the persecution of Herod Agrippa, as recorded in Acts 12. As Luke writes, once Peter was rescued by the angel and released from prison, he departed from Jerusalem and “went to another place” (Acts 12:17). The fact that Peter’s whereabouts are left unidentified should be seen as additional evidence that Peter was still being protected by Luke and is good evidence that Acts itself was written before his death in the mid-sixties.

There are numerous additional examples of this idea of protective anonymity, which unfortunately space does not allow us to consider. Before we conclude this brief survey, however, I’d like to explore one final intriguing possibility. If you have done any reading at all into issues related to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, then you know there is a big debate over whether this text was written by the apostle John or by some other Jerusalem disciple, such as John the Elder. Wherever you come down on that debate, one thing is clear: The author of this Gospel does not make his identity obvious. Whatever your particular view, it must be arrived at by an evaluation of a variety of clues about the identity of the “beloved disciple” (John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20–24).

One such clue I think is particularly illuminating is the fact that in the last scene described in chapter 21, five named disciples are gathered on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, along with two unnamed disciples. The sons of Zebedee (James

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THE AUTHOR OF THIS ANCIENT TEXT LEFT BEHIND NUMEROUS CLUES THAT GIVE US SOLID REASONS TO TRUST THAT HE WAS INDEED A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY EYEWITNESS OF THE EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF JESUS. VOL.28 NO.1 JAN/FEB 2019

and John) are included among the named disciples; but as the chapter unfolds, the identity of the beloved disciple is never revealed or connected with any of the named disciples. Though he is clearly identified as the author of the Gospel (21:24), his identity continues to be shrouded in mystery. The clear implication here, according to Richard Bauckham, is that the beloved disciple is actually one of the two anonymous disciples mentioned at the opening of the chapter, rather than one of the sons of Zebedee.

But even if one rejects Bauckham’s conclusion on this particular point, one fact remains clear: the beloved disciple is never actually identified. In my estimation, this ends up being one of the strongest arguments for the Gospel’s authenticity. As Lutheran theologian Oscar Cullmann pointed out back in 1975, “The very fact that the beloved disciple is anonymous does suggest that he was a historical figure. The apocryphal Gospels tend to connect their legendary accounts with a known disciple rather 14 than with an anonymous person.” I think this point is worth highlighting. All the inauthentic fan-fiction gospels that were written much later generally claim to have been written by a well-known disciple, which helps them gain credibility. Yet, as Richard Bauckham asks, “Why should a pseudepigraphal author in search of a suitable pseudonym choose such a charac15 ter [as the beloved disciple]?” In order to gain trust, the forger would need to make his identity as an authoritative apostle explicit; but for some curious reason, the author of the Fourth Gospel didn’t feel the need to do this. This should be seen as an indication that the author already had sufficient authority from the Christian community among whom this text was being circulated.

As we have seen through this brief evaluation, the Gospel of John appears to have been penned by someone who had accurate knowledge of the topography of both Galilee and Judea from the time before the Jewish War of AD 70. The author of this text was familiar with the town of Bethsaida, which was a name in use during the days of Jesus’ ministry yet had changed by AD 34. He correctly identified the location of the pool by the Sheep Gate with five porticoes, although

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it had been covered over for centuries. His text appears to have been written in such a way that implies these landmarks were still standing at the time of his writing. The names we find throughout this Gospel, when combined with names from the other Gospels and Acts, appear to be ones we would expect to find among Jewish Palestinian males at this time and in just the right proportion. And finally, the author of this text did not attempt to secure credibility by what he wrote but appears to have already had sufficient authority in the earliest days of the Christian church.

As with a witness in a court of law, we can’t actually see for ourselves what the person claims to have seen. All we can do is assess whether the witness is trustworthy or untrustworthy. And in the case of the Fourth Gospel, the author of this ancient text left behind numerous clues that give us solid reasons to trust that he was indeed a reliable and trustworthy eyewitness of the events in the life of Jesus. In short, this Gospel is not a fake reproduction but an authentic historical artifact with objective value. This is not a worthless forgery; it’s a priceless treasure.

SHANE ROSENTHAL, executive producer of White Horse Inn, is this year’s program host for the Gospel of John series.

1. White Horse Inn interview with Richard Bauckham, “The Gospel According to Barnes & Noble” (April 6, 2008).

2. Josephus, Antiquities 18.28 (18.2.1).

3. Josephus, (18.2.1).

4. Josephus, War 7:1–3 (7.1.1).

5. Urban C. von Wahlde, “Archaeology and John’s Gospel,” in Jesus & Archaeology, ed. James Charlesworth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 560–66.

6. Daniel B. Wallace, “John 5:2 and the Date of the Fourth Gospel . . . again,” https://bible.org/article/john-52-and-date-fourth-gospel-again.

7. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 531.

8. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 84.

9. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 542.

10. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed., 543–44.

11. Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context (London: T&T Clark, 1992), 186–89.

12. Frederic W. Farrar, The Life of Christ, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1874), 323n1.

13. C. H. Dodd, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 80.

14. Oscar Cullmann, The Johannine Circle (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 77.

15. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 409.

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t has almost assumed the status of “a truth beyond reasonable doubt” in Christendom that the Gospel of John is 1 the most theological of all the Gospels.

What is not argued, however, is that the Gospel of John is also the most apologetical of all the Gospels. It is literally stuffed from 2 stem to stern, from beginning to end, with the defense of the Christian faith, from miracles to prophecies, to miracles that fulfill prophecy. John grounds all of his major theological pronouncements in his Gospel on the legally sufficient facticity of Jesus’ claims to be the Messiah, God in the flesh, and that in believing those claims one “might have life in his name” (John 20:31).

So often, this Gospel is approached and read as a purely “devotional” book—that is, as the most emotive of all the Gospels, presumably based in part on the fact that John the apostle was the “disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 19:26–27).

Apologetics, on the other hand, is so often seen as centered solely on the intellect, and therefore it basically drools over the cerebral (enter the long history in Christian theology of distrust of the fallen head over the cuddly heart); and so John, it is argued, clearly cuts a different path that goes to higher spiritual matters within the domain solely of the pristine heart.

In fact, however, John’s Gospel sets forth the case most clearly of all the Gospels for why 3 Christianity is a “faith founded on fact” and evidence. Contrary to an impression one might get that the devotional value of John pushes the reader “inward,” John’s Gospel thrusts one “outward” into the world, epistemologically equipped to forcefully present to the unbeliever the “many infallible proofs” (Acts1:3) that God “was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).

In short, John the apostle and evangelist “demonstrates clearly that the Johannine

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apologetic methodology is that of evidentialism” and the presentation of legally sufficient proofs to establish Christ’s claims to be God in the flesh who has come to seek and to save that 4 which was lost.

DEFENDING THE JOHN OF JOHN Before seeing how John provides evidence at every turn to ground trust in Christ’s theological promises to forgive sin and to save, a brief defense of the John of John is in order because it continues to be maintained that the apostle John, of course, did not write the Gospel of John.

We begin with a fundamental principle of liberal biblical criticism: If a book of the Bible says it was written by someone, and/or consis5 tent church history up to the Enlightenment unalterably says it was written by that person, well then you can be utterly certain that person did not write the book attributed to them.

Theological liberals even rev the engine up more with John and argue that by virtue of this being the latest of the Gospels it is obvious that, regardless of whether John is the author, the bigger problem is that you are surely not getting an accurate historical description of what actually took place. Instead, John (or rather the author of the Gospel falsely attributed to the apostle John) is larding a theological interpretation on the life of Christ based on late and inaccurate information. So, if you really want to know something about the life of Christ, you need to go to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Of course, those books have their own impenetrable textual problems, we are told, but at least they are less inaccurate than John, which is the 6 product of editing and redaction.

So John (or, more accurately, whoever wrote John) is factually inaccurate and layers a late and dubious theological interpretation into his moldy half-baked memory of the facts that at best results in maybe learning something about what the early church (by way of an editor enamored with fake news) thought about Jesus, but it is a far cry from what the true story probably is

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if we could only get behind the actual “sources” underlying the text.

Added to this boatload of legally inadmissible hearsay and rank speculation is the perspective of the most influential liberal New Testament critic of the twentieth century, Rudolph Bultmann. Bultmann claimed that the Gospel of John was not written until the middle of the second century or about one hundred years after the death of Christ. In addition, and if that was not bad enough, John was heavily influenced by Gnosticism, which was a kind of potpourri of classical Greek philosophy and mystical elements of Judaism.

What can be said in response?

First, as any trial lawyer trained in the rules of evidence knows, even if the Gospel of John comes later in the New Testament writing cycle, it does not necessarily mean it is inaccurate, especially if it is written (as it repeatedly claims) by someone with direct and immediate (nonhearsay) contact with the events the writing describes. Lateness does not mean inaccuracy!

But even the “lateness” argument is utterly indefensible as the Gospel of John is not “late” as argued by Bultmann. As liberal biblical critic John A. T. Robinson noted, John may even predate the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 (Robinson dated all the Gospels before AD 70 and, in fact, dated John as the earliest of the 7 Gospels.) The greatest American archeologist of the past century, William F. Albright of Johns Hopkins University, also argued forcefully for the dating of all of the Gospels before 8 the fall of the temple in AD 70.

Second, unfortunately for the late daters like Bultmann, we have a fragment of the Gospel of John found in Egypt and dated to the beginning of the second century, and thus it is the earliest 9 fragment of a New Testament book ever found.

Bultmann could never adequately explain this awkward discovery.

