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Hey, we're doing something different today, and slightly weird. We're handing over the reins of Undeceptions to Anita Savage, a long-time journo who's worked for the ABC, Channel 9, Bloomberg, and all sorts of places, and has recently become the news director at Hope 103.2 FM. For the rest of this episode, she's running the show, and I'm in the hot seat. Enjoy.
Holy Week in Jerusalem. Christians follow the path they believe Jesus walked to his crucifixion. But a new study about the burial place of Jesus and his family may become a controversy of biblical proportions.
In 2015, new evidence that apparently proved Jesus of Nazareth was married, fathered a child and never rose from the dead, emerged in Jerusalem. A tomb excavated in 1980 was said to have contained bone boxes with names of some of Jesus' family members. At the time, some historians suggested the tomb may have contained the bones of Jesus, but plenty were sceptical.
There's even a documentary about it, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, produced by Titanic director James Cameron.
Then there's the Gospel of Judas. In 2006, the National Geographic Society announced the discovery of a leather-bound papyrus manuscript dating around AD 300, written in Greek the century before. The core claim of the Gospel of Judas is that the 11 other apostles were deluded and worshipped a lesser deity they presume to be the true God.
Jesus, however, took Judas aside a few days before his death and revealed to him the truth about a myriad of spiritual worlds over which Judas would one day rule.
Scholars have said of this gospel that it is indeed a second century text, but one that is clearly Gnostic, part of a lively second century movement which claimed that true knowledge about the spiritual realm was passed on by Jesus secretly to close confidants like Judas.
So gripped was the world by this idea of a gospel written by Judas that best-selling author Jeffrey Archer wrote his own fictional version, "The Gospel According to Judas." The world continues to be captivated by conspiracy theories about Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus of the Christian Bible. Why do such theories continue to take hold? And what do we actually know about the person of Jesus?
I'm Anita Savage and this is Undeceptions. Music
Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
This episode we've turned the tables and put John Dixon in the hot seat. He's written a new book called Is Jesus History? I'll be getting to the bottom of one of the greatest questions out there. Did Jesus really exist?
There always seems to be new conspiracies about who Jesus was. What's your favourite? Do you have one? I mean, I'm pretty partial to the one where Jesus fell in love with Mary Magdalene, married, had three kids, and their descendants can still be found in modern France. I'm going to have a go at my own little chime in here. You might recognise that storyline, perhaps. It's the basic storyline of Dan Brown's major best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
And from a historian's perspective, any evidence? No, it's rubbish. I just kind of like it. I've caused some Christians to feel a little bit nervous when I've said, I really like the idea of Jesus having a girlfriend or even a wife. I really do. I think that's excellent. Just because that's so human. It's so human. And it's a lovely humanizing portrait of someone who otherwise you might just think in ethereal terms. But I think there's
very wide agreement amongst historians that for whatever reason Jesus just avoided getting married. It was unusual for Jews to avoid getting married but we do have some evidence of other Jews choosing not to get married for religious reasons and I think there's a good chance he just chose not to get married for religious reasons almost like a sign of
like the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament, didn't get married as a kind of sign to Israel of barrenness, of emptiness. And so Jesus may have picked up that theme. He may have also just been trying to save his loved one from what he knew would be his fate.
It would be fair to call John Dixon one of Australia's Jesus experts. Of the 17 books he has written to date, six of them centre on the historical Jesus.
John has a PhD in ancient history from Macquarie University and he teaches on the historical Jesus at the University of Sydney. During 2017 to 2020, he's a visiting academic of the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University in the UK. And just this year, he was appointed the Distinguished Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Public Christianity at Ridley College in Melbourne. But perhaps you already knew that.
All that is to say he's really qualified to talk about Jesus. And to John's mind, Jesus, and Christianity more generally, has a problem that not many other religions have, and it's one that he has pursued for much of his academic life. It makes historical claims that can actually be tested.
But as soon as someone says, oh, our guy was crucified by Pontius Pilate, that governor of Judea between 26 and 36, people are going to ask you historical questions. Christianity doesn't just leave things at the spiritual realm. It makes historical claims about stuff that's meant to have happened in a time and place we know rather a lot about. And clever people, just normal, thoughtful people, are going to say, how do you know that?
You say he did X, Y, and Z in this part of the world. Do we know that? So Christians are kind of stuck with history, whether they like it or not. And thoughtful people who don't believe are going to ask historical questions, whether the Christians like to hear them or not.
