ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 38 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. *** >> I like David's question about proving the resurrection. People seek such proof, of course, because the whole doctrine of the resurrection is so important and so complex. Today's Christians can't be the first to struggle with it. What were some of the earliest problems the first Christians had in understanding the resurrection? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: Our gospels, even though they are ancient documents, are very modern in trying to address the question of the resurrection. Matthew takes this approach of the resurrection: Is this a historical verified fact? And he actually pulls up the witnesses of -- for witnesses not only of Apostles but also the opponents. And then there is -- there is Luke and John. More so with John but also in Luke. When Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room. In Luke, it says they thought they saw a ghost. So one way to handle the resurrection of Jesus is that it didn't happen as a bodily physical thing, but it happened as a spiritual thing. Maybe they invented it in their mind. There's -- I was with a colleague just recently. And he began to have a conversation with me. And I said to him "You know, Joe, I've already" -- "I've already experienced what you're saying to me. And I know what my answer is even though it didn't happen." There are things that we can see in our minds that really may not happen or may not have happened or we contrive all kinds of things. And the same situation then occurs in the Gospel of John. In the Gospel of John, you have the figure of Thomas. And Thomas puts down the gauntlet. He's not going to believe -- he's not going to be satisfied with seeing Jesus because it could be a vision. And of course, the answer of Jesus is "Okay. I'm here. Here is my side. Here are the holes of the wounds in my hands. Put your hands into the bloody holes and let's get this thing over with." That kind of invitation could not be made unless he had really been raised from the dead. So the question: Did somebody steal the body of Jesus or was he a ghost? That appeared in the early church. And I think those are still the same problems. I think we've got to say a word about Mark. Because Mark has no -- Mark was -- in its original form has no mention of any of the appearances of Jesus. Some of the people consider Mark to be the first Gospel. I totally disagree with that. It fits them very nicely because it has no virgin birth. It has no resurrection. Here we can have a Christianity which has a Jesus which was neither born of the virgin or the resurrection. We can really sell this kind of Christianity by taking away the embarrassing supernatural out of the Gospel and out of the life of Jesus. I think the thing with Mark's Gospel says something a little bit different. After we have experienced the resurrection of Jesus -- and we experience that every year in the way we worship Jesus in our liturgical life -- it's always hard to come back to reality. And the reality of the Christian life is not the great exaltation and hilarity of the resurrection. The reality of the Christian life is the suffering of Gethsemane and the anticipation of the death of Jesus and death. That's what Christianity is all about. So by Mark not including any of the appearances of Jesus in his Gospel, he's telling the church "Instead of looking for signs, instead of looking for the miraculous, instead of looking for proof, be content with the proclamation of the angel that he has been raised from the dead. *** 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. ***