Third, in the case of John, we have what lawyers refer to as extraordinary extrinsic evidence for its Johannine authorship. The lines of this extrinsic evidence come from two students of John—Polycarp of Smyrna and Papias of Hierapolis. Each states explicitly that John,

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WE HAVE A FRAGMENT OF THE GOSPEL OF JOHN FOUND IN EGYPT AND DATED TO THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND CENTURY, AND THUS IT IS THE EARLIEST FRAGMENT OF A NEW TESTAMENT BOOK EVER FOUND.

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strangely enough, wrote the Gospel of John.

The comments of Polycarp on this subject come to us through the writings of Irenaeus in the second century, while the statements of Papias generally come via Eusebius of Caesarea of the fourth century. Irenaeus puts it this way: So Matthew published a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own language, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and founding the church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him [Paul]. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, the one who leaned back on the Lord’s breast, himself published a Gospel while he 10 resided in Ephesus.

How solid is this evidence? Substantial in all respects. Eusebius is one of the most reliable of all early church historians (he recorded the festivities at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325), while the general trustworthiness of Irenaeus 11 puts him on a plane with Eusebius. Both Polycarp and Papias sat directly under the teaching of John. In almost any other case, this line of extrinsic evidence (largely unheard of in classical scholarship as to any other work of antiquity) would stamp QED over the issue.

How, then, do the critics continue to maintain that John is not the author of this Gospel?

Answer: They contend that Papias especially refers to John as “the elder John” and not as “the apostle John.” So the writer of the Gospel is a later “elder John” quite separate and apart from the John who personally witnessed the crucifixion and therefore this Gospel is hearsay and not primary source evidence.

Is this a compelling argument? Answer: No! It is clear from the passages cited in both Papias and Polycarp that they are referring to a John who was an eyewitness to the events and the one who had direct contact with Jesus. Papias goes further and even mentions that the John

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he refers to was in the same writer’s club with Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Finally, we can’t resist pointing out the Epistles of 2 and 3 John (both are conceded to have been written by the apostle John) have John referring to himself as 12 “the elder.” Having been the youngest of the apostles when Christ was alive,13 and having lived to an old age in Ephesus and in exile on Patmos, it is unsurprising that he would refer 14 to himself as the “elder John.”

Why in the world are liberal biblical critics so intent on having their two Johns? The answer is because they must have the material coming late and from someone who is not an eyewitness so that their Procrustean Presupposition is vindicated that the Gospels are not presenting a historical account by an eyewitness, but are compilations of variant sources by a redactor that reflect dueling theologies floating around in the early church. The evidence, however, is overwhelmingly contrary to this speculative hypothesis.

Now that we have authorship established, what do we find is the content of the Gospel of John? Is John presenting merely devotional material that assists one in achieving one’s “utmost for his highest,” or is John actively contending for the faith once delivered within the public square?

THE STRANGE CASE OF DISAPPEARING MIRACLES AND PROPHECY Miracles have been the mainstay of Christian apologetics from the beginning of Christian history and indeed from the earliest pages of the Bible itself. This is not surprising, considering Jesus’ own words that “one sign” would be given to his generation to verify his claims, which was the “sign of the prophet Jonah”— that is, Jesus’ resurrection after three days in the tomb (Matt. 12:39–40). Paul makes it plain that if the resurrection did not occur, then we Christians are above all to be pitied because we deceive ourselves and others about eternity (1 Cor. 15:14–15) and have perpetrated the greatest fraud in history. The patristic

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apologists (Irenaeus, Origen, and Eusebius) all argued from the historicity of our Lord’s miracles to the verifiability of his claims and the critical need to accept those claims based on the facticity of the verifiable “signs.”

Indeed, every major apologist from the early church fathers until the mid-eighteenth century similarly argued by means of miracle and prophecy, regardless of their particular philosophical or theological bent. That list included Augustine the Neo-Platonist, Thomas Aquinas the Aristotelian, Hugo Grotius the Dutch Arminian, Blaise Pascal the Catholic Jansenist, and Joseph Butler the high church 15 Anglican. Though miracle and prophecy were the two most common tools in the apologetical kit through early Christian history, this has not been the case since the rise of modern rationalism in the so-called Age of the Enlightenment and the broadside on miracles launched by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Hume postulated (without any support, we might add) that there was uniform experience against the miraculous. However, Hume could only know that was the case if all reports about miracles were false. Yet, he could only know all reports about them were false if he assumed there was uniform experience against them.

In fact, as C. S. Lewis and others have noted, Hume argued in a perfectly circular fash16 ion. Hume’s fallacious argument allowed eighteenth-century rationalistic man—enamored as he already was with “natural laws” that supposedly totally and neatly explained all the physical operations of the universe—to sit back in his easy chair and never have to break a sweat to investigate the factual case for miracles in general and avoiding any contact with the evidence for the resurrection (that is, the eyewitness accounts, details of the testimony as to the resurrection, the historical, legal, and medical evidence for the death of Jesus and his appearance three days later, and so on).

What is the attitude of contemporary evangelical apologetics today toward miracles in the Bible? The importance of miracles is not

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JOHN’S POINT IS PLAIN: IT WAS NOT ENOUGH THAT JESUS WAS IN FACT GOD IN THE FLESH AND THAT HIS MERE PRESENCE ALONE SHOULD BE ENOUGH TO CONVINCE; THE FACT OF THE “VEILING OF HIS DEITY” IN THE INCARNATION MADE IT NECESSARY THAT HE PROVE HIS DEITY.

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denied; rather, it is more relegated to Off Broadway in favor of other approaches, with the real intellectual effort being amassed today for cosmic and largely deductive arguments for the general existence of God (or a “Designer”) 17 that at best might move one to theism. We also see the efforts of the “classical school of apologetics,” which does marshal evidence for the resurrection after establishing God’s general existence through the traditional proofs and 18 detailed arguments from design.

Indeed, arguments from prophecy are even rarer, since they conjure up vestiges of those dubious Hal Lindsey-infused “Prophecy Conferences” that equate the antichrist with the European Union or the Democratic Party.

Charismatic prophecies (centering on the exercise of the one and only spiritual gift of speaking in tongues) and futuristic prophecies (predicting the weekend of the Lord’s return) have essentially exhausted the street credibility of those presenting the biblical case for historically fulfilled prophecies. For example, few indeed are those familiar with the power of the argument for historically fulfilled prophecy 19 based on the Product Rule found in statistics, or the compelling and comprehensive historical proofs from prophecy brilliantly argued by Barton Payne in his definitive magnum opus 20 on the topic.

JOHN THE LAWYER AMONG THE THEOLOGIANS In the Gospel of John, evidentially compelling miracles occur one after the other at the front end of the Gospel to such an extent that if John was trying to argue that faith always comes without needing any evidence, one wonders why he so meticulously records Jesus bothering to do any miracles in the first place. The proof for the miraculous is powerful support that evidence is generally the grounding for saving faith in almost every case in the Gospel of John. Contrary to so much of modern Christianity, there is no higher spiritual status for those who can believe with no evidence.

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MIRACLE AND PROPHECY IN THE DOCK IN JOHN The miracle accounts in John establish beyond a reasonable doubt that John takes empirical evidence with the greatest of seriousness. John comes out of the chute at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry with the sommelier’s dream miracle of turning water into a premier cru wine (John 2). Just so there is no question as to why this was being done, John provides the theological interpretation based on the empirical facts: this was done that Jesus might manifest his glory, so that the disciples would believe in him (John 2:11).

John’s point is plain: It was not enough that Jesus was in fact God in the flesh and that his mere presence alone should be enough to convince; the fact of the “veiling of his deity” in the incarnation made it necessary that he prove his deity.

Immediately after Cana in chapter 2, we have Jesus exercising a smackdown of the money changers in the temple (John 2:12– 25). John steps in here by saying this fulfilled the prophecy that “zeal for Thy house will consume me” (Ps. 69:9). Taking this fulfilled prophecy as proven fact flows naturally from the clear first miracle at Cana just reported in the same chapter.

We cannot resist noting that the biblical critics actually argue that John is in error with his timing of the cleansing of the temple—John has it at the front end of Jesus’ ministry while the Synoptic Gospels appear to place it at the end of Jesus’ minis21 try. Contradiction, it is argued! We only note that harmonization of each account is readily arrived at if one presumes Jesus could easily have cleansed the temple at the beginning and 22 at the end of his ministry.

Again, and immediately after John notes the miracle and fulfilled prophecy, the Gospel writer connects miracle and prophecy when Jesus predicts his own miraculous resurrection. Here you get a proverbial “twofer” that John repeats at several points in his Gospel.

The facticity of the resurrection was so

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compelling to the disciples that John says it was the foundation for them believing the Scripture 23 and the words which Jesus had spoken.

Factually verifiable miracles are essential to a factually verifiable Scripture. Nicodemus, a trial lawyer practicing before the Sanhedrin bench, even privately confessed that nobody could do the miracles Jesus was doing unless God be with him (John 3:2).

Jesus’ office as prophet is again quickly made clear with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) where his omniscience is plain: he knew the full scope of this woman’s Hollywoodesque serial romantic life (John 4:39). As a result of her testimony, many of the Samaritans in her village came to believe.

They believed Jesus had the “living water” to give, because he had demonstrated power to tell the woman at the well “all things” that she had done and he was obviously a prophet.

Similarly, many believed Jesus’ word when he healed the son of a royal official in Capernaum (John 4:46–54).

RESURRECTING THE RESURRECTION IN JOHN As do all the Gospels, the focus in John is the Passion Week that the prophecies foretold and to which all the miracles pointed. The laser-like culmination is on the crucifixion and resurrection as the center of all of history.

