Did you know Jesus was a Jew? That he grew up and lived his entire life among religious Jews? Did you know that this fact is critically important in establishing the credibility and plausibility of the gospel stories? If you don’t, then you may not be familiar with the phrase, psychological apologetics. This is basically how psychological evidence (how people think, what makes sense to them, their conceptual framework) establishes the facts of the gospel narratives. Once you learn about this, it’s impossible to un-see it, and the more your confidence will grow in the historical reliability of what we read in the New Testament (and the Old as well).
The question is, can we trust that what we read in the gospels actually happened the way it happened. The psychology of the Jewish mind of the time gives us a resounding . . . YES! If we’re to get the concept, we must confront skeptics who tell us that the gospel stories were made-up to a greater or lesser degree. We counter their assertion with these questions: could those who wrote the gospels have made it up? And could the Jewish mind, their life and worldview, make this at all possible? We can answer this with a resounding . . . absolutely NOT!
In the 19th century, German “higher critics” claimed the New Testament was written over several hundred years, and that Greek thought was the driving force of these “made-up” stories after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. But modern biblical scholars and textual experts, Christians or not, can now prove that the text of the New Testament comes from the first century. In the history of biblical criticism, which goes back several hundred years, we’ve come to what’s called “the third quest for the historical Jesus.” This includes, and is driven by, the Jewish context of Jesus’ world.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of this realization in the scholarly world. If we’re to believe the gospels are a lie, then we have to believe religious Jews made it up. Period. Could religious Jews have made it up? Skeptics will always say, of course they could, but who has the better case? I’m sure a book could be written about this, and maybe one day . . ., but let’s look at some examples to better understand this psychological apologetic.
Jews were strict monotheists – Think about what we would have to believe if the skeptics are right: These intensely religious Jews (and the gospels revolve around the Jewish feasts, in which all Jesus’ followers were involved) decided they would make up a story about some carpenter from Nazareth actually being God in human flesh. First, Jews would never even conceive of making up such a story. Their brains or imagination could never, ever go there. Their cultural and religious heritage makes such a thing literally impossible. The burden of proof is on the skeptics.
Further, Jews were not Greeks or pagans of any sort, and in their own minds what set them apart from everyone else in the pagan world they inhabited was that their God was one! They would daily pray The Shama, Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. The skeptics insist that we believe the Jews were in effect pagans. I don’t think so.
The Jewish conception of the Messiah – Baked into the cake of the Jewish psyche was their aversion to being under the thumb of a foreign power. Being enslaved for 400 years will do that to a people. That, and their Exodus by Yahweh’s power was always part of their national self-image. Israel’s kingdom reached its zenith under King David (c 1000 BC), and slowly fell apart under his son Solomon, and then successive kings. They were then taken captive by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Greeks, and finally the Romans. Jews had been waiting 400(!) years for a conquering Messiah, a new Davidic king to free them from their now Roman oppressors. While there are hints of a suffering Messiah in the Old Testament, a Messiah like Jesus, especially dying on a cross as a common criminal, was something no Jew could conceive (see Peter below).
Anyone hung on a tree is cursed of God – This must have been the thing most abhorrent to Jews. We read in Deuteronomy 21:23:
his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.
The Messiah cursed by God? Hung on a tree? Seriously? That, to the Jew of the time, would have been literally insane. No wonder it took an actual resurrection to get them to believe it! Yet we’re supposed to believe, according to the skeptic, that these Jews just made it all up? I don’t think so.
We could multiply examples, but if you read the gospels carefully, Jesus continually confounds both his enemies and closest followers.
Peter rebukes Jesus – Jesus is telling his inner circle that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, die, and be raised again. The leader of this merry band of Jesus followers, the “rock” upon whom he just said his church must be built, replies: “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” And we’re to believe the following is made up:
But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
What? Jesus calls Peter Satan? How embarrassing! (The criterion of embarrassment, another powerful apologetic for the credibility of the Scriptures.) Yes, for the leader of the new Christians, but Jesus suffering and dying and raising from death was literally inconceivable to Peter. But it actually happened. The Bible, including the gospels, is verisimilitude in action.
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