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Podcast: Why You Can't Put Jesus in a Box (Rebecca McLaughlin)

September 19, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Who Is Jesus?

In today's episode, Rebecca McLaughlin discusses a number of unbiblical misconceptions that we may have about Jesus and offers encouragement for those with questions about who Jesus is.

Confronting Jesus

Confronting Jesus

Rebecca McLaughlin

In this follow-up to Confronting Christianity, Rebecca McLaughlin shares important biblical context to help all readers explore who Jesus really is and understand why the Gospels should be taken seriously as historical documents.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:02 - Oversimplifying Jesus

Matt Tully
Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s my pleasure.

Matt Tully
We’re going to talk today about Jesus and the way that we think about him, the way that we understand him, and sometimes the way that we misunderstand him. Before we jump into some of that, it’s worth mentioning that we all know that Jesus is so inextricably tied to our culture here in the US and probably in the West more generally. Jesus is integrated in so many deep ways. It’s not uncommon for us in the US to hear politicians and musicians and actors and the like citing Jesus, often maybe to support this or that cause or movement. And yet Jesus is really hard to put in a box, and that’s something that you do really well in this new book—you help to explain why it is that Jesus breaks our categories so often. I wanted to start off our conversation by reading something that you write in your new book that gets at this in a profound way. You write,

”Jesus in the Gospels doesn’t fit our modern paradigms. His attacks on the rich and his protection of the poor make most left-wing leaders look like heartless fat cats. But his teachings about sexual sin make most conservatives look soft. Jesus talks more about love across differences and inclusion for the marginalized than the most tenderhearted liberal. And yet he issues terrifying warnings of God’s judgment. He calls us not to judge lest we be judged. And yet he says that one day he will judge us all.”

Those are strong and seemingly paradoxical words, especially for the ways that we think about and talk about Jesus in our culture today. First question: Why do you think that we—Christians and non-Christians alike—tend to oversimplify Jesus's identity and his message?

Rebecca McLaughlin
I’m reading through Matthew’s Gospel at the moment because our church is preaching through it and in our Bible study community we look at a different passage every week. One of the things that’s been freshly apparent to me in that process—not just in the reading myself but in discussing with folks in our community group who actually come from all over the world—is quite how quick people are in the Gospels to try and act like they figured Jesus out and quite how resistant he is to that. It seems in the Gospels you can only actually see who Jesus is if you come basically on your knees. If you’re standing up, trying to analyze him or own him in that modern sense of catching him out or thinking that you can make him fit into an existing paradigm you already have, it’s just not going to work. I think we experience some of that today. As you mentioned a couple of minutes ago, it’s easy for those of us who were raised in the West to think that Jesus is sort of all over our history. In one sense, he is. Jesus's teaching lay at the foundations of our best moral aspirations, whether it’s love across racial difference, equality for people from all sorts of different socio-economic backgrounds, the equality of men and women, or the fact that the rich, the strong, and the powerful shouldn’t be trampling on the poor, the weak, and the marginalized, but actually should be caring for them. All of those find their first and best foundation in the teachings of Jesus. They’re not self-evident truths, as many today—whether Christian or otherwise—would think. In that sense, we stand on Jesus-shaped foundations. But actually, if we’re brutally honest with ourselves as we look over the history of the West (and that’s true in the US where I now live and it’s true in the UK where I come from), we’ll actually find profound ways in which our history has been anti-Christian. I think that’s one of the things that folks today on all sides of political spectrums, and even between Christians and non-Christians, can find perplexing is that it’s easy to tell a story in which once upon a time, America was a Christian country that was following Jesus's ethics all across the board. And then the 60s came, the sexual revolution, and then the legalization of abortion, the gay rights movement, transgender rights, etc., etc.—that this is a falling away from Christian ethics. There are some senses in which that’s true, but actually if we look back to the period before the 60s, we find that the 60s and the Civil Rights movement was the first time that black Americans are getting any kind of justice. In fact, many things that were encoded into law prior to the 60s were profoundly anti-Christian. As a personal comment, folks sometimes ask me or say to me, It must be really hard raising kids in today's culture. I’m living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the culture around me is in many ways specifically hostile to Christianity, and in particular in terms of Christian sexual ethics. I want to say yes, that it’s hard to raise children in that context. But actually, take me back fifty years or one hundred years and I would be raising kids in a world where I had to say to them, Because we’re followers of Jesus, we need to cut across segregation lines. Because we’re followers of Jesus, we cannot be treating our black brothers and sisters like this. There are actually deeply anti-Christian and hostile to Christianity aspects of culture, however far back you dial in terms of history. I think that’s where that reality that I think we find in the Gospels, that we can’t really come to Jesus smugly, or in a self-satisfied way. We can really only come to him as repentant sinners. I think that sort of finds its feet historically as we look back at not just American history but also the history of my own country. Two cultures that are seemingly infused with Christianity for centuries; in fact, absolutely failing to follow Christian ethics in very important ways. I think a lot of that has fed into today’s misunderstandings of Jesus and misappropriations of Jesus, both on the right and on the left.

