Why Jesus Had To Suffer Series

He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Aslan, Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist until John was arrested. He takes some of the gospels as truth but discredits much of them as believes there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus – Jesus was a Jew, and Pilate crucified him.1

According to Aslan, Jesus was a failed Messiah with political aspirations.2 Aslan is one in a long line of people who pit the Jesus of history against the Jesus of the faith. The historical Jesus is taken to be the merely human person who was born and raised in Palestine and was crucified during the days of Pontius Pilate. The Christ of faith is assumed to be a mythical, supernatural figure invented by the early admirers of the earthly Jesus. The challenge with theories like Aslan’s is he has no facts to support it.

1.4 A Real Story, Continued

Again, John gives you the day. John gives you the time. John gives you the location. This is a real story in time, place, and location. A common perception is that Jesus’ resurrection is just a fable, a myth, that we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better.

1.4.1 C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis is a name many of you are familiar with. Lewis departed from atheism to Christianity, so he does write as a believer. Yet, he was also a literary scholar and a professor at both Cambridge and Oxford. Lewis says ancient fiction was nothing like modern fiction.

I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this [gospel] text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage … or else, some unknown [ancient] writer … without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic, realistic narrative.3

The genre of fiction has only developed within the last three hundred years. That is why if you are reading Beowulf or The Iliad, you don’t see characters noticing the rain or falling asleep with a sigh. In modern novels, details are added to create the aura of realism, but that was never the case in ancient fiction.4

1.4.2 John Says “This is Real”

Again, this is a real story in time, place, and location. My father read me Aesop’s Fables as a child. You may have read the stories of the Roman and Greek gods in your studies. You might as well go to the movies to watch an Avengers movie because anyone reading this knows none of that purports to be real. John’s story is clear: Jesus is real. Sometime later, John writes these words to a group of believers and skeptics scattered throughout modern-day Turkey:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us” (1 John 1:1-2).