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"THE DINGO DID IT"

Some of you old-time Christians tuning in today will remember a classic hymn written in the year 1933 by a gentleman named Alfred H. Ackley. The title tells it all, and it's just two words long: He Lives!

"I serve a risen Savior; He's in the world today. I know that He is living, whatever men may say."

Really, the only thing wrong with that song, I must say, is the high "F" right at the very end. My four baritone brothers and I aren't going to be able to hit that high note until we sing in the heavenly choir in the risen Savior's eternal kingdom!

Well, friend, that two-word musical slogan, "He Lives," is the clarion call of this radio ministry. And yet, here in the year 1999, while many Christians are looking with hope to a new millennium, there's another note being sounded with increasing volume — and it's happening right within the same Christian church.

In the book, The Birth of Christianity, John Dominic Crossan quotes from another volume, Seeing the Lord, by a writer named Marianne Sawicki. And in this and other books, we find the suggestion that Jesus Christ, philosopher and poet and religious leader in ancient Israel, very likely met with one of two fates following crucifixion. One, He was probably eaten by wild dogs. Or two, He was thrown into a pit, and covered with lime, which quickly devoured the body. "Quickly and hygienically," as Sawicki puts it. It brings to mind the tragic ending scene in the spiritual drama, Amadeus, where the gifted composer's body is tossed into a pauper's grave, a lime pit. And these Christian writers suggest that this was the final end of Jesus Christ. No resurrection Sunday. No "I serve a risen Savior." No Second Coming in the clouds. No living deity to pray to here in the year 1999. No, this Jesus got eaten by dogs 2000 years ago; end of story. End of faith. End of everything.

And yet, ironically, these are Christian books! At least, the writers claim to be Christians. Crossan, according to the flyleaf of his latest book, "chairs the Historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature and was codirector of the Jesus Seminar." We've mentioned that project before. He talks about certain claims of the Christian faith, and he writes in the preface:

"I recognize those claims as an historian, and I believe them as a Christian."

I mentioned yesterday President Jimmy Carter's book, Living Faith. And he writes, rather unhappily, about another liberal theologian, Barbara Thiering, who writes from Australia with the suggestion that:
"Jesus was buried by mistake in a cave by the Dead Sea, not dead but just drugged, and later was revived with a purgative, married Mary Magdalene, had three children, was divorced and remarried, and finally died in Rome."

Well, friend, this is very disturbing. And of course, with our two-week radio topic, MORE THAN A GOOD TEACHER, these questions from the field are rather serious. It's suggested by Paul that if Jesus Christ really did end up in the stomachs of wild dogs, then the Christian faith has a problem. In fact, there IS no Christian faith any longer. Here's First Corinthians 15:17-19:

"And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."

So if wild dingoes or a lime pit won this war, Paul writes, then it's over. The entire Christian faith is history. Kaput. "Our preaching is useless," he admits, "and so is your faith." There's no resurrection then — for anybody. No hope of eternal life. No Christ to pray to; no Christ to be our mediator against Satan's accusations. No triumph over sin or death at Calvary. And you and I both are still forever stuck in our sins; locked into condemnation and eternal guilt.

Well, friend, we have to wonder this: how can good Christian scholars decide that despite the plain words of the Bible that the entire Christian faith hinges on the Resurrection, their religion can survive without it? And this too: what makes people decide that the Resurrection did not happen, despite the plain and repeated words of the Bible?

In each of these cases, the people involved describe themselves as historical researchers. In fact, the expression "the historical Jesus" is one they use to indicate what they think is the real Christ, one who can be backed up by plain historical facts and provable data. What do the non-Bible writings of that era indicate? What do the scrolls, the archeological finds from that time period, seem to say about people living then? "We want to strip away," they say, "the legends, the myths, the wishful inventions that friends of Jesus might have come up with, the poems and sayings he probably never uttered, but were ghost-written into the account later."

Here's Crossan's word-for-word description of "the historical Jesus":

"The past Jesus reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse."

In other words, "take it to the jury." However, there's one major problem. As these historians work backward, sifting backward through time to chip away the embellishings and find the true Jesus, they routinely and automatically discard anything that falls under the category of "miracle." Is something in the story a miracle? Out it goes. Virgin birth? Out it goes. A lame man healed? Out. A blind person seeing? Out. A dead person raised? Out. Walking on water? Forget it. The flood and the Jonah story and the feeding of the 5000? Out out out. No way did anything like that ever happen. Couldn't have.

Crossan invites us to be a kind of jury in scrutinizing a Lt. Columbo case like this one:

"The accused said that he would kill the deceased, was seen leaving his house after his death, had blood in his car . . ."

And the jury, tracking backwards through that evidence, would probably say "Guilty." But friend, if you and I do the same thing in the story of Jesus, and throw out all possibility of miracles, aren't we going to say in the end: "The wild dingoes ate Him up"?

Case in point. A funeral procession is heading for the cemetery. The man on the funeral bier is deceased, not breathing, brain-dead, everything. The funeral train is proceeding for the burial plot, with no impediments in the way. You're the jury; what do you say? Well, obviously, they get there and they bury the man. Actually, no, they don't either. Surprise! They meet a person named Jesus, who raises that man to life. But, if you don't accept the possibility of miracles, then you throw that whole story out of the Bible as fraudulent.

Here's a young girl. That "time of the month" has come and gone, and she's very, very late, as worried teens around the world put it. Her stomach is mysteriously swelling up. The doctor says she's pregnant, but she swears in court that she's a virgin. "I've never been with a man," is how Mary, mother of Jesus, says it in Luke chapter one. So you're on the jury. Is she lying? Do you convict her of perjury? If you don't believe in miracles, of course you do! Either that, or you call her psychiatrist. And by the way, it's going to be a crowded jail cell (or psychiatrist's office.) Because you'd better throw Luke in there too. And Matthew, because if there's no virgin birth, then he perjures himself on the stand four times just in chapter one. And of course, Paul you'd have to lock up for about 2000 years for all the lies he writes down.

But the misrepresentations by Paul don't bother a writer like John Dominic Crossan. Or the wild dogs, either. Because to him, the resurrection of Christ isn't the pivotal point the Bible says it is. He writes instead:

"Bodily resurrection means that the embodied life and death of the historical Jesus continues to be experienced, by believers, as powerfully efficacious and salvifically present in this world."

In other words, he suggests, it still works. Wild dogs or no, lime pit or no lime pit. These wonderful words of Jesus, the spirit of Jesus, the one-to-one connection He had with people . . . these are the things that survived the lime pit or the hungry mongrels outside Golgotha.

Ironically, though, these same theologians are the very people who, in think tank projects like the Jesus Seminar, voted with their colored beads and threw out up to 80% of the wonderful sayings and teachings Jesus "allegedly" ever came up with. Which causes President Carter to write in his book:

"How could the diminished Jesus they describe, a failed prophet who made no notable statements" — since they threw them all out — "who did not rise from the dead, have transformed His timid and disloyal disciples into historic giants willing to become martyrs for their faith? Where would there be a basis for today's worldwide church, with 1.5 billion believers, many of whose lives have been deeply affected by their faith? How could Jesus still be alive to me and other Christians, His life a perfect model for admiration and emulation? How could so many hearts be touched and minds stimulated by Jesus to seek ultimate truths about life? If these naysayers are right and either the Gospel writers and Paul were all liars or their words were largely subverted by later revisionists, then what is the basis for the Christian faith?"

Well, friend, the inspired Word of God says that Lucifer couldn't hold Jesus in the tomb. And if the Prince of Darkness couldn't, what chance would you give a couple of dogs?