Historical Evidence of Jesus' Resurrection: Shifting Traditions

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason,

and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

This is the ninth and final episode in the series where we are exploring the

historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

Today's evidence will discuss the change of behaviors of the early church.

From changing the days of worship to not requiring circumcision,

the early church in Jerusalem adapted its long-held Old Testament teachings.

The changes occurred after the disciples claimed Jesus rose from the dead.

What is the best explanation of this change, and how does this supply historical

evidence to believe in Jesus' resurrection?

Thanks for joining us today.

So tonight we are going to talk about the evidence of the change that happens

specifically in the Jewish population of the first century.

Now there is something to be said about the change that happens throughout the

entire world as Christianity is the basis for Western civilization as we know it today.

The morality of the Western culture has its roots in the gospel of Jesus and in his teachings.

And that is another rabbit hole we could go down.

But we're going to specifically stay in the arena of what Jewish followers of Jesus,

what Jewish people who followed Jesus, what they had to give up and how that

is evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. itself.

So, we're going to start with a quote by Gary Habermas.

Again, he is probably one of, if not the most influential researchers of the resurrection of Jesus.

And in his rundown of six reasons that he gives for the historical evidence

of the gospel of Jesus, this is one of them.

He says, Because of their belief, now there is in reference to the disciples,

because of the disciples' belief that he was raised from the dead,

it is the event that has turned the world upside down religiously.

In fact, a recent book on non-believing Jews and the resurrection,

they even acknowledge, not being Christians, that Christianity is a resurrection religion.

It was the resurrection that powered the teachings even to the point of being willing to die,

and we do have first century sources for arguably the three largest names in Christianity.

And that's one of the things that we have covered in this series about how people

don't die for a lie and how the disciples being close to Jesus,

how they would have known whether or not it was true.

They're the ones that had the experiences and they're the ones who took it to their execution.

And so that's part of what we've already talked about.

But the earlier part in this is that it has turned the world upside down religiously

and how non-believing Jews,

they even acknowledge that Christianity is a resurrection religion.

And this is something that was attested to very early on in Christianity.

And so, the idea here is

simply that what the topsy-turvy world that Christianity brought into the world

is something that we can look to as evidence for the validity of the resurrection of Jesus.

So, J.P. Moreland, he's another scholar, he says this, Let's think about the

start of the Christian church.

There's no question it began shortly after the death of Jesus and spread so

rapidly that within a period of maybe 20 years,

it has even reached Caesar's palace in Rome.

Not only that, but this movement triumphed over a number of competing ideologies

and eventually overwhelmed the entire Roman Empire.

And so what we have going on here is him saying that the power,

the emphasis on Christianity in the first century made it from a small group

of followers when Jesus died to ever expanding and expanding beyond the reach of Jerusalem.

This is nothing short of miraculous.

Now, there are other religious movements who have spread about,

there's no denying that, but the way in which Christianity spread and the quickness

of it is something that is of evidence to something big happening in the first century.

So Christianity is the major influencer of Western civilization.

And so that is true. You can look at the laws about murder, about theft,

and then you can go on down the line.

It is based upon the teachings of the Bible and Jesus.

But again, as I said, we are going to take a specific look at how Christianity

uprooted Jewish people who followed after Jesus as evidence for the historical resurrection of Jesus.

So, the first thing we need to understand is from a Jewish perspective,

what was their heritage? What was their culture?

What was the tradition of the Jewish people?

And did Christianity conflict some of those?

And so we're going to take a look at some specific instances where we can see

what the Jewish people thought of their traditions,

what they thought of the Bible, and how this was ingrained in them for a very long time.

We're going to start in the second century before Jesus.

So about 164 BC, we have the Maccabean Revolt in Judea.

And the Jewish people had been trampled on over and over again.

We had the Assyrians, we had the Babylonians, we had the Persians,

we had the Greeks and later we're gonna have the Romans but in between the Greeks

and the Romans we have this period where the Jewish people revolt against their

leaders and they regain their freedom.

Gentiles in this time were trying to absolutely desecrate the religion of the Jews.