So if the study of the historical Jesus is so scrutinized today by people of all beliefs or no beliefs, why then is Christianity still subject to constant attack? Well, it's partly because you can't demonstrate everything in the Christian faith by a great stretch. So there's lots of room for people to doubt and to attack, but there are also emotional motivations.
in the Christian faith because it makes huge claims about our life. So there may be really good evidence for something in Jesus' life that people resist because of its emotional or maybe spiritual relevance to our lives.
in a way that we wouldn't dismiss if we were just talking about something Pliny the Younger wrote in a letter. You know, Pliny the Younger wrote a letter where he describes his hunting practices and how he takes books along for the journey because it can get very boring out there. We accept it.
John's talking about Pliny the Younger, a Roman author and administrator who lived just after Jesus. He's left a collection of private letters that have proven invaluable to historians in painting a picture of public and private life in the heyday of the Roman Empire. One of those letters, to a Cornelius Tacitus, details a hunting trip Pliny the Younger went on. It's not long, but it's quite charming. Here it is.
You will laugh, and I give you leave to. You know what sort of sportsman I am, but I, even I, have bagged three boars, each one of them a perfect beauty. What, you'll say? You? Yes, I, and that too without any violent departure from my usual lazy ways.
I was sitting by the nets. I had by my side not a hunting spear and a dart, but my pen and writing tablets. I was engaged in some composition and jotting down notes, so that I might have full tablets to take home with me, even though my hands were empty. You need not shrug your shoulders at study under such conditions. It is really surprising how the mind is stimulated by bodily movements and exercise.
I find the most powerful incentive to thought in having the woods all around me, in the solitude and the silence which is observed in hunting. So when next you go hunting, take my advice and carry your writing tablets with you, as well as your luncheon basket and your flask. You'll find that Minerva loves to wander on the mountains quite as much as Diana. Farewell.
Minerva, by the way, is the goddess of wisdom. Diana, the goddess of the hunt. And he's writing in the early second century. It's a lovely letter that we have. And because nothing hangs on it, we accept it. You know, it fits with other hunting practices from the time and it fits with what a nerd would do during his hunting, you know, take books. So we believe it totally. But as soon as we turn to Jesus and he says, oh, the judgment of God is coming and
And there's only one escape, and that's through him. You know, people will doubt that Jesus even said that, even though it has the same level of evidence that we have, or even more evidence than we have for Pliny's hunting. It's because it freaks us out that there might be a God of judgment or that Jesus might have thought that, that we sort of resist the evidence. And I'm trying to say, hey, don't just just apply normal historical method and see where it takes.
The fact is, Jesus is so huge that he inevitably brings big emotions. Everyone has an opinion about Jesus, and everyone has an emotional reaction to Jesus, and what he says about himself, who he is, and what he said he was on earth to do. Richard Dawkins, in an interview with The Guardian in the UK, said somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist.
Time magazine lists Jesus as the most influential person in history. Napoleon is the second most influential, then Muhammad in case you were interested. Some call Jesus a wise sage, others a revolutionary. Millions around the world still call him the Christ, the saviour of the world. And there's a lot of psychological research nowadays to point out what actually the Bible was saying way back centuries earlier, that we bring our own
preferences and desires to this material. We aren't simply rational creatures. We are rational creatures heavily influenced by our emotions, our preferences, our ethics, our likes, our dislikes. And
The only way not to be a complete captive to one's emotions and preferences and background is to be aware that we are actually a product of these things. And only when you are aware of it and you actually notice how you are drawn to some things and repelled by others, then you analyze why. So I often feel that people who reject the Christian faith
present as rejecting it only for intellectual reasons, but on closer inspection, on more honest inspection, they acknowledge...
that it's some maybe personal hurt from Christians in the past. Maybe it's just their upbringing. Maybe it's they think Christians are fools and they don't want to be associated with it. It's rarely simply intellectual. And I know my skeptical friends will protest at this point. But I would just say, look, I'm willing to admit that my Christian convictions are not entirely based on intellectual. There's an emotional social dimension there.
I think it's high time that sceptics admitted the same about their scepticism. Some of the scepticism surrounds the Gospels themselves, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Gospels are the primary historical sources for the existence of Jesus. John spoke with Dr Peter Williams in episode 7 of this podcast about whether we can trust the Gospels. It's worth going back and having a listen to that one.