Matt Tully
That even comports well with a theological understanding of humanity, that even as redeemed Christians, we are sinful; and that sin is always going to be present and always going to be manifesting itself in anti-Christian ways. Your book is called Confronting Jesus, but it strikes me that it could have been called Confronted by Jesus, because that seems to be so often what you’re emphasizing is the way that Jesus confronts us in many different ways in our culture today. I was surprised to hear you say that you see this dynamic in the Gospels. I think we tend to think of Jesus as confronting the religious leaders, the establishment there in his time. I wonder if you could explain a little bit more where we see this dynamic of Jesus sort of pushing back against preconceived ideas that various groups would have had about him.

Rebecca McLaughlin
If we look at Jesus's own disciples, it’s almost comic in the Gospels how severely even his closest followers misunderstand him. Famously, Jesus explains to his disciples—right after Peter has acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, God’s long-promised King—Jesus explains that he is in fact going to suffer and die. Peter, again, who has just made this great declaration of who Jesus is and has recognized his divine Kingship, takes Jesus aside and rebukes him. He tries to tell Jesus, No, no, no. This cannot be the plan. You’ve got this wrong. Jesus says those hard words to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan. You’re not setting your mind on the things of God but on the things of man.” Peter, one of Jesus'ss very, very closest followers who goes on to be a key leader in the early church, fundamentally misunderstands what Jesus's Messiahship means. We see it again and again. We see James and John, two other of Jesus's closest, chosen disciples. In some accounts it’s either their mother as the foremost of the group or the two boys, but they come as a little family group to say, Hey, Jesus, in your new kingdom, can we be your right- and left-hand guys? They really want to nail down their status in Jesus's new kingdom. Jesus is like, You’ve got it completely wrong. You have no idea what you’re asking for. He has to explain to his disciples again and again that actually, power and leadership in his kingdom is not about status and having power and privilege for yourself. It’s actually about service and sacrifice. We see another time he’s told his disciples he’s going to be dying and he’s going to rise again, and they spend their time on the road arguing about which of them is greatest. In the Gospels, it’s almost comical how much their vision of who Jesus is doesn’t actually connect with who Jesus actually is and what his actual plan is. I can laugh at them, but then I can see it in my own life and the ways in which I so quickly take Jesus as a sort of validation of me and my opinions. Even as I am sort of trying to teach what Jesus taught, seeing my own sin rise up. There was a sort of sobering moment for me when I was writing the book. I had just read again Jesus's explanation to his disciples that he hadn’t come to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many, and this is why power and privilege in his kingdom just works upside down. Minutes after reading that—not for the first time and not for the second time, but for the however millionth time I’ve read that teaching of Christ—I specifically went to Twitter to see if someone with whom I have felt slightly competitive has more or less followers than I do. And that’s not even a major area of sin for me. If you were going to do a highlights reel of my sin areas of temptation, it’s actually not at all about how many Twitter followers I have. It actually makes very little difference to me at all, but I was just zooming in on what seems to be one of my lesser sinful areas. And mere seconds after I read Jesus's teaching on this, I can be in my heart actually disobeying it. That is sobering; the capacity we have for hypocrisy, even as we are trying to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, trying to listen to what he says. So as I read the Gospels, it’s unsurprising to see that in Jesus's disciples themselves and in Jesus's disciples today.