They were trying to assimilate them into their Greek culture and religions.

And so what they did is they defiled the sanctuary of God. So they set up altars

in the holy place of the second temple.

They offered unauthorized sacrifices, putting a pig on the altar, an unclean animal.

They came in and put up statues of Zeus and worshiped him in the temple of God.

And when the Jewish people regained control, they did not follow after those

types of religious ceremonies.

They reverted back to what they knew, they reverted back to what we call the

Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

This is just ingrained in them. This is what they were meant to do.

And one of the apocryphal books is called First Maccabees,

and it kind of describes how the Jewish people brought the temple back to a

place that was sacred and sanctified rather than defiled.

And as we read through this, this is going to showcase how endearing the Old Testament was to them.

So the brackets that I have up on the screen are not actually in the book of 1st Maccabees.

They are just for our reference to know where the reference in the Old Testament is.

So it says, Then they took unhewn stones, as the law directs,

and built a new altar like the former one.

They also rebuilt the sanctuary and the interior of the temple and consecrated the courts.

They made new holy vessels and brought the lampstand, the altar of incense,

and the table into the temple.

Then they offered incense on the altar and lit the lamps on the lampstand.

And these gave light in the temple.

They placed the bread on the table and hung up the curtains.

Thus they finished all the work they had undertaken.

And so as they removed the altar that the pig was sacrificed on,

they took it out and they replaced it with one that right after the Ten Commandments, God says,

if you make an altar, do not put any tools to it.

It must not be hewn.

And so this is what they did. They reverted back to Exodus 20,

25, and they followed that decree.

Then when you go down and you say, all right, they rebuilt the sanctuary and

the inter-temple, they consecrated the courts, they made new holy vessels,

they brought the lampstands, the altar of incense, and the table into the temple,

they offered incense on the altar and lit the lamps.

All of these things that are described in Exodus 25 to 27, they followed these completely.

At a time when it would have been easy to go their own way, to make their own

decisions because they had just kicked out the empire that had caused this desecration

to the temple, they could have made something new.

But no, they reverted back to their teachings. They reverted back to the Bibles.

And so one of the things that makes the Jewish people so endearing and enduring

is that they take their text very seriously.

The Jews weren't the only nations to be taken captive by the Assyrians or the Babylonians.

There were lots of nations that did this, but the Jews are still around today

where we don't have nations like the Hittites because they were so adamant of their traditions.

They were not going to compromise what their text says, and they continued to hold this,

sign of God close to them. They were really trying to pursue after God.

And so J.P. Moreland again says these words, why didn't that happen to the Jews?

Why weren't they intermarried? And why weren't they, why do we still have them today?

And they just didn't go the way of the Hittites and the other nations.

And he says, because the things that made the Jews Jews, the social structures

that gave them their national identity were unbelievably important to them.

The Jews would pass these structures down to their children,

celebrate them in the synagogue meetings every Sabbath, and reinforce them with

their rituals because they knew if they didn't, there soon would be no Jews left.

They would be assimilated into the cultures that captured them.

And there's another reason why these social institutions were so important.

They believed these institutions were entrusted to them by God.

They believed that to abandon these institutions would be to risk their souls being damned to hell and.

After death. And so the Jewish people held tight to these things.

This is something that they were taught in synagogue.

This is something that when they had the Passover celebration,

they remembered the exodus out of Egypt.

They knew all the stories.

They were this tight knit. They were tight to the history of their people.

And they truly believed that God was the one who had talked to them,

who had revealed to them, who had chosen them out of the rest of the world to

spread his name all over the place.

And so this led them to holding to their traditions, to their heritages.

This led them to this kind of mentality.

And this is the mentality we see when Paul is arrested in Jerusalem.

In Acts chapter 21, verses 27 to 31, we read,

Acts 21:27–31

the seven days were almost ended when some Jews from the province of Asia saw

Paul in the temple and roused a mob against him.

They grabbed him, yelling, men of Israel, help us.

This is the man who preaches against our people everywhere and tells everybody

to disobey the Jewish laws.