The Gospels as evidence of Jesus, says Peter Williams, stack up really well against similar types of evidence we have for the emperor who ruled Rome when Jesus was an adult, Emperor Tiberius.
If you believe Emperor Tiberius was a real historical figure, there's no reason why you shouldn't also believe that Jesus was a living, breathing person. Whether you believe Jesus was God, now that's something else entirely. But these gospels were written by people who obviously thought Jesus was who he said he was: the Christ, the Son of God.
Surely they are biased in how they portray this Jesus. I asked John how it is that the Gospels can be considered reliable evidence if they have such an obvious angle.
Much of what we know about Jesus comes from the Gospels. Some would say that they're a little bit biased in the way that they approach. Sure they are. They're selling something. So why should we take that credibly? Why would we listen to anyone in our lives at all? I mean, that's the same question comes back to bite us on every issue. Look, historians don't fret about there being, well, what you call bias. A historian just says a perspective. They tend to try not to...
or fill the point with kind of evil motive. So bias can be a problem, but if you just think of it as every writer of the ancient world and modern has a perspective. Tacitus, the greatest of Rome's chroniclers, who gives us most of the information we have about the emperors, had a perspective. He despised the way some emperors had brought down the glory of Rome, and he loved a certain Roman tradition.
And he tells his history from that perspective. Josephus was a Jew who was very pro-Roman. So we know that his perspective is very flattering toward Jews, but also very flattering toward Romans. And so we have to just be careful as we read it. Now, the great thing about the Gospels is that they let us know what their perspective is overall.
very early on, they are pretty keen on Jesus and they think he's Lord. And then they tell the story. And so what the historian just reads that and goes, yeah, of course they thought Jesus was the Lord. You know, just as a lot of people thought Caesar was Lord.
That doesn't mean we dismiss what they tell us. We may not arrive at their conclusions about Jesus, but there's no reason to doubt when they tell us, you know, he was raised in Galilee and preached around Galilee and went to Capernaum and had a base there. And there's no reason to doubt those things. They are just historical telling from a perspective.
It doesn't seem to matter how convincing the argument, there will always be skeptics who say that Jesus never existed. John Dixon seems resigned to that and perhaps after a few more coffees we'll be ready to take them on. After the break, John tells me a little about the historical Jesus challenge that's been going on now for almost six years, that if he loses, we'll see him eat a page of his Bible.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.
and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash undeceptions. In 2014, another round of enthusiastic atheists began questioning the authenticity of the historical Jesus. John Dixon decided to up the stakes. He issued a challenge. MUSIC
I was interested in the challenge that you have where you say you will eat a page of your Bible if someone can find a full professor, and I emphasise that, who says Jesus never lived. What's all that about? Yeah, it was a rush of blood to the head really when I put out that challenge. I was just so sick of the occasional Christmas or Easter article in the press that says Jesus never lived.
which is just not a responsible historical position. I know you'll find some people who have PhDs in ancient history even who have argued this. They tend to be militant atheists, actually, and almost the mirror image of the extreme fundamentalist Christian apologists.
But I want to put out the challenge to sort of settle things, to say, OK, why don't you find me a professor of ancient history? Not just some random who got a PhD once. A professor of ancient history, you know, an expert in this discipline who thinks Jesus didn't live. Because there isn't one. And if there is, I will eat a page of my Bible because at least they will have found one out of the thousands they could have chosen from. And when I put out that challenge...
People were throwing at me professors of folklore and poetry and psychology and English literature and saying, aha, there's a professor, but that's a professor from a different discipline. It's not a...
Professor from ancient history or classics in any university in the world. And the reason I said full professor is just for the Americans listening or reading that original article where I put that challenge because they call anyone who teaches in a university a professor. Whereas, you know, in our English Australian tradition, a full professor is just a, you know, someone who has attained that professor position.
And so have there been any or many attempts? Yeah, plenty of attempts, but no one has yet fulfilled that criterion. I've heard along the grapevine that there is an atheist group here in Australia that is still looking for such a professor. When they find a professor, they're going to come into my offices regularly
with a film crew and make me eat my Bible in front of them, which is fine because I've already prepared my speech and I will. I'll gladly eat a page of my Bible because I'll basically say, well, you found one. You know, there were thousands to choose from and it took you years to find one professor of ancient history who thinks Jesus didn't live. Actually, I think my Bible's safe.
Believing that Jesus was a real person is one hurdle, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff in the Bible about Jesus that is harder to reconcile in today's world. How do historians cope with all the miracles in the Gospels? The writers say he healed people. He turned water into wine. Why doesn't that immediately put up red flags? Whether or not the historian believes in miracles is one thing.