12:35 - Will Engaging with Non-Believers Lead Me to Doubt My Faith?

Matt Tully
The dynamics that we see so often around us today are the exact same things that his very first followers and listeners were struggling with and dealing with. Before we jump in more to some of the misconceptions that we often have about Jesus or that we see about Jesus in our broader culture, I wonder if you could just take a step back and tell us a little bit more about yourself and how it is that got so focused on this area of apologetics. You’ve written a number of books, a few of them for Crossway, where you focus on winsomely engaging with skeptics. Whether that’s Confronting Christianity, this book that you wrote for Crossway a few years ago, another book doing the same thing for teenagers, or this new book, why do you have such an interest in apologetics?

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s funny because I feel like I have a slightly conflicted relationship with the word apologetics. Apologetics has sometimes historically meant trying to prove non-believers wrong in a somewhat aggressive sort of way. That’s certainly not true of everyone who has described themselves as an apologist in recent years, but there’s been something of that vibe to where it’s almost more important to prove your opponent wrong than to attempt to truly win them for Christ.

Matt Tully
Persuasion isn’t really part of the goal.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, and I love what Peter says: “Always be ready to give a reason for the hope that you have”—but to do so with gentleness and respect. I feel like often apologetics hasn’t been marked by gentleness and respect, but by arrogance and dismissiveness and finding the worst form of your opponent’s argument in order to tear it down. Rather than sitting alongside them and saying, Hey, this is where I think your critiques are really valid. This is where I thoroughly agree with some of your starting points. And this is why I think that actually Jesus provides a much more satisfying answer to the questions that you’re wrestling with than you might think. So that’s sort of a side note on apologetics. At heart, honestly, I care about evangelism. I have friends who feel much more called to discipleship than evangelism. And that’s great; I don’t think everybody has to be cut exactly the same. But in my heart, what I most care about is people coming to know Jesus and being ultimately saved. Because for many years of my life, from childhood onwards essentially, I was in very academic, not at all Christian environments where most of my friends would not have been believers and would have had principled objections to Christianity. Growing up in London and going to Cambridge in the UK, it was very different from my husband’s experience of growing up in Oklahoma and then going to Oklahoma State where, as he would put it at least at that time, even if his friends (or a person he met) didn’t go to church themselves, they respected that he did. It made him seem like a kind of more impressive guy.

Matt Tully
That might even be a positive thing in their mind.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Exactly. Like, Good for you. In the UK, acknowledging that you go to a Bible-teaching church, not just a kind of church where the music is pretty and so you thought you might go for aesthetic or cultural reasons, acknowledging that you truly are a follower of Jesus, you might as well be saying you have two heads. It is not going to win friends and influence people. In fact, it’s probably going to produce at best perplexity, and at worst accusation. Not to say there are so many countries and cultures today where it is far harder to be a Christian than it ever has been in the UK, so I don’t say that to sort of position myself as some kind of martyr at all. But just to say that much of my Christian formation happened in a context where I knew that most people didn’t follow Jesus, were not at all intrigued by Christianity, had long ago dismissed Christianity if they had ever once considered it.

Matt Tully
Was there a time in your life when you yourself were struggling with the claims of Christ and Christianity, where you wondered, Do I really believe this?

Rebecca McLaughlin
No. It’s funny. I read quite a lot by atheist and agnostic thinkers from different traditions who would be hostile to Christianity or slightly disbelieving, and people sometimes say, With all that you read or the friends that you engage with who are not Christians, don’t you ever start to wonder if maybe you’re just wrong about Christianity?

Matt Tully
That’s probably a fear that many Christians have with reading those people and even in engaging with their neighbor who they know isn’t a Christian. There’s this underlying fear of, What if I’m wrong and what if they convince me of that?

Rebecca McLaughlin
I think I actually feel the opposite. I find that the more I actually understand even from some of the best atheist or agnostic thinkers, the more clear it is to me that Jesus has the words of eternal life. In fact, people lose far more when they try to sort of go it alone without Jesus, even just sort of ideologically and whether they ever embrace Jesus or not. Once we pull Jesus out of the foundation, far more comes crashing down than most people realize, not least these fundamental ideas about human equality and love across difference and care for the poor and equality of men and women. These things which actually my least Christian friends hold very dear have come to them from Christianity, and without Christianity they don’t have any solid philosophical foundation.