He speaks against the temple and even defiles this holy place by bringing in Gentiles.

For earlier that day, they had seen him in the city with Trophimus,

a Gentile from Ephesus, and they assumed Paul had taken him into the temple.

The whole city was rocked by these accusations, and a great riot followed.

Paul was grabbed and dragged out of the temple and immediately the gates were closed.

And they were trying to tell him, word reached the commander of the Roman regiment

that all Jerusalem was in an uproar.

And so the idea that Paul was teaching against the Jewish nation,

he was teaching against the laws,

and that he was even defiling it by bringing in a non-Jewish person really incited this uproar.

They were at arms over this because they held these teachings so dear to themselves.

This is their national identity.

This is what they were pursuing. It meant so much to them.

And so the crazy thing is, or the unbelievable thing is,

that when Jesus rose from the dead, or supposedly rose from the dead,

there was a dramatic change in some of the people of Jerusalem,

the Jews around the world, where they forsook some of the commandments, some of the teachings.

And this is the evidence then that helps us to determine historically that something big happened.

And based upon all the evidence that we have seen in this series,

that Jesus did rise from the dead.

And so we're just going to take a look at a couple of these to see how they

were set up and what happened in the Jesus movement after the disciples say

that he rose from the grave.

So the first one is the food and dietary laws, which can be found in Leviticus chapter 11.

Leviticus 11 · chapter mention

This is where if the animal splits the hoof and chews the cud, that animal is clean.

But if it does one or the other and not both, it is unclean and other laws and restrictions in this.

So we're going to read a part of it. It says in Exodus 11, 1 through 4,

Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Give the following instructions to the people of Israel.

Of all the land animals, these are the ones you may use for food.

You may eat any animal that has completely split hooves and chews the cud.

You may not, however, eat the following animals that have split hooves or that

chew the cud, but not both.

The camel chews the cud, but does not have split hooves, so it is ceremonially unclean for you.

And so it goes on from there in that chapter describing the food that is clean

and unclean to the Jewish nation.

And again, this is some of the things that the mob against Paul was saying.

He is telling people not to follow the Jewish customs, to follow the Jewish

rules. and this was certainly one of those. This meant so much to the national

identity of the Jewish people.

It held them together and they were holding tight to it.

And so why did so many people abandon this teaching?

Why did people say this was no longer something that we had to do to be in a

right standing with God? and it's based upon the disciples, the apostles' teachings.

So first we see this in Acts chapter 10, verses 9 through 16,

Acts 10:9–16

where we read, The next day, as Cornelius' messengers were nearing the town,

Peter went up on the flat roof to pray.

It was about noon, and he was hungry. But while a meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance.

He saw the sky open, and something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners.

In the sheet were all sorts of animals, reptiles and birds.

Then a voice said to him, get up, Peter, kill and eat them.

No, Lord, Peter declared. I've never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have

declared impure and unclean.

But the voice spoke again, do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.

And so here, the text is clearly showing that human beings are calling things

unclean, but God is calling them clean.

Later on in this passage, Cornelius, who was mentioned in verse 9,

he is with Peter, and Peter is like, it's not lawful for me to be with you.

But what God has made certain to me is that I should not call anything unclean

that he has called clean.

And so this is pointing in that direction to the food that is available to all

people who follow after God.

So, Peter understood this vision not to call anything clean.

Including Gentiles, or unclean, including Gentiles, that God referred to as clean.

But the early church also understood this to be about dietary laws in the Old Testament too.

And that's when we get to the story

in Galatians 2, where Peter is kind of two-faced in this interaction.

When there aren't the people from Jerusalem, what's called the circumcision

party, or we would call them today the conservative movement of the Jesus movement.

They, when Peter was not with them, he was eating all, he was eating shellfish,

he was eating bacon and all the pork products. It didn't matter what was on the table.

He was conversing and being with the people in just in that moment there.

But when people from Jerusalem came, he stopped doing that.

And so Paul experiences this. And this is what Paul says about that moment.