But if a historian wants to follow historical method, it's really clear Jesus had a reputation for doing what everyone thought were miracles. So you'll find even in the most secular scholars today agree the evidence is so good we have to conclude Jesus did things people thought were miracles. Now the historian at that point is saying, I don't know if they were miracles. That's above my pay grade. I'm just a historian.
But the lines of evidence are pretty clear. He did things people thought were miracles. And that is all that history can do. It's only history after all. You can't prove everything. In his book, John points out that the problem of miracles is not just a problem of the Gospels. There are healing stories in some of the best material about the emperors.
One example John writes about is from Tacitus, who tells us that Vespasian, while in Alexandria en route to Rome, where he would become emperor in AD 69, healed a man who was blind and another who had a withered hand.
Vespasian, believing that his good fortune was capable of anything and that nothing was any longer incredible, with a smiling countenance and amid intense excitement on the part of the bystanders, did as he was asked to do. The hand was instantly restored to use, and the day again shone for the blind man. Both facts are told by eyewitnesses even now, when falsehood brings no reward.
A story like this, says Don, in no way undermines the broader narrative that Tacitus tells us about the rise and reign of Vespasian. Stories like these can be genuine reports which have a simple, natural explanation. In the case of Vespasian, one scholarly conjecture is that this was a kind of photo opportunity created by Vespasian and his PR team as they made their way to Rome to claim imperial power.
I also like to point out that this is the evidence you would expect a miracle worker to leave behind. Multiple lines of early evidence that point to his reputation as a healer. If he really was a healer, what other evidence would it leave behind? It's exactly the evidence that is left behind. So in the end, whether Jesus did miracles is a philosophical judgment, not a historical one. The historical one is very clear. He certainly did things people thought were miracles. What explains that?
Well, if you don't believe in God, you know, maybe he tricked people. Maybe people were so gullible.
Who knows? Maybe he had a big PR team that convinced everyone there were miracles. If you can believe that, knock yourself out. But if you believe there is a God who could do a miracle, you know, if God wanted to, then the fact that we have the kind of evidence a miracle would leave behind is kind of cool. What about the ultimate miracle, the resurrection? Same applies. It puzzles lots of people that historians would even talk about the resurrection at all, but they do. There's a vast literature on
hundreds of historical volumes and journal articles written on the resurrection, not from a theology point of view, but from a history point of view. Because we have two pretty strong pieces of evidence from the first century. One is that there very probably was an empty tomb. Now, with my Christian hat on, I say there really was an empty tomb. But just speaking historically, there probably was an empty tomb.
And loads of non-Christian scholars agree with that. And the other piece of evidence is that there were lots of people who really thought they saw him, sincerely claimed they saw him. The lines of evidence for that are early and widespread. So historians today look at that and say, well, okay, what do we do with that? There probably was an empty tomb and there certainly were people who thought they saw him. What explains that?
Some scholars say we don't know what explains that. Other scholars say maybe it was some kind of elaborate fraud. The problem with that, of course, is that
Many of these eyewitnesses gave their lives for what they knew to be a fraud, which is sort of hard to believe. People die for things they merely think are true, but who dies for a lie they know is a lie. And in the book, I don't push it beyond the evidence. I just say you can pick up a gospel and when you read the narratives of the resurrection, you're still reading history. You may not conclude that
what the early Christians concluded, that Jesus was actually raised to life. But I think you can conclude historically that there was an empty tomb and they thought they saw Jesus alive. That's good history. What you do with that history is a more personal question. Music
Faith isn't just what you exercise in making the step from historical Jesus to Son of God. John Dixon argues faith is something you need in many other aspects of life. You need faith, in fact, to believe that Jesus was a real person, God or not. And that's not a bad thing.
The word faith has come to mean believing without evidence. And I think we need to blame our skeptical friends for this. They started to pick up the Bible's word faith and use it to mean believing without evidence. Blind faith is virtually what faith has come to mean. But the historic definition of faith is just trust.
And the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the standard for English, even gives one of the definitions of faith, trust in evidence or belief on the basis of evidence and testimony. And it's that historic, which is much older than the new idea of faith as believing without evidence. That historic definition is the definition that I prefer to operate on. It's simple trust.
I've come to learn over years of experience that it's often good to trust the testimony of other people. Testimony is a form of evidence.