18:59 - Did Jesus Actually Exist?

Matt Tully
When it comes to talking about Christianity with non-Christians, as you’ve already said, I think it’s fair to say that we can sometimes be pretty nervous. We can be fearful, not just that we ourselves will start to question some of these tenets of our faith, but that we maybe even wouldn’t have answers that would be satisfying to the unbeliever—that we would be offensive to them, that we would be viewed as strange or odd. So I thought it would be helpful to talk through some of the common challenges or misconceptions that non-Christians tend to put forward related to Jesus and hear how you would respond, both maybe fort the person like that who is listening, but also for the Christian who is listening and wants to be in a better position to respond in a winsome, biblical way, as you said. The first misconception is maybe the most basic, fundamental one that we do hear sometimes. It’s that Jesus never actually existed, that he’s a fictional character that wasn’t actually a real human being. What’s the evidence for Jesus's existence?

Rebecca McLaughlin
I find one of the most helpful ways to answer questions across a whole range of issues is to find respected experts who aren’t actually in the same place as I am, ideologically or belief wise, who will assert the truth or otherwise of a claim. When somebody asks me, How do we know that Jesus really existed? what I’ll likely first do is say that there’s a very well-known New Testament scholar named Bart Ehrman who has written a number of books critiquing Christianity or critiquing Christian belief and certainly doesn’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God. He says that it is absolutely and essentially historically incontrovertible that Jesus did in fact exist, and that we shouldn’t even be asking that question anymore. What’s more, he says that the Gospels are clearly the best historical evidence we have about the life of Jesus. They’re not the only evidence, and that’s one of the reasons why from a purely historical perspective the basics and the facts of Jesus's life are pretty much incontrovertible is because we have early evidence from people who didn’t even like Christians at all that Jesus was a first-century rabbi who was claimed to be the Christ—the Messiah, God’s promised King. He was crucified under the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and was subsequently worshiped by his followers as if he were a god.

Matt Tully
So you say those are the basic facts that are pretty historically rock solid, even among secular scholars?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Imagine that we set aside the Gospels completely. Those are the facts that we could know about Jesus of Nazareth. The reality is that even those who don’t think that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead or in fact performed miracles or in fact was the Son of God, the idea that the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not giving us any sort of valid, historical evidence about Jesus would be very hard to defend, because they’re actually written, in historical terms, very soon after the events that they describe. Some would say earlier, but even skeptical scholars would say Mark’s Gospel was written between thirty-five and forty-five years after Jesus's death, and well within the lifetime of eye witnesses of Jesus's life. John, the latest Gospel to be written down, experts would generally agree that it was written about sixty years after Jesus's death. If you think about the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, they wrote their biographies of the emperor Claudius about sixty years after his life and death, without any of the kind of personal access to Claudius that the Gospel authors had. In historical terms, the Gospels are actually very good evidence and ring true in terms of their evident knowledge of the local geography and customs and religious debates of Jesus's immediate context.

Matt Tully
I think today in our culture sixty years after someone lived, while that’s not unprecedented to get biographies or what have you that would come that late afterwards, we also see a lot of biographies or accounts of things that happened coming much sooner than that. We can think, How could we be confident in an account written six decades after the events? How could that be that reliable? I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, so how are these people going to accurately recount these things? How can we have confidence that they’re not embellished in some way or tweaked in some way to fit a narrative? How would you respond to that?