But when Peter came to Antioch, I had to oppose him to his face for what he

did was very wrong. When he first arrived, he ate with Gentile believers who were not circumcised.

But afterward, when some friends of James came, Peter wouldn't eat with the

Gentiles anymore. He was afraid of criticism from these people who insisted

on the necessity of circumcision.

As a result, other Jewish believers followed Peter's hypocrisy,

and even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.

And so what we see here is this conservative movement is saying,

no, no, no, we need these people circumcised.

We need these people following these dietary restrictions.

So even within the Jesus movement, there was this pull to remain true to the

Torah, the teachings of God.

This is what they knew. This is what they grew up. And it was something that

was pulling them to even go against what God had said in that vision to Peter.

And so, according to the ESV study Bible, it says, eating with the Gentiles

would mean not eating according to Jewish dietary restrictions.

The circumcision party advocated following the ceremonies of the Mosaic covenant

law, at least regarding circumcision, food, and special days.

And so, while they had let some things of the law go.

They were not letting everything go, and it's just this pull that we can see

on their hearts to remain faithful to this covenant that they had been taught

since they were infants.

Then we have from the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, respectable Judean

and Galilean Jews did not eat with Gentiles.

The growth of nationalism in Judea pressured moderates such as Peter and probably

James to avoid offending more conservative voices.

Although they probably saw table fellowship with the uncircumcised as secondary

to the Jerusalem church's unity,

Paul saw it as denying the wider unity of God's.

And so when Peter would pull back in these instances,

they're saying that he probably thought the unity of the Jerusalem church was

greater than the unity and fellowship that they were having with the Gentiles.

But Paul saw it as, no, no, no, everyone is included in the family of God.

Everyone needs to be a part of this, and we're not going to have these dietary restrictions anymore.

And so immediately after this,

we see another facet of what holding on to these Jewish teachings mean.

So in Galatians 2 again, verses 14 to 16, we read, when I saw, this is Paul talking.

That they were not following the truth of the gospel message,

I said to Peter in front of all the others,

since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like

a Gentile, why are you now trying to make these Gentiles follow the Jewish traditions?

You and I are both Jews by birth, not sinners like these Gentiles,

yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law.

And we have believed in Christ Jesus so that we might be made right with God

because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law.

For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law.

And so this is the freedom that the gospel gives us.

The freedom is not to learn all 613 teachings from the Torah.

It is to just follow after God, to have a right relationship,

and we have a right relationship with him by our faith.

And that's what's important to Paul. If we cling to the dietary laws and restrictions,

if we cling to circumcision, if we cling to any of those teachings,

we are righteous based upon what we do.

But when we put them in their rightful place, we are justified by God and our relationship with him.

By grace, you have been saved through God.

So again, the ESV study Bible will say, Peter was guilty of hypocrisy because

though he had been happily living like a Gentile,

meaning not observing food laws, he was now requiring Gentile Christians to

observe Jewish table regulations if they wanted to eat with him.

Such a requirement, however, would undermine the gospel itself by making justification

depend on works of the law rather than faith in Jesus Christ.

And so there we have it. When the Jewish people started giving up these rituals,

these teachings, it was a severing that was going on.

It was something that was completely unique and different. And this was just one of those areas.

We're now going to look at the Jerusalem Council of Acts chapter 15,

Acts 15 · chapter mention

where we see some more of these things that the Jewish people let go of,

those who were following after Jesus in the first century.

So in Acts 15.5, we read.

Then some of the believers who belonged to the part of the Pharisees stood up

and said, the Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.

So people, again, in Acts 15, this is after Peter had that encounter with the

blanket lowering and all these animals and God saying, go Peter, kill and eat.

After that, after Paul's first missionary journey, where many Gentiles came to faith in Jesus.

The pull was again to remain true to their Jewish roots, to remain close to

the law that's found in the Torah.

And so this was something they were dealing with again here in Acts 15.

And so a note from the NIV Cultural Background Study Bible says this,

after AD 70, which is when Jerusalem was ransacked by the Romans and the temple was destroyed,

the more liberal Hillite faction prevailed among Pharisees.

