ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 39 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> What is the significance of the virgin birth and the resurrection in understanding Jesus and the formulation of the Christian faith? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: Eric, I promised you that we would go further into the discussion of the resurrection in connection with a deeper discussion on the virgin birth. We've already discussed the virgin birth. So we don't confuse it with the immaculate conception. So that we don't say that the sinlessness of Jesus is a direct result of the virgin birth. But I would like to discuss both the resurrection and the virgin birth from a different perspective. And that is Christianity can be destroyed by destroying the person of Christ. We already mentioned that. That if we can show that Jesus was in some way fallible, made mistakes, was not all that intelligent, that Christianity is destroyed. This process -- we might think this is a modern attack on Christianity. I think the evidence of the New Testament shows that from the very beginning Christianity was attacked by attacking the person of Jesus in two accounts. One, he was not born of a virgin. And two, he was not raised from the dead. If you want to go into the modern seminary situation from many denominations in their theology classes, their New Testament classes, they may not explicitly deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But they'll say there really isn't much support for it. And it really isn't necessary. I would like to take a contrary position. And that is the one thing that distinguishes the Gospel of Matthew from particularly a Gospel like Luke is its strongly negative flavor. It is prepared and written in a situation which Christianity is attacked at its very foundations. And this should not be unusual. Because the person of Jesus was attacked. Afterall, why was he crucified? Why was he executed as a criminal? Because people didn't like what he said. Particularly what he said about himself. So this antagonism to Christianity is just a continuation of the antagonism that the people had to him while he was alive. And going to the Gospel of John, I think there's evidences that people were attacking his origins really at that time. They say that the Gospel of John has no birth narrative. I think there is a reference to the virgin birth if we take an alternate reading. In John Chapter 1 Verse 18 it generally reads in this way -- 13: "To those who believe on him he gives power to become the sons of God." And he says those who are born not from the blood nor by the will of the flesh nor by the will of a man." An alternate reading says, "not many people who are born but one person who was not born by the blood" -- that means in an ordinary way -- "nor was he born by the will of the flesh. Because he was born as an illegitimate child. Nor was he born by the will of a male." It doesn't say of a human being by a male. Because today we know when many people, when they reach 40 or 50 years of age, they haven't been married or they don't have children, they say, "I'm going to preserve myself. I'm going to get married and have a kid because my genetic position is too important to be left behind." I think that's a reference to the virgin birth. In the same Gospel the people who do not believe what Jesus is preaching about giving his body to eat and his -- his flesh to eat and his blood to drink make this statement: Isn't this Joseph's Son? Isn't this Joseph's Son? That would be the -- that would be the most harming cut of all, that this person, Jesus, is not special at all. He is simply a child of an ordinary man who happens to be a carpenter. He has nothing to say. So it was known in a kind of a way that Jesus was something special and they could destroy him by saying that he wasn't born of the Virgin Mary. And that way he could no way be the Son of God. Matthew takes a more deliberate approach to this question. Notice -- do you realize that there are very few Christmas cards that come from the Gospel of Matthew. What Christmas card have you ever seen with a picture of Joseph thinking about what he's going to do with his wife -- and she was legally the wife. They weren't cohabiting. But she was legally the wife -- as he's thinking about what he's going to do with his pregnant wife. And this he knows, that he didn't do it. You don't have to take a course in college biology to know that. He was not that primitive an individual. It starts off with the possibility that Mary committed adultery. Have you ever seen a Christmas card with that on it? It's absolutely forthright. So it starts off in a negative position. "No. Somebody else besides me" -- that's Joseph -- "is the father of this child." And then the angel informs him that that which has been conceived of the Holy Spirit. But look how Matthew approaches this. In the genealogy -- if Jesus is illegitimately conceived, then Christianity is a joke. It's a farce. Look how -- look what he does in the genealogy. He mentioned Rahab as an ancestress of Christ. And she was a prostitute. And then there's Solomon was born out of -- it doesn't say Bathsheba. We know out of Uriah the Hittite. So maybe because of those unfortunate situations, the entire royal line is illegitimate. Look what he does. He says if you were to say that Christianity is illegitimate because of Mary, then your whole line -- then by the way, there's Tamar who had an affair with her father-in-law. He puts that in in order to attack the Jewish -- the Jews who are saying that Jesus is insignificant because of adultery. It's the most amazing way -- I always marvel at the genius of the evangelist St. Matthew. And then when it comes to the resurrection, they make the point, well, afterall, the resurrection is an act of faith. You know, back in the 1970s when we were having this controversy in the Missouri Synod and some of the -- that's 1974 -- there were young men going out. And they were going to be Missouri Synod pastors. And they said, "Oh, I believe in the virgin birth. But it's a theological miracle, not a biological miracle." Oh, what, you mean -- I think even the uninformed could figure that one out. Because a theological miracle is no miracle at all. It has to be a real miracle. It is important. And then there's the question of the resurrection. And that really is marvelous, too. It's frequently said that the resurrection is a theological truth. It's an act of faith. It's something which we believe. And what we believe we cannot prove. And we can demonstrate our position. Because Jesus only appeared to people of faith. Therefore, it's an act of faith. But they overlook the account in the Gospel of Matthew that the first witnesses of the resurrection were the guards at the tomb. And in a sense they were evangelists because they went. And they went to the priests to tell them what had happened. And then we're further told that the priests gave them money to keep quiet. We call it hush money. You know, there are many trials which are publicized on television and the media. Heaven knows who is being paid to say what. We know that as a fact. You could say, "Now, was that really true, that the guards got hush money to be quiet about what happened in the tomb that Easter morning the angel came and rolled the stone away?" Well, consider this: Matthew says that was common practice for the priests. In fact, he points to a field for the burial of strangers which is called the Field of Blood. Why the Field of Blood? Because it was purchased with blood money. What's blood money? Blood money is paid to get somebody killed. That's Mafia kind of talk. You give somebody some money to knock somebody off. And where did that -- the field -- the money for the Field of Blood come from? It came from Judas Iscariot who was paid to take the soldiers to where Jesus was so they could arrest him. Blood money. The field of blood. And Matthew says, "Do you want some proof?" He says, "To this very day the Field of Blood is there. And there's the evidence." So Matthew tackles both of these questions directly. Do not kid yourself that Christianity will -- as long as the church survives until Christ comes, the person of Jesus will be undermined and will be undermined under these two questions, whether he was born of the virgin or whether he was resurrected. And there are times that we have to address these kinds of questions. If you ever happen to be a chaplain in a university setting, you may have to address this question a little bit more frequently. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***