Rebecca McLaughlin
The first thing I would say is that the Gospels very clearly cite the eye witnesses on whose testimony they’re drawing. Whereas I don’t remember what I had for breakfast a week ago and likely nor do you, however old you and I are and however old anyone listening to this podcast is, there will be things that we remember from quite a long time ago because they had a profound impact on us. I remember circumstances and conversations even from childhood. Certainly there are eye witnesses of Jesus who were children, but in fact the eye witnesses we’re drawing on here are those among his male and female disciples who traveled with him, primarily his itinerant disciples, but also people whose full-time job was traveling around with Jesus and learning his sayings and watching what he did. After his resurrection, they had made it their business to go around telling everybody about all these stories about Jesus. Even in the case of John’s Gospel—the last to be written down and likely by John in his 70s or 80s, recalling things that happened in his teens or 20s—it’s like an actor who had learned Shakespeare’s plays in their early youth and then had been on tour with Hamlet for decades, then being asked, Can you recite ’To Be, or Not to Be’? Yes, funnily enough, I can. It’s not a randomly remembered thing that happened ages ago, and it’s also not dependent on just one witness. In addition to his twelve chosen apostles, he actually had a large group of people who traveled with him, including many women. Luke, in particular, highlights the named women among Jesus's disciples on whose testimony the Gospels draw. One of the striking things about the Gospels is that all of them point to the women’s testimony in particular when it comes to Jesus's death and resurrection. That doesn’t seem strange to us because we wouldn’t think that a woman’s testimony was less valid than a man’s . But in first-century cultural context, if you were making stuff up, you would never make it dependent on a woman’s testimony. Especially in religious matters, women were seen as prone to exaggeration and superstition. Again, it’s almost comic how in Luke’s Gospel the women come back from the empty tomb, report to the apostles what they’ve seen and heard, and Luke comments that the disciples didn’t believe the women. It seemed to them an idle tale.

Matt Tully
He reports that stereotype actually happening at that time.

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s one example of many embarrassing episodes for the apostles who went on to be the key leaders of the early church. Folks who would say maybe there is some basis of truth in the Gospels, but actually, clearly they’ve been smoothed over and adapted for political reasons, or a more authentic version of Jesus's life has been suppressed. If there truly were censors working through the Gospels, practically it would have been extraordinarily hard to do, but let’s imagine for a minute that there were. If anybody had the power to airbrush things out and add stuff in, it would have been Peter. Even Mark’s Gospel, which as far as we can tell is largely based on Peter’s memories in particular, reports his abject failure. The time when he said to Jesus, I’m willing to die with you and Jesus said, Actually, you’re going to deny me, even tonight, three times. You will deny you even know me. Peter says, No way. And that’s exactly what happens. If I were Peter, I would have made sure that story was never told.

Matt Tully
That doesn’t garner confidence in the movement by showing its leaders to be incompetent, faithless, and hypocrites.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah.

28:22 - Wasn’t Jesus Just a Good, Moral Teacher?

Matt Tully
Maybe that relates to a second misconception that kind of relates to that issue of the reliability of the Gospels, and that’s that Jesus was nothing more than a great moral teacher. This one actually seems quite common in our culture today. More than people saying, I don’t think he actually existed, we hear things like, No, I respect Jesus. He was a great moral teacher. He had a lot of really good ideas that we should follow today. We would all be better off if we adhere to his principles. But they would say that maybe all the talk about Jesus being God and even the miracles and what have you, that was all just sort of his followers, in the centuries following his death, embellishing the story about him to make him fit some kind of narrative that was maybe more in service of the development of some kind of cult than it was actually recording history. How would you respond to that idea that Jesus was really nothing more than a good, moral teacher?