But the more conservative Shammites dominated before 70.

Hillel reportedly welcomed proselytes diplomatically, but Shammai reportedly

insisted on them keeping the entire law from the moment of conversion.

And so in Jesus's lifetime, prior to Jerusalem being sacked,

the more conservative sect was here. and they're like, this is what we're going to do.

If you're going to become a Jew, you have to follow these rules.

This is what you have to do.

That was the dominant theology of that day.

And we can see that here in Acts chapter 15, 5, where they were like,

Acts 15 · chapter mention

yeah, they have to do this.

They have to be circumcised if they want to be a part of our group.

Later on, we see James standing up in this council.

He was a leader of the Jerusalem church at that time, and this is what he declares.

So again, we're going to compare what James is saying to what the religious

leaders have already declared and said.

James says, it is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult

for the Gentiles who are turning to God.

Instead, we should write to them telling them to abstain from food polluted

by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.

For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times

and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.

And so James is like, no, no, we need more grace here. They need more freedom.

We're not justified by our works. We're justified by faith.

And so those who are turning to God, those who are becoming a part of our connection

with God, this is what we need to do.

And he just lays these four things out there.

Some of these, like abstain from sexual immorality, that's just a morally right thing to do.

And so the other ones we're going to explain here from the Cultural Background Study Bible.

So it explains that animals that were strangled still had blood in them,

and one law given to Noah was the prohibition of eating meat with blood in it.

That's from Genesis 9.4.

These rules applied to foreigners living in Israel in Leviticus 17 and 18.

So widespread Jewish tradition applied them to righteous Gentiles who would

be saved. what in later rabbinic tradition became known as the Noahide laws,

the rules given to all of Noah's descendants.

The list given here maintains a compromise position.

Gentile Christians would be treated as righteous Gentiles if they kept these

few rules, some of which biblical morals would demand anyway.

The compromise does not address the theological issue on Paul and many Jerusalem

believers would not agree whether Gentile Christians could be treated as a part

of God's people without physical circumcision.

So here we have that it is not required.

If they were going to be a part, they did not have to hold on to that.

And it was a while ago where I first heard about these Noahide root laws,

and it was when a Jewish person was talking to a Catholic person,

and the Catholic person asked point blankly,

why are you not trying to convert me to Judaism?

Like, why is that not something you do? And his response was,

there are these, and I forget the number, but there are this number of rules that Noah had.

Through Noah we have for all of the descendants of Noah.

And if you adhere to those, then you are a part of the family of God.

You are a righteous Gentile.

And because this person, this Catholic person was obeying those rules,

there was no need to convert him to Judaism.

But this is the tradition.

They were still going back to their clinging to their text, their rules,

their heritage, their traditions.

This was still them, but we are getting away from the righteous being justified

by our works because circumcision was not included in this.

In this, we also have circumcision was not required, but four stipulations were laid down.

These involved areas of Gentile weakness that particularly repulsed Jewish believers.

It would have helped both the individual and the relationship between Gentile

and Jew if these requirements had been observed. They involved divine directives

that the Jews believed were given before the Mosaic law.

Gentiles were to abstain from food polluted by idols, sexual immorality,

a sin taken too lightly by the Greeks, and also associated with certain pagan religious festivals,

the meat of strangled animals, which means those retaining the blood that was

forbidden to be eaten, and eating blood, a practice expressly forbidden under Jewish law.

And so in this council, we still see this clinging to them, but James is very

clear that it is not justified by our circumcision.

We are not justified by works. We're just going to live as moral people.

And this was the moral rules that they set down.

The next concept that was changed or altered by followers of Jesus in the first

century was their day of worship.

So worship was traditionally put on the Sabbath day, which is Saturday.

And this is what Exodus 31 15 says.

You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day must

be a Sabbath day of complete rest, a holy day dedicated to Yahweh.

Anyone who works on the Sabbath must be put to death.

And so this is the rule that they had in front of them. This is what they were taught from young.

And this is something that they actually changed in the first century.

Because in Acts 27, we read, on the first day of the week, which is Sunday,

we gathered with the local believers to share in the Lord's Supper.