In the resurrection, you get no vague Fatimalike vision of a pale, translucent Jesus dressed in the living room curtains and whose visage could also be conjured from a well-fried tortilla.

Instead, you get John Updike’s “valved heart” 24 and “rekindled amino acids” that confidently instruct Thomas to “put your hand here and be 25 not unbelieving but believe.”

The evidence is not just legally compelling (as a slew of trial lawyers have attested26), but it also directly involves prominent lawyers of that day in the middle of the facts. Thus a justice of the Jerusalem Supreme Court 27 (the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea ) asked Pilate, at some personal risk, for permission

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to embalm the body and to use his own tomb for its burial (not exactly anticipating a resurrection). There at Joseph’s side at Calvary taking the body down is none other than the adept Sanhedrin trial lawyer and law professor (“Teacher of all of Israel”) Nicodemus of chapter 3 fame and infamy. Together, you can’t assemble more legal power and credibility for the witness stand. If there was any question that the disciples had gone to the wrong tomb on Easter morning, surely a justice of the Jerusalem Supreme Court, whose own personal tomb was given to Jesus Christ, would not have remained silent but would have produced the GPS coordinates to his tomb, if not personally produced the 28 heavily embalmed body to shut down such pernicious speculation.

Undeterred, critics have beaten a path to the conclusion that John’s recounting of the Passion Week is shot through with holes, among them being the following four key and fatal flaws.

1. The trial of Jesus is not consistent with Roman or Jewish procedural or substantive law.

Rather, the trial is a late construct that gets 29 the criminal procedure of the day wrong. For example, the Roman governor would never have referred Jesus back to the Jewish high priest, would never have tried Jesus at night, and would never have listened to the crowd and released Barabbas instead. However, two books put to rest both arguments.

As to the issue of John’s correct understanding of Roman criminal procedure and substantive law, A. N. Sherwin-White’s Roman Society and 30 Roman Law in the New Testament finds just the opposite to actually be the case. The entire New Testament (including John) shows extraordinary care to get the details of Roman trial procedure correct down to the last detail.

As importantly, a professor of law in France published a definitive work on The Trial of 31 Jesus, which concludes that all of the jurisprudential material in the Gospels is utterly solid.

Professor Jean Imbert cites two other first- and

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second-century provincial Roman governors who did precisely the same thing as Pilate did.

2. As for Pilate, there is no extrabiblical reference to him anywhere outside of the New Testament. Besides, he was only a procurator or financial administrator and thus not capable of handing down, let alone executing, a capital sentence.

AS DO ALL THE GOSPELS, THE FOCUS IN JOHN IS THE PASSION WEEK THAT THE PROPHECIES FORETOLD AND TO WHICH ALL THE MIRACLES POINTED. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

A common objection for centuries to the historicity of John and the other Gospels was the mention of Pilate, for which there was never any extrabiblical reference. Evidence that the New Testament makes up characters to fit a narrative, no doubt? And the prejudiced and probably senile church fathers then go on to compound the error by slipping in Pilate to the ecumenical creeds. What an embarrassment!

In support of the fact that it is always wiser to suspend the judgment that the Scriptures are ever in error or even inaccurate in anything they describe: in 1961, archaeologists in Jerusalem unearthed the now-called “Pilate Inscription” (housed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem), which connects Pilate with the official office of 32 “Prefect of Judea.”

3. The date of the crucifixion is different in the Synoptic Gospels as opposed to the date recorded in John. This is another example of clear error in what the writer (actually Mr. Redactor) wrote.

For centuries, biblical critics have guffawed that the date of the crucifixion is different in the Synoptics than what is presented in John.

Then, French Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Jaubert confirmed the existence of two calendars operating in first-century Palestine (the sun-based Jubilee calendar of Qumran and the lunar-based Roman calendar), which reconciled this alleged contradiction and precisely harmonized the two dates used that had puzzled even orthodox 33 scholars for a millennia.

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4. The post-resurrection events in the four Gospels are hopelessly contradictory and cannot be harmonized.

and Jesus appears to James and finally appears one last time before the ascension (Mark 35 16:15–20).

Novelist and essayist Dorothy Sayers, no mean literary critic herself, put it nicely when talking about this subject:

PROPHESY PILE-ON: GAME OVER BY INVOCATION OF THE MERCY RULE

[One] is often surprised to find how many apparent contradictions turn out not to be contradictory at all, but merely supplementary. Take, for example, the various accounts of the Resurrection appearances at the Sepulchre. The divergences appear very great on first sight. . . . But the fact remains that all of them, without exception, can be made to fall into place in a single orderly and coherent narrative without the smallest contradiction or difficulty and without any suppression, invention or manipulation beyond a trifling effort to imagine the natural behavior of a bunch of startled people running about in the dawn34 light between Jerusalem and the Garden.

One recent harmonization, done by a trial lawyer, goes like this: Mary Magdalene and Mary go to the tomb from Bethany via John’s house, picking up Salome from there (Matt. 28:1–15); Mary Magdalene rushes from the tomb to tell Peter and John (John 20:1–2); Joanna and Susanna arrive at the tomb, and the women go into the tomb (Matt. 28:5–7; Mark 16:5–7; Luke 24:3–8); the women tell the disciples and no one else (Matt. 28:8; Mark 16:8; Luke 24:9–11); Peter and John run to the tomb and return home (John 20; Luke 24:12); Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb again (John 20:10–18); Mary, wife of Clopas, and Salome set off to Bethany to tell the brethren and meet Jesus (Matt. 28:8–10); Clopas and another disciple go to Emmaus and later return and tell the others (Mark 16:11–12; Luke 24:13–35); Jesus appears to the disciples (Luke 24:36–43; John 20:19–23); Jesus appears again to the disciples, including Thomas this time (John 20:24–29); the Twelve return to Galilee and meet Jesus again there (John 21);

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Not to be overtaken by miracles, a prophecy pile-on occurs during the Passion Week events as recorded by John. We first note that “statistically, the prophetic element involves 180 of the book’s 866 verses,” with no less than forty-five 36 separate fulfilled predictions. The following are only some of those prophecies specifically fulfilled in the death of Christ (without enumerating the countless prophecies fulfilled as to his birth, his life, or his deity): 1. He would be crucified. (John 3:14; 19:18; see Ps. 22:16) 2. He would be betrayed by a friend. (John 13:18; see Ps. 41:9) 3. No bone would be broken. (John 19:33–37; see Exod.

12:46; Num. 9:12; and Ps. 34:20) 4. His side would be pierced. (John 19:33–37; see Zech. 12:10) 5. The soldiers would cast lots for his garments. (John 19:23–24; see Ps. 22:18–19) 6. He would die with evildoers. (John 19:18; see Isa. 53:12) 7. He would be buried in a rich man’s tomb. (John 19:38– 42; see Isa. 53:9) 8. He was an innocent victim who would die in place of his people. (John 18:14; see Isa. 53:4–9)

GETTING TO THE FLESH AND BLOOD OF THE MATTER: THAT PESKY DETAIL OF THE MISSING BODY We live our daily lives based on probabilities and on the testimony and trustworthiness of others much more than we might think.

Other than Oral Roberts, few living have seen the Risen Lord of Glory. Then you have John the apostle and evangelist and Thomas the Doubter, who had tactile contact with Jesus and firsthand witnessed the “many infallible proofs.” John saw with his own eyes, and

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JOHN SAW WITH HIS OWN EYES, AND HIS OWN HANDS HANDLED THE WORD OF LIFE, WHO DECLARED THAT HE WAS “THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. WHOEVER BELIEVES IN ME, THOUGH HE DIE, YET SHALL HE LIVE, AND EVERYONE WHO LIVES AND BELIEVES IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE. DO YOU BELIEVE THIS?” (JOHN 11:25–26).

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his own hands handled the Word of Life, who declared that he was “the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26).

For penitent sinners who have staked their eternity on the facticity of those words, including the legion of trial lawyers who have carefully investigated the admissible evidence for the resurrection found in John’s Gospel, the only defensible answer is Thomas’s legally admissible, non-hearsay confession pronounced after personally handling that evidence: “My Lord and my God.” CRAIG PARTON is a trial lawyer and partner with the old-

est law firm in the western United States, where he serves as chair of the litigation department. He is also the United States director of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France (www.apologeticsacademy.eu). He is the author of three books, including The Defense Never Rests: A Lawyer among the Theologians and Religion on Trial: Cross Examining Religious Truth Claims. He has also published numerous articles in legal, theological, and cultural journals and has contributed articles to numerous published volumes.

5. D. A. Carson notes that the title “According to John” was affixed just as soon as the four canonical Gospels began to circulate as “the fourfold gospel.” D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 229. Carson and Moo cite F. F. Bruce, who perceptively noted that “while the four canonical gospels could afford to be published anonymously (presumably because their apostolic pedigree was beyond question), the apocryphal gospels which began to appear from the mid-second century onwards claimed (falsely) to be written by apostles or other persons associated with the Lord.”

6. Typical of the critics is the following: “Such a process of conflation as has been assumed implies the existence of a redactor (R) who has brought the Gospel (of John) to its present form. That such an editor has been at work has, of course, been suspected by many scholars.

His traces are seen in verses, abruptly introduced, which mar the artistry of the original author; in gaps and seams and illogical sequences which suggest that the true order of the text has been disarranged; in passages which appear to have been adapted in order to serve a purpose other than that intended by the author.” This comment is, of course, followed by a wholesale and baseless reordering of some of the chapters of John to fit how the critics would have ordered the book after they finished discovering the “true sources” used by this rambunctious redactor. See G. H. C. MacGregor and A. Q. Morton, The Structure of the Fourth Gospel (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961), 13, 57.