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s impossible to square with any of the Gospels. Again, if we look at Mark’s Gospel vs. John’s—Mark’s written first and John’s, as far as we can tell, was written last—it’s certainly true that in John’s Gospel we see an extraordinary number of situations where Jesus says things that only God would ever have the right to say. Perhaps my favorite is when he looks one of his female disciples, Martha, in the eyes after her brother has died and says, I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me, even though he dies, will live. And anyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? Those are not the words of a good teacher who is nothing more. Those are the words of either the Son of God himself or a despicable narcissist. I am the resurrection and the life. Are you kidding me? We see throughout John’s Gospel for sure Jesus making these stunning declarations, often playing on the covenant name for God from the Old Testament, which can be translated “I am who I am.” But let’s set aside John’s Gospel for a minute and let’s look at Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the earlier Gospels, and Mark in particular. In Mark’s Gospel it’s incontrovertible that Jesus is claiming to be so much more than just a good teacher. One example is when Jesus calms a storm just with his words. His disciples, who are very afraid when the storm has sprung up and they think they’re going to die, are even more afraid afterwards. They say, Who is this, that even the wind and the waves obey him? Or I think of another story of Jesus being confronted with a paralyzed man who had famously been lowered through the roof of the house where Jesus was teaching. Jesus looks at him and he said, Son, your sins are forgiven. The religious leaders who are watching are completely horrified because only God has the right to forgive sins. Who does Jesus think he is to be doing this? Jesus says, Which is easier, to say to the paralyzed man ’Your sins are forgiven’ or to say ’Get up and walk’? And then he declares one of my favorite sort of . . . of all time. He says, But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I say to you, ’Get up and walk’ to the paralyzed man, and he gets up and walks. Time and again and throughout Mark’s Gospel, we see Jesus doing and saying things that only God has the right to say and do. It’s very clear to the religious leaders, who hate what Jesus is saying and doing, that he is making the blasphemous claim that he is God. Now, of course, if he actually is God, it’s not blasphemous, but there’s no way to read around those declarations. If you were to try and make a kind of non-supernatural version of Mark’s Gospel, which has certainly been attempted by some in history, you’re shredding on every page. In particular, when it comes to the resurrection claim about Jesus, which is the miracle on which the Christian faith stands or falls. People will sometimes say, *Well, Jesus was probably a great charismatic teacher and as stories started to circulate about him, people got a little bit over excited and ultimately they started claiming that he had been raised from the dead. You can see that makes a certain sort of sense if you don’t look into the details. But the problem with that hypothesis is that the very earliest documents we have about Jesus—which are actually not the Gospels, but some of Paul’s first letters to the early churches—major on the resurrection. Christianity without the resurrection is like Romeo and Juliet without Juliet. It doesn’t make sense. If Jesus only died and was not raised from the dead, he is not in fact God’s long-promised King who has come to save the world and will ultimately return to judge the world. He’s some guy who died 2,000 years ago, and stayed dead.

Matt Tully
That’s a point that Paul himself makes in his letters, that without the resurrection all of this is just kind of a farce.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes.

33:58 - Isn’t Christianity Fundamentally Incoherent?

Matt Tully
One other objection or question that a non-Christian might wrestle with is that even if they were to acknowledge that the Gospels do portray Jesus as a divine figure and that there is that baked into the cake, so to speak, they might still wrestle with the logical possibility of the idea of a fully human, fully divine being. They would say, That fundamentally doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t see how those two things can exist together. That’s obviously something that Christians also wrestle with and try to understand, but what would you say to the non-Christian that says, That core idea of your faith, that Jesus was both God and man, is fundamentally incoherent?

Rebecca McLaughlin
If there is a God who made the universe, it would be absurd for us to think that we would be able to fully wrap our minds around him. As our secular friends will often remind us, we are tiny little mammals wandering around on a tiny little planet in an obscure solar system within a much, much, much larger universe. We are infinitesimally small compared to the God who made the universe, if there is such a God. If there is such a God, it shouldn’t surprise us at all that we have a hard time wrapping our little mammalian minds around some of the things that he does. At the same time, if there is a God who made the universe, it is wild that he would become human as Jesus did. It’s completely shocking. One of the things that’s been more and more evident to me as I’ve thought about Mary, the mother of Jesus, experience is that, even if we’re not believers in Jesus ourselves, Christmas is sort of a widely celebrated holiday and we’re used to the idea that Christians claim that God was born as a human baby. But from Mary’s perspective, here she is a faithful, Jewish, first-century woman, living in a world where the Jews were being rolled over by the Romans, who were pagans and believed in many, many gods. The Jews had the very unpopular view that there was in fact only one God who had made the heavens and the earth, and that any other so-called gods were just idols. One of the Jewish distinctives was belief in one universal creator God. The idea from a Jewish perspective that this one great, universal, utterly transcendent, creator God—who humans couldn’t even look on and live—would have taken on humanity, the idea that the God of all the universe would, as the Bible puts it, become flesh in the person of Jesus and be conceived in Mary’s womb is absolutely wild. But then anytime we start to ponder on the universe, we find ourselves pondering extraordinarily wild things. Anyone who has the least understanding of modern science will have to acknowledge at times, Crazy stuff has gone down; things that sound utterly extraordinary. The fact that what Christians call the incarnation—the Son of God taking on humanity—the fact that that seems incomprehensible to us shouldn’t lead us to say, Well, it couldn’t possibly be true. It should lead us to wonder if there is a God; and if this is true, what on earth does that mean for us. And I think it means some extraordinary things.

