Jesus, and not breaking his legs. And the prophecies talk about betrayal for thirty pieces of silver, so maybe Matthew played fast and loose with the facts and said, yeah, Judas sold out Jesus for that same amount." But that objection didn't fly any further than the previous one. "In God's wisdom, he created checks and balances both inside and outside the Christian community," Lapides explained. "When the gospels were being circulated, there were people living who had been around when all these things happened. Someone would have said to Matthew, 'You know it didn't happen that way. We're trying to communicate a life of righteousness and truth, so don't taint it with a lie.' Besides," he added, "why would Matthew have fabricated fulfilled prophecies and then willingly allowed himself to be put to death for following someone who he secretly knew was really not the Messiah? That wouldn't make any sense. What's more, the Jewish community would have jumped on any opportunity to discredit the gospels by pointing out falsehoods. They would have said, 'I was there, and Jesus' bones were broken by the Romans during the Crucifixion,'" Lapides said. "But even though the Jewish Talmud refers to Jesus in derogatory ways, it never once makes the claim that the fulfillment of prophecies was falsified. Not one time." 3. The Intentional Fulfillment Argument Some skeptics have asserted that Jesus merely maneuvered his life in a way to fulfill the prophecies. "Couldn't he have read in Zechariah that the Messiah would ride a donkey into Jerusalem, and then arrange to do exactly that?" I asked. Lapides made a small concession. "For a few of the prophecies, yes, that's certainly conceivable," he said. "But there are many others for which this just wouldn't have been possible. "For instance, how would he control the fact that the Sanhedrin offered Judas thirty pieces of silver to betray him? How could he arrange for his ancestry, or the place of his birth, or his method of execution, or that soldiers gambled for his clothing, or that his legs remained unbroken on the cross? How would he arrange to perform miracles in front of skeptics? How would he arrange for his resurrection? And how would he arrange to be born when he was?" That last comment piqued my curiosity. "What do you mean by when he was born?" I asked. "When you interpret Daniel 9:24-26, it foretells that the Messiah would appear a certain length of time after King Artaxerxes 1 issued a decree for the Jewish people to go from Persia to rebuild the walls in Jerusalem," Lapides replied. He leaned forward to deliver the clincher: "That puts the anticipated appearance of the Messiah at the exact moment in history when Jesus showed up," he said. "Certainly that's nothing he could have prearranged ." 4. The Context Argument One other objection needed to be addressed: were the passages that Christians identify as messianic prophecies really intended to point to the coming of the Anointed One, or do Christians rip them out of context and misinterpret them? Lapides sighed. "You know, I go through the books that people write to try to tear down what we believe. That's not fun to do, but I spend the time to look at each objection individually and then to research the context and the wording in the original language," he said. "And every single time, the prophecies have stood up and shown themselves to be true. "So here's my challenge to skeptics: don't accept my word for it, but don't accept your rabbi's either. Spend the time to research it yourself. Today nobody can say, 'There's no information.' There are plenty of books out there to help you. "And one more thing: sincerely ask God to show you whether or not Jesus is the Messiah. That's what I did-and without any coaching it became clear to me who fit the fingerprint of the Messiah."
I appreciated the way Lapides had responded to the objections, but ultimately it was the story of his spiritual journey that kept replaying in my mind as I flew back to Chicago late that night. I reflected on how many times I had encountered similar stories, especially among successful and thoughtful Jewish people who had specifically set out to refute Jesus' messianic claims. I thought about Stan Telchin, the East Coast businessman who had embarked on a quest to expose the "cult" of Christianity after his daughter went away to college and received Y'Shua (Jesus) as her Messiah. He was astonished to find that his investigation led himand his wife and second daughter-to the same Messiah. He later became a Christian minister, and his book that recounts his story, Betrayed!, has been translated into more than twenty languages. There was Jack Sternberg, a prominent cancer physician in Little Rock, Arkansas, who was so alarmed at what he found in the Old Testament that he challenged three rabbis to disprove that Jesus was the Messiah. They couldn't, and he too has claimed to have found wholeness in Christ. And there was Peter Greenspan, an obstetrician-gynecologist who practices in the Kansas City area and is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. Like Lapides, he had been challenged to look for Jesus in Judaism. What he found troubled him, so he went to the Torah and Talmud, seeking to discredit Jesus' messianic credentials. Instead he concluded that Jesus did miraculously fulfill the prophecies. For him, the more he read books by those trying to undermine the evidence for Jesus as the Messiah, the more he saw the flaws in their arguments. Ironically, concluded Greenspan, "I think I actually came to faith in Yhua by reading what detractors wrote." He found, as have Lapides and others, that Jesus' words in the gospel of Luke have proved true: "Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44). It was fulfilled, and only in Jesus-the sole individual in history who has matched the prophetic fingerprint of God's anointed one.