7. See John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 352.

8. Robinson references Albright’s conclusion found in New Horizons in Biblical Research (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 46.

Robinson, Redating the New Testament, 308n218.

9. The papyrus fragment is known as p52 (Rylands Papyrus 457) and includes John 18:31–33, 37–38. For a thorough discussion of the importance of the discovery of this fragment in 1934, see Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 38–39; see also Philip Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography and Textual Criticism (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 143.

“The dating of p52 to the first quarter of the second century is remarkable, especially if we accept the consensus dating for the composition of the Fourth Gospel: 80–85. This means that p52 is probably only twenty years away from the original.”

10. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III: 1, 11; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 5.8.2–4.

11. See Richard Bauckham’s respectful treatment of Irenaeus in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 452 ff.

1. John immediately begins his book not in time (e.g., “when Quirinius was governor of Syria” as Luke says, or with a genealogical list as found in Matthew) but in eternity with the existence of the Logos, which is a term known to the Hellenized Jews who had some contact with Greek philosophical categories. See, for example, the Stoic philosophers who spoke of the Logos as the nature or purpose behind the universe and with whom Paul creates common ground with these philosophers in Acts 17, even going so far as to cite Stoic and Epicurean poets.

2. While Christ’s first miracle at Cana comes at the front end of chapter 2, the catching of the “153 large fish” comes at a beach barbeque at the end (John 21:4–14). Similarly, the prophecy of his resurrection is announced in chapter 2, while the prophecy of the type of death Peter would endure comes in 21:18–22 and after the resurrection.

3. For the book by this title authored by a renowned lawyer and one trained in the application of legal evidence, see John Warwick Montgomery, Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics (Irvine, CA: New Reformation Press, 2015).

4. Henry Hock Guan Teh, Principles of the Law of Evidence and Rationality Applied in the Johannine Christology (Bonn: Culture & Science, 2015), 177. See esp. p. 222 where Teh, a trial lawyer in Malaysia, concludes that John in his Gospel “is a strong supporter of legal apologetics.” Teh creates a chart of tranches of evidence John used, including direct, documentary, and circumstantial evidence (see Teh’s Appendix A to Principles of the Law of Evidence).

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12. Second John 1 and 3 John 1. Note that the existential “joy” expressed in 1 John 1:4 is grounded (once again) in objective, empirical contact with the incarnate Christ (vv. 1–3).

13. See Theodor Zahn’s solidly orthodox classic Introduction to the New Testament (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1909), esp. vol. 3 dealing almost exclusively with John’s writings and its authenticity. In passing, Zahn notes that it was “everywhere regarded” in the early church that John was the author of the Gospel by his name (citing Ignatius and Justin Martyr for good measure; see vol. 3, sect. 49, p. 386 ff.).

14. During his later life, John appears to have resided in Asia Minor (Rev. 1:4, 9), and Irenaeus states that John lived on until the time of Trajan, whose reign began in AD 98. See Against Heretics, Book II: 22, 5; Book III: 3, 4.

15. See Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971); see also Bernard Ramm, Varieties of Christian Apologetics, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1961).

16. “I find it ironic that so many readers of Hume’s essay have been subdued by its eloquence. And I find it astonishing how well posterity has treated [Hume’s] ‘Of Miracles,’ given how completely the confection collapses under a little probing. No doubt this generous treatment stems in part from the natural assumption that someone of Hume’s genius must have produced a powerful set of considerations. But I suspect that in more than a few cases it also involves the all too familiar phenomenon of endorsing an argument because the conclusion is liked.” John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 71.

17. One thinks of William Lane Craig’s development of the Kalam

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Cosmological argument (we must add, which was initially developed by Muslim apologists) and the various arguments of the Intelligent Design apologists, all of which are helpful but leave the unbeliever a far distance from the cross of Christ, even if their arguments are accepted.

18. Numerous recent efforts in contemporary apologetics in the classical tradition seeking to offer a “comprehensive apologetic” present Christianity first as the best explanation of all truth and the verification of the Christian theistic worldview by arguing for the entire veracity of all of the truth claims of Christianity. Thus, “by being comprehensive concerning what is secondary in terms of Gospel preachment (i.e., laboring through a plethora of world views and tediously presenting the Aristotelian traditional proofs for the existence of God before getting eventually to the case for Jesus Christ), apologetics slips into something other than presenting Jesus Christ and Him crucified for sinners.” See my review of Douglas Groothuis, “Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith,” in Global Journal of Classic Theology 10, no. 2 (2012). Similar problems have been noted in David Limbaugh’s Jesus on Trial, Alister McGrath’s Mere Apologetics, and Louis Markos’s Apologetics for the 21st Century. Limbaugh’s work received this less than stellar grade: “By the time the reader arrives exhausted at the central case for Christianity (the death and resurrection of Christ) one has slipped into a diagnosable coma by having had his apologetical attic stocked plum full first with the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, evidences for intelligent design, the moral argument, and 200 pages of bible study material that Limbaugh has accumulated over his Christian experience and apparently thinks we should care about.

We don’t and I highly doubt any serious or curious non-Christian will care either, regardless of the author’s last name.” Parton, Global Journal of Classic Theology 12, no. 1 (2014). For a much sounder presentation of the classical or traditional school of apologetics, see R. C. Sproul et al., Classical Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984) that, although dedicated to the presuppositionalist Cornelius Van Til, thoroughly exposes Van Til’s methodology along with that of Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, and the absurd idea that to be Reformed is inconsistent with evidential apologetics.

19. See the full-throated argument in Montgomery’s Christ Our Advocate: Studies in Polemical Theology, Jurisprudence and Canon Law (Bonn: Culture & Science, 2002), 261–65. Using a conservative probability of any one of just twenty-five messianic prophecies being randomly fulfilled in one person (Jesus Christ) at 25 percent, the result is that the formula of n=1/4n gives the probability of Jesus randomly and by chance fulfilling just twenty-five of those messianic prophecies as one in a thousand trillion. And we note that 25 percent probability of any one prophecy being fulfilled is highly conservative, since the probability of Jesus randomly fulfilling the prophecy that he would be born of a virgin and in Bethlehem, or that Judas would betray him for thirty pieces of silver, or that the guards would barter for his cloak, is decidedly less than 25 percent.

20. For example, Dr. Payne establishes the fulfillment of over one hundred prophecies in the book of Isaiah alone. See J. Barton Payne, Encyclopedia of Bible Prophecy: The Complete Guide to Scriptural Predictions and Their Fulfillment (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 278–320.

21. MacGregor and Morton make this point in The Structure of the Fourth Gospel, 12.

22. A contradiction involves two assertions that cannot under any circumstances both be true. Numerous scholarly works have analyzed in excruciating detail such alleged contradiction and have found grammatical and historical grounds for reasonable harmonization in every instance. For an excellent example of this genre that goes back at least as far as Eusebius and to the correspondence between Augustine and Jerome in the fourth century, see Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982).

23. John 2:18–22. This all connects nicely with Jesus’ later remarkable (which, if false, would be maniacal) pronouncement that he is actually “the resurrection and the life” and that “he who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26).

24. See John Updike’s glorious poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” where he writes with the most solid Johannine theology that “if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, The Church will fall.” In Telephone Poles and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959).

25. John 20:27. This is truly the culmination of the Gospel of John and perhaps one of the clearest evidences that Jesus believed himself to be

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none other than God in the flesh as he accepts worship from Thomas.

John 8:24 is along the same lines, where Jesus makes the astounding claim (and, again, wholly psychotic and delusional if not true) that if you don’t believe in him, then “you will die in your sins.”

26. For a detailed survey of trial lawyers who have examined the evidence for the resurrection, see Philip Johnson, “Juridical Apologetics 1600– 2000 A.D.: A Bio-Bibliographical Essay,” Global Journal of Classic Theology 3 (March 2002): 1–25. Johnson’s list ranges from the author of the first textbook on apologetics (Hugo Grotius, the “father of international law” in the sixteenth century), to Matthew Hale (Lord High Chancellor under Charles II in the seventeenth century), to William Blackstone (codifier of the English common law in the eighteenth century), to Simon Greenleaf (dean of Harvard Law School in the nineteenth century), to Lord Hailsham (Lord High Chancellor in the twentieth century), to twenty-first-century apologists and lawyers such as John Warwick Montgomery and Jacques Ellul. For a fuller treatment of this topic, see my book The Defense Never Rests: A Lawyer among the Theologians (St. Louis: Concordia, 2015).

27. The Sanhedrin was a collection of seventy-one scribes, elders, and chief priests such as Annas and Caiaphas (John 18:19–24), with ultimate authority in capital cases resting with the chief priests, who would confirm the sentence with the Roman governing authorities and also refer the execution of the sentence to the secular authorities.

See Walter M. Chandler, The Trial of Jesus from a Lawyer’s Standpoint (New York: Empire, 1908), 176–79, 280; see also Ethelbert Callahan, The Lawyers of the Bible (Indianapolis, IN; Hollenbeck Press, 1912), 60–61. For the significant evidence from church history that Gamaliel (teacher of Paul, chief justice of the Jerusalem Supreme Court, and holder of a PhD in Mosaic Law), ended up fully in the Christian faith, see my “The Case against The Case against Christianity: When Jerusalem Came to Athens,” found in The Resurrection Fact: Responding to Modern Objections, ed. J. Bombaro and A. Francisco (Irvine: New Reformation Press, 2016), 91–96.