Testimony in a court of law is evidence. And sometimes major legal decisions are based only on testimony. And I say only, but the thing is, if you have two or three different pieces of testimony about an event, that is usually enough for a judge to make a massive decision about someone's life based on testimony.
And the judge is doing all sorts of tests while he or she listens to the testimony of various people. I mean, I've known judges in my life, and they tell me they make contemporaneous notes as they listen to testimony. They're making little notes to themselves about indications of good faith testimony and bad faith testimony, indications that this just doesn't ring true and so on. They're making all these notes, and it's part of their case. And the reason I go into all of this detail is to say that
Trust in testimony is the basis of history. Forget religion. Forget religion. Just leave that to one side. Most of what we know about the historic past, certainly the ancient past, is based on the testimony of writings that have been left to us. And when those testimonies read believably, where they don't seem to have been made up, where there are other testimonies that
point in the same direction, we find ourselves trusting the testimonies and saying this is a historical fact. Emperor Tiberius ruled the ancient Roman world from AD 14 to 37. Well, that's a fact based on testimony. And the same is true of the analysis of Jesus. The historian reads the multiple sources that we have
in both the Gospels and Paul's letters and elsewhere. And these are testimonies, but we've come to give quite a bit of trustworthiness to these testimonies. We have faith in these testimonies, not in the religious spiritual sense of a leap into the dark, but of a genuine, well-developed, critical trust that people believe
tend to speak in good faith and we can often catch them out when they're trying to fib. And most historians conclude that most of these Christian sources are not fibbing.
This podcast is called Undeceptions. What is the greatest deception about the historical Jesus and can you undeceive us? The silliest of all deceptions is the one that says he didn't live. And apparently something like 14% of Australians think he never even lived. I mean, that is just crazy because that's just not a view that has currency in historical scholarship. So that's a silly one. And the evidence, multiple lines of evidence,
both Christian and non-Christian, make clear he lived. But, you know, in terms of the, you know, more sort of pressing and sensible observations,
deceptions out there. I guess it's that he was only a teacher, only a lovely person who went around Galilee telling everyone to be nice to each other. It's partly true as well. You read the Gospels and he did go and say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. And that's stuff that we like nowadays because Jesus has influenced our culture. But the deception here is to almost
flatter Jesus by saying, oh, you're a great teacher. Yeah, I think Jesus is a great teacher. And in the end, we actually dishonor Jesus by this flattery because there's no doubt he claimed much more than being a teacher.
Just historically speaking, he claimed to be the judge of heaven and earth, right? He claimed to be the Messiah. He claimed that people ought to look to him for forgiveness. So his claims cannot be reduced to just being a teacher. And I think the deception is just to reduce him to a nice guru, right?
actually is to miss the historical Jesus, let alone the Jesus I believe died and rose again for our sins, which puts the whole thing in a completely different ballgame.
So who is the historical Jesus according to John Dixon? I think he's identical with the Jesus who died and rose again. It's just that history can't give you that whole perspective on Jesus. So if I answer the question, who is Jesus according simply to the rules of history, I will say he was a revered prophet, teacher, healer.
claimed to be able to renew Israel and the world, who proclaimed the coming judgment on the world and said that the only escape from this judgment was his bearing of judgment, his shed blood for the salvation of the world. All of that you can say on historical grounds alone. You don't need any theology or philosophy to come to that conclusion. The historical Jesus is
thought of himself as the Lord and Savior of the world. Whether we end up believing that, that requires more than history and more than my book is ever going to do, which is why the sort of punchline of my book is not come to Jesus. The punchline is, why don't you pick up a gospel and read his life for yourself? Because I think that is where you come face to face with this figure and have to make a decision about who he is.
I've loved being your host this week on Undeceptions. Thanks for having me.
If you'd like to know more about anything we spoke about this episode, can I suggest you seek out John's new book, Is Jesus History? Head to underceptions.com and we'll have a link in the show notes for this episode. Next week, John is in a different kind of hot seat, though back as your host, as the Q&A episode of Underceptions. And John will be answering some of the questions he's received from you throughout the season. Bye for now.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon. Oh, and me, Anita Savage. Produced by Kayleigh Payne. I don't know, what do you do, Mark Hadley? Hang around. Yeah, okay. He calls himself director. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing is by Bella Ann Sanchez. A really special thank you to Anita Savage for hosting this episode. I'm afraid it's back to me next week. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and everything else related to this episode.