Paul was preaching to them, and since he was leaving the next day,

he kept talking until midnight.

And so they broke bread together. They participated in communion here on a Monday,

this was their day to worship. It was no longer on Saturday. It was on Sunday.

We also see evidence of this in 1 Corinthians 16, 2, when Paul says,

on the first day of the week, you should each put aside a portion of the money you have earned.

Don't wait until I get there and then try to collect it all together.

Once. And so on the day that you are gathering together,

on the day that you are worshiping God, this is when you are to collect this

money so that when I get there, I can just take the offering and give it to

the people who are suffering in Judea.

The ESV study Bible says this, this shows that Christians gathered for worship

on Sunday, not Saturday, in order to acknowledge the crucial importance of Christ's resurrection.

Then J.P. Moreland says, however, after the death of this Nazarene carpenter,

this 1500 year tradition is abruptly changed.

These Christians worship on Sunday. Why?

Because that's when Jesus rose from the dead.

And that's the tradition that this day was set aside as special,

as unique, because every week we're going to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.

Every week we're going to remember what he did.

And this change is evidence that the disciples really did see the resurrected

Jesus, that he didn't stay in the grave.

And so these are just a few of the ways that the Jewish tradition,

which was held so tightly by people, even through the time where Jesus rose

from the grave and the people who started following him,

these traditions were held very tightly to them.

But they were changing. And the change that didn't happen in the Babylonian exile,

the change that didn't happen when the Jewish people were cleansing the temple

and could have gone any of the directions they could have chosen to go,

but they reverted back to the Torah.

They reverted back to God's teaching.

This event is the one that changed these traditions in Jewish believers of Jesus.

And we know that there were Jewish believers of Jesus because of Acts 2,

5 and 6, and then we'll also read Acts 2, 41.

At that time, there were devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem.

When they heard the loud noise, everyone came running, and they were bewildered

to hear their own languages being spoken by the believers.

On the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down upon them,

the whole city of Jerusalem were filled with Jews from throughout the world.

These are the people who later on in Acts 2.41, where we read,

those who believed what Peter said were baptized and added to the church that day, about 3,000 in all.

And so this group of people were the ones that started following after the raised Jesus.

This group of people are the ones who would eventually come to understand that

their old way was holding them down and that they had to release their old way and change,

whether it was changing from worshiping God on Saturday to Sunday,

whether it was not keeping with the dietary restrictions.

These were the things that were being released because the Holy Spirit was upon

them and because a dramatic event happened in the first century that caused these changes.

One last quote by J.P. Moreland, it says,

keep in mind that this is an entire community of people who are abandoning treasured

beliefs that have been passed on for centuries and that they believed were from God himself.

They were doing it even though they were jeopardizing their own well-being,

and they also believed they were risking the damnation of their souls to hell if they were wrong.

What's more, they were not doing this because they had come upon better ideas.

They were very content with the old traditions.

They gave them up because they had seen miracles that they could not explain

and that forced them to see the world another way.

This is evidence that something big happened in the first century that can,

the best explanation for this is that Jesus did rise from the grave.

This is what caused so many people to give up age-old traditions and to cling

to justification by faith alone.

It is not by works of the law so that no man can boast.

This change to me showcases that it is that something big happened.

And the best explanation is that Jesus really did rise.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion on the change of behaviors

of the Jerusalem church that interrupted their millennium-long procedures as

followers of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The best answer for this change seems to be the miraculous resurrection of Jesus.

In this entire series, we have explored many historical reasons why it is plausible

to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. We have seen evidence in and outside

of the Bible and from Christian and non-Christian sources.

This evidence was organized in a way to empower believers in their faith and

to encourage non-believers to take a look at the evidence and decide for themselves

where the evidence leads.

If you are interested in taking next steps in your faith journey,

please contact Faith Chapel through the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week, we will hear from Kent Morton, who is a missionary Faith Chapel supports,

and learn how God used him as a missionary in Albania, and what his role is

now supporting overseas missionaries. Have a great week.