Would the Resurrection Make Anyone Believe Jesus Was the Messiah?

[00:00:01] Would the Resurrection make anyone believe that Jesus was the Messiah? By Bart Ehrman I have been talking about the early Christian understandings of Jesus as the Messiah. Not just the Messiah, but the crucified Messiah. A concept that would have seemed not just unusual or bizarre to most Jewish years in the first century, but absolutely mind boggling and self contradictory. I been arguing that it was precisely the contradictory nature of the claim that led almost all Jews to reject the Christian claims about Jesus. [00:00:35] Several readers have asked me whether I think Jesus understood himself to be the Messiah. [00:00:40] Probably those who know a little bit about my work and my general views of things would think that my answer would be absolutely not. But well, I think Jesus did consider himself the Messiah, but not the to be crucified Messiah. The key to understanding Jesus view of himself is to recognize what he meant by considering himself the Messiah. I'll get to that in a later post. For now I want to give the evidence that Jesus thought that in some sense, a sense distinctive to Jesus, he thought he was the Messiah. [00:01:14] There are two highly compelling lines of argument. These arguments are so compelling that I wish I had thought of them myself. But alas, as with most good arguments, they are the work of others. [00:01:27] These two arguments are interlocking. They need to go together in tandem, but I can only give one at a time. The first involves what happened after Jesus life and the second involves what happened leading up to his death. [00:01:42] In terms of Jesus afterlife. Here we have to consider what the very first Christians thought about him. [00:01:48] These people that I'm calling Christians did not call themselves Christians. The term Christian appears originally to have been a term that outsiders, I.e. non believers, applied to the followers of Jesus. [00:02:00] You may be surprised to learn that the term only occurs three times in the New Testament. That's Acts 11:26 and chapter 26 verse 28 and in 1 Peter chapter 4, verse 16. In Acts 11:26 we learn that the disciples of Jesus were first called this name in the city of Antioch. [00:02:25] The name itself means something like a partisan of Christ or one who is associated with Christ. [00:02:33] The followers of Jesus were not called Jesusians, but Christians. Why was that? Because outsiders knew the distinctive and unusual view of these followers of Jesus after his death, that they considered Jesus to be the Christ. [00:02:48] That this was the dominant view of Jesus among his followers after his death is confirmed by the fact that Christ is by far the most common epithet used of Jesus by his earlier followers. Christians called him lots of things, of course. Son of God, Son of Man, Lord, Servant of the Lord, branch of David, God, and lots of other things, but the main thing they called him was Messiah. Or when they were speaking Greek, Christ. [00:03:17] How commonly did they call him Christ? [00:03:20] So commonly that Christ ended up being a name for him. Jesus Christ very soon came. Not to be a descriptive title, Jesus the Messiah, but an actual name, virtually a first name and last name. [00:03:33] This must have happened very early in the Christian tradition, right off the bat, and certainly it happened everywhere. When outsiders to the faith first started referring to the Christians, they identify them as those who worship Christ. That is, that's the name they use for him, not Jesus. [00:03:51] So what does this have to do with whether Jesus called himself the Messiah? Well, just this. Why do you suppose the earliest followers of Jesus identified him as the Messiah? [00:04:02] Now, you might be tempted to say that it was because they believed he got raised from the dead. Jesus died, his followers came to believe he was resurrected, and so they concluded that he was the Messiah. Makes sense, right? [00:04:14] Wrong. For a very basic but absolutely crucial reason, a reason that escapes almost everyone today. Because it's so widely assumed that the Messiah was supposed to die for sins and then to be raised from the dead. But here's the key point related to my several past posts. [00:04:31] There weren't any Jews who expected the Messiah to die and to be raised from the dead. [00:04:37] Suppose the followers of Jesus did come to believe that God had raised him from the dead. That would not have made him the Messiah in their view, since that was not supposed to happen to the Messiah. If the followers of Jesus came to believe in the resurrection, or if that changed their views of Jesus, they would have started saying things like Jesus is the Son of God, or Jesus has become divine, or Jesus is the exalted Lord. All of these things could be inferred from the fact of a resurrection. [00:05:06] But what could not be inferred from the fact of a resurrection would be Messiah. [00:05:13] It's like this. The resurrection of Jesus would never have led anyone to say, see Jesus is the Roman Empire Emperor, or see, Jesus is the King of Britain, or C, Jesus is the world's greatest mathematician, or C, Jesus is the first, the fastest runner the world has ever seen. And why is that? It's because no one ever expected that the Roman Emperor, the King of Britain, the world's greatest mathematician, the fastest runner on earth, were to be raised from the dead so that believing in the Resurrection would not make anyone think that about a person in the first place. [00:05:50] And no one expected the Messiah to be someone who was raised from the dead. So even if the followers of Jesus did come to believe he'd been raised as they did, that would not have led them to call him the Messiah. [00:06:04] And that is a basic and fundamental point. I owe it to the great New Testament scholar of yesteryear from Yale University, Nils Dahl. And it means something absolutely crucial. The only reason the followers of Jesus after His death and the belief in his resurrection came to call him the Messiah is because they were calling him that before his death. [00:06:27] The resurrection was taken to confirm something that they already believed. They believed it while he was still living. They had to have. And why did they believe it while he was living? As I'll show in the next part of this two part argument, it's almost certainly because it's what he believed about himself.