37:57 - Why Is Jesus's Jewish Identity and Background So Central to Who He Is?

Matt Tully
It can be so easy to embrace, as C. S. Lewis said, “chronological snobbery” in how we think about these things. We kind of assume that maybe Jesus's first followers—those early Christians—were scientifically illiterate and gullible, and so the idea of God becoming a human was easier to accept for them. But it’s so helpful when you emphasize that especially in that Jewish context, the idea of God taking on humanity to himself was just as—maybe more so—ground breaking and out of this world, so to speak, than it is for us today. That leads to another maybe misconception that I think both non-Christians and I think probably a lot of Christians wrestle with when it comes to how they think about Jesus. That’s the idea that maybe Jesus's true relevance comes to the fore when we look past his distinctly Jewish identity—the things that made him Jewish—and instead, we tend to view him as some kind of ideal human, a prototypical human, and that’s where his significance comes from. I wonder if you could speak to that. Why is Jesus's Jewish identity and background—his role as Israel’s Messiah in particular—so central to who he is?

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s fascinating. I think Jesus is both ideal and particular, and that’s one of the extraordinary claims of the New Testament—Jesus, this first-century Jewish man, is the image of the invisible God. He’s not just some sort of platonic ideal of humanity, but he is a particular human who walked, laughed, ate, lived, breathed, and died and rose again. Why does it matter that he did so as a Jewish man? Why did God not become flesh in the person of somebody from a different culture? The answer is because God had revealed himself to the Jewish people over centuries. Jesus wasn’t Act 1 of the story of God’s relationship with humanity; he was actually, you could say, starting the first act after the interval. And it had been a long interval of God’s people not hearing from God, in terms of an officially recognized prophet for hundreds of years before Jesus came. But we see in the Old Testament scriptures—or as my Jewish friend recently reminded me, the Hebrew scriptures—we see that the key to understanding who Jesus is and what the Gospels are, because the Gospels are actually profoundly Jewish texts, and so often we’re not going to understand the full significance of what’s going on in the Gospels if we haven’t drank deeply from the Old Testament well to know who is this God who has claimed to be the God who made the heavens and the earth, and yet who has called a particular human (Abraham) into relationship with him and chosen a particular family and a particular people from the first, weaving people from other families and tribes into his people, but nonetheless relating to a particular people for centuries. And then you have Jesus, stepping onto the stage of human history as the fulfillment of hundreds of years of God’s promises to his people.

41:42 - What Is Jesus's Relationship with the Old Testament?

Matt Tully
That’s a perfect segue into our final misconception that we could talk about today. It relates to that relationship that Jesus had, and has, with the Old Testament. I think sometimes in our culture Jesus is portrayed as, in some sense, overturning or a contrast to the Old Testament conception of God as an angry, vindictive, capricious deity that loves to judge people and kill people. And then Jesus comes onto the scene preaching a new message, a message of love and peace and acceptance, of caring for the downtrodden, of justice even. And that’s viewed as a contrast to what we see in the Old Testament. My guess is that many Christians know that that’s not right, but they might have still wondered this. They might have sensed that there is a distinction in Scripture. Have you observed that? How would you respond to that kind of question?

Rebecca McLaughlin
I think it’s a common misconception, and I think the best antidote to it is reading the Old Testament and reading the New Testament. I think we’ll see that misconception sort of crumbling.