28. John also records the astounding condition of the burial clothes (John 20:6–7).

29. For a particularly virulent effort in this regard, see Haim Cohn (former Israeli Supreme Court Justice) in The Trial and Death of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). The form-critical school, of course, finds the narratives unreliable and so, equally unsurprising, concludes that the trial never occurred as recorded. See Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus (Berlin: Walter Gruyter & Co., 1961), in which Winter argues, for example, that releasing Barabbas was a product of the evangelist’s mind.

30. A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). See a particularly marvelous display of wry British wit on pages 187–88, where Sherwin-White takes to task liberal biblical critics who value the bibliographic lineage of Tacitus and Suetonius above that of the New Testament writers.

31. Jean Imbert, Le Procès de Jésus (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984). The previous classics in this field done by lawyers are Walter H. Chandler, Trial of Jesus from a Lawyer’s Standpoint (1908) and Irwin H. Linton, Sanhedrin Verdict (1943).

32. Parton, Religion on Trial: Cross-Examining Religious Truth Claims (St. Louis: Concordia, 2017), 79. We note that the earliest fragment of any New Testament book is that of John 18:31–33, 37–38, which interestingly mentions Pilate no less than four times in five verses.

See footnote 13.

33. A. Jaubert, La Date de la Cène. Calendrier biblique et liturgie chrétienne (Paris: Gabalda, 1957). Jaubert’s discovery is handled in detail by Montgomery in “The Fourth Gospel Yesterday and Today,” The Suicide of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1975), 428–65. See also F. F. Bruce’s review of Jaubert’s work in Journal of Semitic Studies 3, vol. 2 (1958): 219–21.

34. Dorothy Sayers, The Man Born to Be King (New York: Harper & Bros., 1943), 19–20. Typical of the recordation of the understandable chaos around an empty tomb are these lines from Mark: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone” (Mark 16:8).

35. See Graeme Smith, Was the Tomb Empty? A Lawyer Weighs the Evidence for the Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Monarch Books, 2014), 214–15.

36. Each of these predictions is methodically analyzed in detail with extensive references to the Old Testament passages by J. Barton Payne. See Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy, 516–26.

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T

he old proverb “God is in the details” means that it’s in the small and seemingly insignificant minutiae of an event that we see the truth and intent behind it. (This why graduate students painstakingly work their way through five-inch-thick books in the stacks of the university library!) There are certain details—the color of the grass, a disciple referenced , and the geographical location of two cities—in the Gospels that by virtue of their unimportance reveal the legitimacy of the account they give of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. WHI producer Shane Rosenthal sat down with Lydia McGrew, author of Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts, to discuss some little things that carry a lot of weight.

WHI: What is an “undesigned coincidence,” and where did you get the idea for this book?

LM: I often say that an “undesigned coincidence”

is an incidental interlocking that points to truth.

Where I got the idea for the book—the fairest thing to say is that I got it from my husband.

Tim McGrew is an apologist and the chair of the philosophy department at Western Michigan University in southwest Michigan. He’s passionately interested in older books concerning apologetics and older arguments we’ve forgotten. He got me very interested in this from two authors in particular: William Paley from the eighteenth century and John J. Blunt from the nineteenth century, who had written about undesigned coincidences and popularized it in

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their own time. After a while, however, it was forgotten. It’s just beginning to come back in the twenty-first century.

WHI: The detailed analysis of the Gospels that

you provide in your book makes me think of the Antiques Roadshow, where people bring in an item to be appraised that has been handed down in their family. Although they may not actually like the item, they change their attitude when they’re told it’s worth $400,000! On the other hand, it might be something they loved, but then they’re told it’s a worthless fake—it just appears old. Likewise, it seems you’re looking at the Gospels from this perspective of the appraiser, asking whether they are originals or reproductions—that is, inauthentic documents that were written much later but made to look like they were old and original to Jesus’ time.

LM: It’s interesting to see just how hard it would actually be to do this deliberately as a fake or a hoax. It would take a lot of work.

For example, it’s not what you would get with Bart Ehrman, the skeptical scholar, who would say that this was like a game of telephone where people were telling tales to one another. You would definitely not find these kinds of undesigned coincidences in that kind of undeliberate way, where people are just telling a story to someone and then someone else tells it to someone else and so forth, and then finally it’s written down.

WHI: The first undesigned coincidence I’d like you

to discuss relates to a simple comment we find in Mark 6:39, in which Jesus feeds the five thousand and commands all of them to sit on green grass.

Why do you think the color green is significant?

LM: Mark is the only Gospel that has the word green. No other Gospel bothers to mention that. It’s one of those little passing details. He commanded them to sit down, and then it says that they all sat down on the green grass. When you go to John 6:4, which also describes the

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feeding of the five thousand, John briefly mentions, apropos of nothing, that the Passover was near at hand. Now, around the Sea of Galilee, you don’t get green grass for eight months out of the year. The one time when you do get some green grass is shortly after the spring rains.

So, this springtime season would be when you would have green grass. So it fits together really well! Mark doesn’t mention that the time of the Passover was near, and John doesn’t mention the color of the grass, but they fit together like two different pieces of a puzzle.

W H I : In other words, one Gospel writer isn’t

copying another Gospel writer; both of them are describing reality.

LM: Exactly. They have access to what really hap-

pened in some sort of separate fashion. In fact, the feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle found in all four Gospels, so that gives us more opportunities to kind of pick up on these little casual details that fit together.

WHI: Now during that same event, the feeding of

the five thousand, you draw your readers’ attention to John 6:5. “Seeing that the large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?’” What strikes you as being significant about that comment?

LM: It mentions the name of the person to

whom he spoke. It could be utterly coincidental, a one-out-of-twelve chance that he picked some disciple at random. But if the story were faked, you would think the author could have chosen a more prominent disciple rather than Philip. It’s not that Philip was utterly obscure, but there’s no particular reason to mention him here. For example, unlike Judas, he’s not the treasurer of the group; unlike Peter, James, and John, he’s not part of the closest center circle to Jesus. So if you look at Luke 9:10, we have a fact that only Luke mentions: This event took place in a deserted area near

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MARK DOESN’T MENTION THAT THE TIME OF THE PASSOVER WAS NEAR, AND JOHN DOESN’T MENTION THE COLOR OF THE GRASS, BUT THEY FIT TOGETHER LIKE TWO DIFFERENT PIECES OF A PUZZLE. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

the town of Bethsaida. John doesn’t mention the location at all, but if you go to a completely different passage in the Gospel of John (1:4344) right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry when he’s gathering his disciples, it mentions Philip, and it says he was from the town of Bethsaida.

When Jesus asked Philip that question about buying the bread, I think he was kind of pulling his disciples’ chain a bit; in fact, John says that he knew what he would do. He doesn’t ask them where they can buy bread because he really wants them to buy bread. When he chooses which disciple to tease, as it were, I think he turns to Philip to say, “Philip, you’re from nearby here; where can we buy bread so all the people may eat?” He picks Philip because he knows Philip is local to the area, and it all fits together in an extremely mentally satisfying way. But it’s so casual; no one would do that deliberately. You can’t imagine John saying, “I think I’m going to fake my readers out in picking up this story from the other Gospels.

I want to make it even more realistic, though, so I’ll put in this little casual comment about Philip but not refer to Bethsaida; and then in a totally different passage, I’ll mention that Philip was from Bethsaida. Then maybe two thousand years from now, someone will notice these details and say the story must be true.”

That’s extremely implausible.

WHI: When you put all these coincidences together,

it really begins to hit you that this does not look like artifice.

LM: Not at all, particularly because they’re so

casual, which is something I mention a lot in the book. I think this is something skeptics find difficult to understand. Skeptics don’t understand the evidential value of casualness.

A forger or a faker has to draw attention to what he’s doing or else it’s of no value to him.

If he just mentions casually that Jesus spoke to Philip, what value is that to him? So that’s another part of what gives this cumulative case its force.

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WHI: The ancient historian Josephus records that

the town of Bethsaida was actually renamed Julias around AD 30. Josephus, who wrote in the 70s or 90s, has about sixteen references to the town as Julias, and only once does he mention the older name of Bethsaida and then in the account of the name change. So it’s interesting that all four Gospels use the right name without referring to this name change, which may be an indication that the authors were writing at that time about that location the way it was then.

LM: I agree. John is very conversant with the

topography of Galilee and with specific places in Jerusalem. So what you’re talking about shows the acquaintance of that author with that name.

He also mentions, for example, that they went down from Cana to Capernaum. Why down?

Because it’s toward the seaside, so you would be going down the hill and so forth. He speaks in this effortless way like a person who is a native of that time and place.

WHI: New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham

says that when it comes to a witness in a court of law, you can’t actually go back in time to see whether or not what they’re telling you is true, but you can establish whether a witness is generally credible by things you can test. That has always stuck with me, especially when looking at John.

As you go through John, he’s giving detailed and accurate first-century information. John A. T. Robinson, a liberal scholar who came to conservative conclusions, said that when you look at John’s Gospel, his chronology is actually the most detailed and it’s the best skeleton you can use to place the other Gospels, which present the material more topically.

LM: Bauckham also helpfully points out that with John in his Gospel we always know exactly where Jesus is. John doesn’t just say that Jesus was in Jerusalem; he says that Jesus was in Jerusalem in the porch of Solomon or the pool of Bethesda, which is near the Sheep Gate. In that indirect way, our discoveries in archaeology, undesigned coincidences in

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other passages, and so forth confirm John’s historical intention.

WHI: Many liberal New Testament scholars say

that John, more than any other evangelist, is doing theology, not history. What John actually ends up doing, in my view, is presenting eyewitness history that has profound theological implications.

