{UAH} Who Do You Say That I Am?

 

Who Do You Say That I Am?

Jesus asked his disciples that very question in Mathew 16:15. Peter answered, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

It seems as though the matter should be settled, but despite the evidence there are those throughout history who have made Jesus into many things other than what he was:

• The Christ myth theory holds that Jesus never existed but was invented by the Christian community. The idea was first put forward in the late eighteenth century and developed and popularized in the nineteenth by Bruno Bauer. It is still held to today by the likes of academics such as Richard Dawkins, Dr. Richard Carrier, and Robert Price.

• In the 1980s and 1990s a group of 150 scholars formed the Jesus Seminar. According to the seminar, Jesus was a mortal man, born of two human parents, who did not perform miracles nor die as a substitute for sinners nor rise bodily from the dead. Sightings of a risen Jesus were nothing more than the visionary experiences of some of his disciples rather than physical encounters.

• In his New York Times best-seller Misquoting Jesus, evangelical turned agnostic Bart Ehrman claims that early scribes altered the New Testament texts in order to unify and harmonize portrayals of Jesus in the four Gospels. He contends that certain widely held Christian beliefs, such about the divinity of Jesus, are associated not with the original words of Scripture but with these later alterations.

• In his current New York Times best-seller Zealot, Rene Aslan claims Jesus was a Jewish zealota rebel against Rome and the Romans local agentsand that he never intended to found a church, much less a new religion.

In Why Believe in Jesus?, apologist Trent Horn examines the historical, biblical, and logical evidence to build a compelling case for the reasonableness of belief in the Christian Jesus: that he was truly God incarnate in first-century Judea, put to death on a cross, and risen on the third day.

Along the way, Horn debunks common myths about Jesus, both popular and scholarly, that try to compete with the Christian understanding.

In the Gospels Jesus asks, Who do you say that I am? Watch Why Believe in Jesus? and be readied to answer that question with knowledge, confidence, and faith.

Paul Mugerwa
mugerwas5@aol.com