Matt Tully
So you think it’s that simple? You kind of said that tongue-in-cheek, but is it really mostly an issue of we don’t know our Bibles well enough?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes. Well, yes, and. Number one, and again, I mentioned we’re reading through Matthew’s Gospel as a Bible study group, and there we see both incredible words of grace and mercy and love and forgiveness from Jesus, and a sort of expansive, all sinners welcome approach that he takes; and terrifying words of judgment, which we gloss over at our peril. We see in the Old Testament extraordinary love and compassion from the Lord to his people, extraordinary love and compassion for those who are outside and beyond his people. And we see terrifying acts of judgment for those who rebel against God. It is absolutely true that in Jesus God was fulfilling promises over centuries and that there is meaningful change between how we relate to God now and how God’s people in the Old Testament related to God. Last night with our community group we were reading a confrontation that Jesus has with the Pharisees where one of the things he says is, Something greater than the temple is here—talking about himself. He’s saying that the building, which had been the central focal point of Jewish worship and where God was most distinctly seen to dwell, that that building where the sacrifices were made and where prayers were offered and where faithful Jews would pilgrimage to that particular place, that he in fact is greater. If we read the Old and New Testament together we’ll see that the temple is pointing us toward Jesus who is the true temple in whom the real sacrifice was made. So there are many profound ways in which Jesus is fulfilling what the Old Testament pointed us toward. So it’s not true that we relate to God now just as we related to God prior to Jesus's life, death, and glorious resurrection, but there is a continuity of message as forgiveness is offered for those who will come repentantly to the Lord. What we discover in the New Testament is that Jesus's death and resurrection is the means of that forgiveness. It’s not that God was never calling people to repent and believe and be forgiven prior to that. He absolutely was. But we see in Jesus how that forgiveness was going to be achieved through the one who is, as Matthew’s Gospel puts it, God with us.

46:10 - For Those Curious about Jesus

Matt Tully
That’s so beautiful and such a wonderful thing for us to be emphasizing as we think about this and talk about this with our friends and neighbors. Maybe as a final question for you, Rebecca, what would you say to the non-Christian listening to this? Maybe someone sent this to them. Maybe they’ve just been doing their own investigation, trying to understand who Jesus really is and what that means for them. What encouragement would you give to the person who is wondering, isn’t sure what they think yet, hasn’t bought into some of the things that you’re saying here, but nevertheless is curious and wants to know more? What would you say to that person?

Rebecca McLaughlin
I wrote a book for you. Very specifically, I wrote Confronting Jesus for the person who isn’t sure what they think. Maybe they have read other resources that have helped them to question some of their objections to Christianity in the first place. Maybe they are curious about Jesus but don’t feel ready yet to just pick up one of the Gospels and read it for themselves. I would encourage somebody in that position, honestly, to just pick up one of the Gospels and read for themselves. There’s no ultimate substitute for that, but if you feel like you need something to bridge you into that space or to answer some questions maybe before you get there, then that’s the reason why I wrote this book. In particular, to take seriously the doubts and questions and challenges that folks might legitimately have, and to look at the Gospel accounts of Jesus's life in light of those and see what we find.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the things that I’ve appreciated the most about you and how you go about writing some of these books. My understanding is that you often send your books to lots of friends, including many non-Christian friends—to kind of get their thoughts, hear their questions, hear their objections, hear ways that you could be more clear. How has that process helped you to write a book like this that is aimed at helping and coming alongside someone who is wondering?

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s been so helpful. I actually dedicated Confronting Jesus to my friend Julia who read the script twice. She’s Jewish and doesn’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God, but has been very kind to read all of my recent books and give me feedback on early drafts. She says, Here’s a part that is unintelligible to someone who isn’t deep in the New Testament scriptures as you are, which is always helpful feedback to have. And she says, Here’s something that felt confusing or not at all compelling. She’s certainly not in a place where she’s feeling deeply compelled by the things that I’m writing, but certainly can point to the areas that feel more and less compelling and help me understand better why, and help me hear from someone who is a very smart and thoughtful and deeply wants to be ethically grounded and to have a love for people in need in various ways. How somebody like that can be introduced to Jesus's life and teachings and the claims about him in a way that will hopefully at least give her the opportunity to think them through.

Matt Tully
Rebecca, thanks again for talking with us today and helping us to think through some of these common ways that people think about Jesus, ways that people misunderstand Jesus, and help us be prepared to discuss them with our friends.

Rebecca McLaughlin
You’re so welcome.

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