LM: I agree. Even people who are considered

to be a little more on the conservative spectrum, such as N. T. Wright, say things like, “I feel about John the way I feel about my wife. I love her, but I would never claim to understand her.” This is often used to imply that John is less historical than the Synoptic Gospels.

I really disagree with that implication. We should definitely consider this Gospel as historically grounded.

WHI: Let’s talk about another of these undesigned

coincidences. In Mark 15:43, there is a passing comment about Joseph of Arimathea’s courage in asking for the body of Jesus. You point out that this unexplained comment actually makes sense in the light of what John records.

LM: You might think that since Jesus had just been crucified, Joseph of Arimathea would have been afraid to approach Pilate. But that’s not necessarily the case. The Romans liked to be helpful to Jewish sensibilities. They might crucify your relative, but they would allow you to bury your relative! So for Joseph to go to Pilate didn’t necessarily take any particular courage, and yet Mark says he gathered up his courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Why is that? When we look at John 19:38, we find John saying that Joseph of Arimathea was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews. At this point, Mark knew that Joseph was somewhat afraid, and so he indirectly mentions his courage. Then John explicitly states that Joseph was a secret disciple because of the Jews. Both Gospel writers seem to approach this fact independently—that

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JOHN DOESN’T JUST SAY THAT JESUS WAS IN JERUSALEM; HE SAYS THAT JESUS WAS IN JERUSALEM IN THE PORCH OF SOLOMON OR THE POOL OF BETHESDA, WHICH IS NEAR THE SHEEP GATE. IN THAT INDIRECT WAY, OUR DISCOVERIES IN ARCHAEOLOGY, UNDESIGNED COINCIDENCES IN OTHER PASSAGES, AND SO FORTH CONFIRM JOHN’S HISTORICAL INTENTION.

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Joseph was now coming forward in a public way as a follower of Jesus.

WHI: Let’s talk about the foot-washing scene recorded in John 13 and the background that Luke provides in his account of the Last Supper.

JOHN IS THE ONLY GOSPEL THAT TELLS US THAT JESUS WASHED THE DISCIPLES’ FEET. WHY DID JESUS DO THAT JUST THEN? WAS IT MERELY TO GIVE THEM AN ILLUSTRATION OF LOVE? 52

LM: John is the only Gospel that tells us that Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. Why did Jesus do that just then? Was it merely to give them an illustration of love? In Luke 22, Luke mentions that on the same night, the disciples were bickering about who was going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and that Jesus rebuked them. Jesus said that the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them and are called benefactors, but it should not be so among them—the greatest will be as the youngest, and the leader as the servant of all. We hear so many sermons about servant leadership that we are used to thinking of Jesus as servant-like.

But there aren’t a lot of instances in the Gospels where Jesus does something servant-like for his disciples, except for this foot washing in John 13. This seems to be what Jesus is referring to in Luke: “I am among you as the one who serves.” Luke, however, doesn’t mention the foot washing. Why does Jesus wash the disciples’ feet that night? Because they had been bickering—which is not mentioned in John.

Why in Luke does Jesus say, “I am among you as the one who serves”? Because of the foot washing, which is not mentioned in Luke. So you have this double whammy, as it were, a twofer that links those two Gospels together at that point.

WHI: You say that Jesus’ words to Pilate—“If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting”—is related to an earlier scene in John 18 when Peter actually took up a sword and maimed Malchus, a servant of the high priest. Why do you think that’s significant?

LM: You would think Jesus would not bring this

up, that he would not want to draw attention to

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this, because Pilate could just say, “Actually, they’re complaining to me that one of your servants cut off the ear of somebody when they were trying to arrest you last night. But then you say that this is not going on. What’s the deal? Why are you bringing this up?”

We find the reason in Luke 22 when they arrest Jesus: Jesus performed a miracle. First, he stopped the fighting: “Peter, put up your sword.”

Then he took the servant’s ear and healed him.

Jesus knew he had done this, so he could afford to make that comment to Pilate because no one was going to talk about Jesus’ healing ministry— that’s not the narrative they would want to bring forward. This is why he is able to say this to Pilate with such confidence in John 18:36.

WHI: Another question you ask in your book related

to this scene with Malchus is how John appears to have inside information, especially regarding that servant’s name. This particular servant’s name is mentioned only in John’s Gospel; and later, in chapter 18, John records that one of the guards who questioned Peter was actually a relative of this same Malchus.

How does John know the name of this high priest’s servant and that this person was his relative?

L M : Yesterday with my teenage daughter, I was reading the account of Jesus’ trial before Annas: “They took him to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was high priest that year.” She turned to me and said, “That’s really random.” Just mentioning that this guy was Caiaphas’s father-in-law (which is similar to pointing out that “the servant’s name was Malchus” or that Peter is questioned by Malchus’s relative) seems to be a completely pointless and unnecessary detail. But how would anyone know those details? We have no reason to believe any of these people became Christians later on.

If we look at that same chapter in verses 15–16, John mentions that the “other disciple”—whose name is not given at this point—was known to the high priest, that he had a connection. In fact, one theory is that it’s possible the Zebedee family supplied dried fish to the high priest’s

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household. That, of course, is conjectural. In a sense, John seems to have known the servants: he knew the servant girl and gained access for Peter. He knows that servant group, who’s related to whom, and that’s why he’s able to mention these little extra details.

WHI: Let’s look at what we’ve surveyed, particularly with the scene in John 18 where Peter cuts off Malchus’s ear. If we look at this from the perspective of a radical, liberal hypothesis, seeing John’s Gospel not as eyewitness material but rather as a kind of fan fiction written much later, then we could ask why the author would take the time to write down the name of an insignificant character like Malchus but not record his own name. In other words, whatever your view of the authorship of John’s Gospel, it is ambiguous, because the author of John’s Gospel is mentioned only as the “beloved disciple.” We have to put the data together and make the best conclusion.

However, in the most famous fan-fiction gospels (the gnostic gospels), a later writer could gain credibility by associating this material with one of the famous disciples from the time period—such as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and so on. But when we read those “gospels,” they don’t really sound Jewish at all—they sound Greek—and so we label them as gnostic theology. I guess the biggest question is, why, if you’re making up the Gospel of John and trying to gain credibility, do you make up the name Malchus but don’t reveal your own name as an authoritative apostle?

LM: I think that’s an excellent point. It really would be far more relevant to the purpose of someone forging or making up a fictional gospel to, in some way, attribute it strongly to himself by a high-profile name.

DR. LYDIA MCGREW is a widely published analytic philosopher, home-schooling mother, blogger, and the wife of philosopher and apologist Timothy McGrew. She is the author of Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017), which defends the reliability of the New Testament using a long-neglected argument from incidental details.

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TELL US YOUR STORY. What have White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation meant to you, your family, or your church? Your stories encourage us in our work, and we’d love to hear them.

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04

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews 56

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The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World

Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be

White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White

by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu

by Daniel Hill

by Rachel Hollis

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

Patricia Anders

Leslie A. Wicke

Eric Chappell

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World

by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu HarperOne, 2014 240 pages (hardcover), $25.99 “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” (Matt. 18:21–22) “Pray then like this . . . ‘Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.’” (Matt. 6:9, 12) “If one has a complaint against another, [forgive] each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”

(Col. 3:13) Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”

(Eph. 4:31–32)

“

“And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” (Luke 23:34) t is clear from this mere sampling of Scripture passages that God calls us to forgive one another— with Jesus as the ultimate example from the cross. Knowing this biblical mandate is one thing (along with loving our neighbors as ourselves); it is quite another to put it into practice—especially when the grievance remains painfully strong.

Forgiveness, however, is actually vital to our overall well-being. Holding grudges is not healthy—spiritually or physically. Anne Lamott famously said that holding a grudge is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. It doesn’t work, and it’s just plain stupid and harmful to the one holding the grudge. And

I

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besides, Jesus says we need to forgive or God will not forgive us (see Matt. 6:14–15). We know we need to do this, but where do we start when the scars run deep? And how do we do this, not only on an individual basis but also collectively?

This is the basis for The Book of Forgiving by Anglican archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho, also an Anglican priest at the time of writing.

Most of us are familiar with the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa and the country’s efforts to mend itself through the Truth and Reconciliation Council, over which the archbishop presided as chair. The stories of forgiveness during this era are simply amazing—wives forgiving their husbands’ murderers, parents forgiving their child’s murderers, victims forgiving those who tortured them, and many other poignant examples of grace. After twenty-seven years in prison, Nelson Mandela overcame his anger and forgave those who had imprisoned him—seeking to bring peace to his country as their first duly elected president (and also winning the Nobel Peace Prize). All of this, Tutu states, was to avoid bloodshed and to dismantle the otherwise never-ending circle of retribution. They sought to follow Jesus in forgiving and even loving their enemies, instead of the self-destructive vendetta of an “eye for an eye”—for as Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

We all desire God’s reconciling love and peace in our lives and in our world, but how do we ourselves make this first step toward practicing forgiveness as God commands us? I believe that The Book of Forgiving is beneficial in providing concrete steps here, as evidenced by the subtitle The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. Of course, MR readers know that only God himself can heal this broken, fallen world.

But as we saw in just the few Scripture passages above, God still calls us to do our part in forgiving one another—which essentially is healing for ourselves and for the world around us.

As the subtitle suggests, forgiveness is a fourfold process: (1) Telling the Story, (2) Naming the

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Hurt, (3) Granting Forgiveness, and (4) Renewing or Releasing the Relationship. Part one of the book is titled “Understanding Forgiveness” and includes helpful chapters on why we should forgive and on understanding what forgiveness is not. Part two lays out this fourfold path in helpful detail, and part three—“All Can Be Forgiven”—deals with needing forgiveness from others and also from ourselves, concluding with what a “world of forgiveness” could look like for both individuals and entire nations.