Deliberations Questions forReflection or Group Study 1. Even if you're not Jewish, is there an aspect of Lapides' spiritual journey that is similar to your own? Were there any lessons you learned from Lapides about how you should proceed? 2. Lapides considered his Jewish heritage and unbiblical lifestyle impediments to becoming a follower of Jesus. Is there anything in your life that would make it difficult to become a Christian? Do you see any costs that you might incur if you became a Christian? How might they compare with the benefits? 3. Lapides thought Christians were anti-Semitic. In a recent wordassociation exercise at an East Coast university, the word most often associated with Christian was intolerant. Do you have negative perceptions of Christians? What do they stem from? How might this influence your receptivity to the evidence about Jesus? For Further Evidence More Resources on This Topic Fruchtenbaum, Arnold. Jesus Was a Jew. Tustin, Calif: Ariel Ministries, 1981. Frydland, Rachmiel. What the Rabbis Know about the Messiah. Cincinnati: Messianic, 1993. Kaiser, Walter C., Jr. The Messiah in the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995. Rosen, Moishe. Y'shua, the Jewish Way to Say Jesus. Chicago: Moody Press, 1982. Rosen, Ruth, ed. Jewish Doctors Meet the Great Physician. San Francisco: Purple Pomegranate, 1997. Telchin, Stan. Betrayed! Grand Rapids: Chosen, 1982.
11: THE MEDICAL EVIDENCE Was jesus' Death a Scam and His Resurrection a Hoax? I paused to read the plaque hanging in the waiting room of a doctor's office: "Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living." Obviously, this was no ordinary physician. I was paying another visit to Dr. Robert J. Stein, one of the world's foremost forensic pathologists, a flamboyant, husky-voiced medical detective who used to regale me with stories about the unexpected clues he had uncovered while examining corpses. For him, dead men did tell tales-in fact, tales that would often bring justice to the living. During his lengthy tenure as medical examiner of Cook County, Illinois, Stein performed more than twenty thousand autopsies, each time meticulously searching for insights into the circumstances surrounding the victim's death. Repeatedly his sharp eye for detail, his encyclopedic knowledge of the human anatomy, and his uncanny investigative intuition helped this medical sleuth reconstruct the victim's violent demise. Sometimes innocent people were vindicated as a result of his findings. But more often Stein's work was the final nail in a defendant's coffin. Such was the case with John Wayne Gacy, who faced the executioner after Stein helped convict him of thirty-three grisly murders. That's how crucial medical evidence can be. It can determine whether a child died of abuse or an accidental fall. It can establish whether a person succumbed to natural causes or was murdered by someone who spiked the person's coffee with arsenic. It can uphold or dismantle a defendant's alibi by pinpointing the victim's time of death, using an ingenious procedure that measures the amount of potassium in the eyes of the deceased. And yes, even in the case of someone brutally executed on a Roman cross two millennia ago, medical evidence can still make a crucial contribution: it can destroy one of the most persistent arguments used by those who claim that the resurrection of Jesus-the supreme vindication of his claim to deity-was nothing more than an elaborate hoax.
The idea that Jesus never really died on the cross can be found in the Koran, which was written in the seventh century-in fact, Ahmadiya Muslims contend that Jesus actually fled to India. To this day there's a shrine that supposedly marks his real burial place in Srinagar, Kashmir! As the nineteenth century dawned, Karl Bahrdt, Karl Venturini, and others tried to explain away the Resurrection by suggesting that Jesus only fainted from exhaustion on the cross, or he had been given a drug that made him appear to die, and that he had later been revived by the cool, damp air of the tomb. Conspiracy theorists bolstered this hypothesis by pointing out that Jesus had been given some liquid on a sponge while on the cross (Mark 15:36) and that Pilate seemed surprised at how quickly Jesus had succumbed (Mark 15:44). Consequently, they said, Jesus' reappearance wasn't a miraculous resurrection but merely a fortuitous resuscitation, and his tomb was empty because he continued to live, While reputable scholars have repudiated this so-called swoon theory, it keeps recurring in popular literature. In 1929 D. H. Lawrence wove this theme into a short story in which he suggested that Jesus had fled to Egypt, where he fell in love with the priestess Isis. In 1965 Hugh Schonfield's best-seller The Passover Plot alleged that it was only the unanticipated