In the introduction, the archbishop writes: Forgiveness is truly the grace by which we enable another person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew. To not forgive leads to bitterness and hatred. Like self-hatred and self-contempt, hatred of others gnaws away at our vitals. Whether hatred is projected out or stuffed in, it is always corrosive to the human spirit. (23) In chapter 3, “Understanding the Fourfold Path,” the authors provide an illustration of two different “cycles.” In the “Revenge Cycle,” we have “hurt/harm/loss” followed by “pain.”

At this juncture, there is a choice given. We can choose to remain in this Revenge Cycle and move next to “harm” and “reject shared humanity,” which is naturally followed by “revenge/retaliation/payback” and “violence/ cruelty.” Or, we have the option of exiting this continuous loop by “choosing to heal,” leading us then upward to the “fourfold path” along the “Forgiveness Cycle.” Although they call this a cycle, it’s really a ladder with four ascending rungs—the fourfold path—away from the Revenge Cycle and into healing.

Throughout the book, by way of personally illustrating this fourfold path, Mpho Tutu

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shares honestly with readers her own painful story of a tragedy that took place in her home— in her daughter’s bedroom. A young South African woman, Angela, lived with them and helped take care of the household. One day when Angela was alone in the house, a robber broke in and brutally murdered her. In the first step of the “fourfold path,” Mpho “tells the story” of finding Angela’s body (which is hard to read due to the graphic detail she provides as part of her healing process). She then “names the hurt,” describing the anguish she and her family experienced afterward. Not only was the murder devastating; she also felt that neither she nor her family would ever be safe again. Mpho writes, “It makes everything feel so out of control. I have so much fear and so much anxiety and always this sadness and grief mixed in and touching everything and everyone” (107). In the next chapter, Mpho talks about “granting forgiveness,” which was especially hard since the alleged twenty-two-year-old murderer (whom she actually knew) was never convicted. In seeking this healing through forgiving, Mpho writes, When you harm another, you also harm yourself. His humanity suffered from his own inhumane act. I can tell you this feeling of sadness and empathy for the murderer was something of a shock to me, and I believe this was my personal open door to forgiving. (135) This “open door to forgiving” was Mpho’s way out of the “Revenge Cycle” onto that four-step ladder upward to healing. Finally, in “Renewing or Releasing the Relationship,” Mpho struggles with whether or not to maintain her relationship with this young man. She desperately wanted to know if he really had committed the murder and, if so, why. If he needed money, then why

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didn’t he just ask Mpho for it? Could she help him now? Not knowing the answers to these questions, she chose to forgive him and move on.

Although it was easier to do so “intellectually”— “emotionally,” she writes, “I’m not quite there yet, because it still hurts, and I know there is still healing work to be done” (156).

Although this is the personal story that runs throughout the book, there are many other equally powerful stories of atrocities, tragedies, and forgiveness. Indeed, this can be a hard book to read because of the disturbing facts of these stories. As the archbishop writes, we are capable of committing the most horrific atrocities against one another, and yet we are also capable of great love when we recognize our shared humanity.

When we have a tragedy in our lives, we can be overwhelmed at the love and support that comes flooding in from those around us—even from virtual strangers—or we might be the ones there to hold up our grieving brother or sister.

One important takeaway from this book is the renewed (or maybe even awakened) awareness of our shared humanity (what Tutu calls Ubuntu).

As we most painfully know, we are fallen creatures who are as frail as the dust itself, who do what we don’t want to do and don’t do what we want to do. But, along with the apostle Paul, we know that Jesus has indeed set us free from this vicious cycle. As the archbishop writes: For Christians, Jesus Christ sets the pattern for forgiveness and reconciliation. He offered his betrayers forgiveness. Jesus, the Son of God, could erase the signs of leprosy; heal those broken in body, mind, or spirit; and restore sight to the blind. He must also have been able to obliterate the signs of torture and death he endured. But he chose not to erase that evidence. After the resurrection, he appeared to his disciples. In most instances, he showed them his wounds and his scars. This is what healing demands. . . .

The invitation to forgive is an invitation to find healing and peace. In my native

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language, Xhosa, one asks for forgiveness by saying, “Ndicel’ uxolo” (I ask for peace). (24) If we are truly to let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts, then we need to learn to forgive one another, recognizing our shared humanity, made in the image of God. Rejoicing with those who rejoice, suffering with those who suffer, and forgiving when “sinned against.” In The Book of Forgiving, I personally found help in unloading a crushing burden I had been carrying for years— finding (through the grace of God) my way out of that cycle of revenge by finally choosing to heal.

PATRICIA ANDERS is managing editor of Modern Reformation and editorial director of Hendrickson Publishing on the North Shore of Boston.

Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be

by Rachel Hollis Thomas Nelson, 2018 240 pages (hardcover), $22.99 achel Hollis has done a lot of things. Growing up in a tragic family situation, she moved to Los Angeles in her teens, married a marketing professional in the entertainment industry, worked as an event planner, had four children and fostered others, took up blogging, started a business, wrote novels, ran marathons, and describes herself as aiming to control a media empire. Hollis recounts these stories in her self-help book Girl, Wash Your Face, but her real goal is to share everything she has learned from her adventures about living well and chasing her dreams. It’s an illuminating read, but perhaps not for the reasons Hollis intended.

The book is structured as a list of lies that Hollis has encountered and overcome in her life.

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Some of the lies, such as “I’ll Start Tomorrow,” are lies we tell ourselves. Others, such as “I am defined by my weight,” come from messages around us. Most of the direct advice appears in the list of “Things That Helped Me” found at the end of each chapter. These are the most practical parts of the books. The essays themselves are a blend of anecdote and exhortation, intended to motivate the reader to implement the practical tips.

The relationship between each chapter’s “lie” and the associated essay ranges from direct to convoluted. “I Can’t Tell the Truth” is mostly about Hollis’s experiences with the foster system; it’s only about truth-telling in the sense that Hollis is sharing a true, painful story. Other chapters are more focused, like “No Is the Final Answer,” in which Hollis urges us to rethink obstacles rather than accepting “no.”

In this respect, Girl is reminiscent of other books written by bloggers, and the chapters read like an assemblage of blog posts. Those familiar with this quirk of bloggersturned-authors can adapt, but others will find it disjointed.

The tone will also be familiar; Hollis employs a casual, folksy voice, sprinkling her paragraphs with interjections of “girlfriend” and “sister” or minced oaths such as “honest to dog.” This makes it an easy read, though some will find the interjections distracting.

The central premise, assumed in some chapters and directly argued in others, is that you are in control of your own happiness, and that you can choose to pursue your dreams, overcome hardship, and become a “better version of yourself.” The lies are things you believe that keep you from acting on your own agency. Hollis refrains from specifying in too much detail what a better version of yourself looks like, preferring to hold

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up her own life as a loose, inspirational example for readers to emulate. She advances this argument by two means: assertion of opinion and anecdotes from her life. Despite admitting interest in gurus and life coaches, she doesn’t interact with other self-help books or teachers. Nor does she present empirical evidence or logical argument. While self-help books aren’t meant to be densely argued, inclusion of these elements would make Hollis’s case more plausible without weighing Girl down. The reliance on story and opinion creates another problem: some of the stories operate as faux arguments. They appear to prove the point Hollis is making only because the reader’s suspension of disbelief (activated by the narrative structure) covers gaps in the logic. Stories operate by asking readers to fill in elisions in order to preserve momentum and narrative force. This is appropriate in storytelling. When substituted for proof or argumentation, though, it weakens claims and can mislead.

This is evident in chapter 5, “Loving Him Is Enough for Me.” Hollis tells the story of how she met her husband, a relationship she admits began inauspiciously.

The couple broke up for a time, during which Hollis gave her then-boyfriend an ultimatum.

The moral Hollis draws from the story is that she had been mistakenly dependent on her boyfriend’s affection and that she needed to believe she deserved better. But the upshot of the ultimatum is that, within hours, they were reconciled and went on to be married. How does this fit with Hollis’s argument? It feels cathartic and therefore appears to prove a point, but when examined closely the logic isn’t clear. Presenting explicit reasoning and evidence, instead of relying entirely on a story to make her case, would have saved Hollis from incoherence.

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Hollis has strong opinions about being happy and healthy, and this is presented as basically the same thing as being good. You just have to try really hard, “give yourself grace” when you fail, and try again.

Another route Hollis could have taken is argument from shared principles, such as Scripture.

Hollis identifies herself as Pentecostal, and clearly she has attempted to ground her advice in her faith. Especially in the latter part of the book, Scripture quotations and discussions of God’s love pepper the text. However, there are few arguments from biblical principles. Appeal to public standards, such as empirical evidence or a shared creed, would give Hollis a base that her folksy anecdotes cannot provide.

In fact, the creed that best unifies the disparate elements of Hollis’s book isn’t a publically codified one. It’s the loose set of ideas described by sociologist Christian Smith as “moralistic therapeutic deism”: God is out there, but you ultimately choose your own destiny. God wants you to be happy, to be a better version of yourself.

Hollis has strong opinions about being happy and healthy, and this is presented as basically the same thing as being good. You just have to try really hard, “give yourself grace” when you fail, and try again (hence the title “wash your face” refers to wiping away tears after you’ve failed).

This makes sense. Hollis is, after all, part of the cohort Smith studied; and based on what we see in Girl, she shares their dominant religious principles. For Christian readers, however,

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it’s important to see this in context. Historic Christian doctrines—such as God’s sovereignty, human sinfulness, Christ’s sacrifice, and final judgment—sit uneasily with the individualistic, performance-oriented, therapeutic vision Hollis employs.

Finally, a word about privilege. It’s clear from Hollis’s descriptions that her household is both affluent and multi-income. This prosperity has freed her from many constraints. For example, Hollis describes sending a babysitter to pick up her children from school so she can attend business events, with only a token acknowledgement that this is not typical. This is not mere finger-pointing; the privilege question poses a serious problem for Hollis’s central argument that you determine how happy you will be. It’s hard not to suspect that it’s a lot easier to choose the shape of your life if you have the resources to shape it in whatever form you like. On a physical level, the toll on the brain from long-term stress or poor medical care makes such exercises of willpower less plausible. On a financial level, lack of money enforces trade-offs between what we want and what we (and our families) need.

Without a thorough exploration of how those trade-offs work and how to navigate them, the

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injunction to pursue your dreams isn’t practical. Hollis admits that we can’t control our circumstances. But those very circumstances undermine the choices that Hollis says we can control. This calls into question the radical individualism of Hollis’s premise, and perhaps of her entire philosophy.

Girl, Wash Your Face provides a case study of how Christian Smith’s teenagers are navigating their thirties. It’s a quick, painless read if you are curious to see moralistic therapeutic deism in action. As a guide to living well, however, it provides little that is either new or effectively argued.

LESLIE A. WICKE graduated with a degree in history from Pat-

rick Henry College. She is a writer and artist whose work can be found at www.leslieawicke.com and www.tbjeremiah.com.

She and her husband currently live in Virginia.

White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White

by Daniel Hill IVP Books, 2017 192 pages (paperback), $16.00 ’m going to make an assumption.

It’s risky, but I think I’m on safe ground. I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, there’s a strong possibility that your world is white—your closest friends are white, your most trusted mentors are white, your pastor is white, the last several books you read were by white authors, and your church is predominantly white. That’s not an unusual story in Reformed and evangelical circles, and that’s the story of Daniel Hill, a Chicago church planter and author of White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White. His claim is that race is a difficult concept for white Christians to grasp, and when the default setting in mainstream culture (and in many of our

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churches) is white, it’s sometimes hard to view one’s whiteness objectively; that is, to view it in such a way that we can better understand its consequences and effects in a diverse society.

Hill helpfully and humbly guides the reader in the necessary work of examining our cultural identity (whoever we are) in relation to our identity in Christ.

White Awake begins with Hill’s sobering autobiographical account of his work as a church planter out of Willow Creek Community Church (the megachurch in the Chicago suburbs). After reading Dr. Michael Emerson’s Divided by Faith, Hill began a journey to plant a diverse, multiethnic church in the City of Chicago. Those familiar with “cage-phase Calvinists” may see similarities—whether it’s TULIP or racial justice, the newly initiated often demonstrate messianic tendencies toward the uninitiated (myself definitely included). Newly discovered truth often propels white people to fix the problem—by doing something. (In fact, as Hill argues, the search for an immediate fix has a lot to say about white cultural assumptions and values.) His journey was a mixture of failure and success, something he expands by using the motif of blindness as seen in Nicodemus and Jesus in John 3.

After describing his personal journey, Hill explores what “identity” is. His starting point is the gospel. The Bible, he says, “provides us with a unique and powerful motivation for pursuing wholesale, identity transformation in Christ” (41). Yes, we are born-again, baptized children of God and disciples of Jesus, but this doesn’t negate the role our social and national culture plays in shaping our identity.

Identity transformation requires honesty, reflection, and seeing the significant forces that form our hearts, minds, and daily lives—a concept that Hill effectively marshals against the idea of “colorblindness.” Colorblindness is a buzzword used to signify a perspective that, while well intentioned, is more a product of misapplied theological truth than it is an accurate articulation of the universal worth of all

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human ethnicity. It minimizes the way cultural identity played a role in many stories of Old Testament characters, the incarnation of Jesus, the overtones of cultural identity in the early church, and God’s celebration of cultural diversity that reaches its climax in Revelation 7. Colorblindness is not the absence of racial prejudice; it’s an evasion or avoidance of the power of sin and its impact on the system of race that exists in America. Tolerance of sin is never acceptable in the life of a Christian; colorblindness shouldn’t be either.

He identifies seven stages that “mark the cultural identity process of a white person seeking transformation from blindness to sight” (49): Encounter, Denial, Disorientation, Shame, SelfRighteousness, Awakening, and Active Participation. Though perhaps not as logically necessary as the ordo salutis, Hill’s sequence of identity transformation does seem to accurately describe the journey some white people make when they realize that their unconsciously constructed narrative of life in America has been informed by factors they had been unaware of. It’s not an accident that the “do something” stage doesn’t occur until the very end. Hill wants those of us in the majority culture (i.e., white) to be “quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger” (James 1:19), particularly when it comes to issues of race in the church and the broader culture.

Hill’s candor and directness, especially in issues of shame and self-righteousness, make this book immensely valuable, especially for a white audience. As a pastor in Southern California, I can attest that the issues Hill describes exist in my own heart and life and those in my community. Whether he’s describing a faulty theology of lament, low perseverance in pursuing racial justice, intellectual or social

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escape from the problems of our neighbor, or the psychological discomfort that results when you learn the history of race in America, Hill is a welcome guide. What’s the practical takeaway? Hill saves the application for the end; but without the cultural identity transformation sequence, I largely think his advice would fall on deaf ears.

Still, there are some appreciated action steps that both pastors and parishioners can take in following Jesus on the issues of race.

One area where Hill’s work could be improved is providing his white readers with more examples of how and why racism is bigger, deeper, and more insidious than personal acts of bigotry. Speaking for myself, white cultural experience is largely designed to prevent me from observing structural and systemic discrimination. The area of systemic racism is where many white Christian friends start scratching their heads; somehow, we’re able to think systemically when it comes to abortion, secularization, or progressive sexuality, but discussions of racism are limited to the personal. Additional examples for the skeptics would go a long way in the continuing conversation.

Hill’s pastoral insights, sensitivity, and boldness in White Awake are deeply important and valuable. Whether you get the book to help lead a small group, cultivate a conversation among church ministry leaders, or inform your preaching, please get the book. It’s a work by a white pastor for white people, which is okay.

But if we’re going to understand the consequences of valuing and normalizing white culture in our churches and communities, then we need all the help we can get.

ERIC CHAPPELL is a pastor at Trinity Presbyterian of Orange County (PCA) in Southern California.

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KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE. MEMBERSHIP IS FREE. With over twenty-five years of radio broadcasting and magazine publishing, and our Campaign for Core Christianity, our mission is to help Christians “know what they believe and why they believe it.”

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B AC K PAG E

The Touch

by Eric Landry

efore I leave my house, I engage in a ritual of sorts. I pat each of my pockets, feeling my wallet, phone, and keys. It isn’t until I actually touch them that I am confident I have them. Even though it’s common to say “Seeing is believing,” touch is the most important sense we use to make sense of our world.

The heart of our Christian faith is the God who comes near enough to touch: “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14). God had shown up in other forms before the incarnation: he spoke to Abraham, he appeared as a burning bush to Moses, he used his prophets to convey his will to Israel, and he even devoured sacrifices by sending fire from heaven. But his greatest appearance to his creation was in the form of his greatest creation: in the flesh of a human.

Why was God enfleshed? Simply so we could touch him. Later in his life, the apostle John wrote a letter to the early church, reminding those men and women who had never seen Jesus that he had seen him, that he had heard him, and that he had even touched him. Why is that important? Well, just as touch is our most important sense to orient ourselves in the world, our world makes sense only if we are rightly oriented to God. Sadly, the disorientation we all feel in the world—the sense that this world is not right and we are not right—is because we are out of touch with God. We know that we’re supposed to be with God, but a great chasm has opened up between God and us because of sin.

Some of the most memorable stories in the

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Gospels are about the people who touched Jesus—the woman with an issue of blood, the prostitute who wiped his feet with her tears and hair, and the beloved disciple who leaned back against him at the Last Supper. In Jesus, God drew near enough to be touched. That was his greatest gift to us, but it also made him vulnerable to all of the scorn, abuse, and violence humans are capable of. The tender touches that fill the Gospels are replaced at the end of Jesus’ life with violence—the soldiers who seized him, mocked him, and beat him, pushing a crown of thorns onto his head, and nailing him to a cross.

A God near enough to be touched is also a God near enough to be crucified.

But this touch, as violent and terrible as it was, was also the reason the Word was made flesh; for in the touch of the Roman soldiers who crucified the Lord of glory, the world was suddenly and strangely put right again. This was the touch that reoriented a disoriented world. By assuming our flesh, God redeemed it. He confronted our sin on its own turf and defeated it in the flesh.

The incarnation is not incidental to our faith.

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, or as one paraphrase puts it: “He became flesh and bone and moved into our neighborhood!”

That is what makes our religion different from every other religion and moral philosophy of the world. Where others promise us the means by which we can become like God, only Christianity tells us that God has become like us.

ERIC LANDRY is the executive editor of Modern Reformation.

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HELP THE NEXT GENERATION. B E C O M E A PA R T N E R T O D AY. In a time when the “nones� (or those claiming no religious adherence) are, according to pollsters, growing and when our own churches are stagnant or shrinking, it is more important than ever to identify and celebrate the gospel: the glory of God manifested in the grace he shows to those who deserve the very opposite. This is Christcentered Christianity at its best and with the support of our partners we produce resources that help transform churches, prisons, families, and individuals.

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“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made. . . . In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

JOHN 1:1–5