Kasey Olander:

Welcome to The Table podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology to everyday life. I'm Kasey Olander, I'm the web content specialist here at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary and we thank you for being with us today. This episode is a lot of fun because we are currently with three hosts of The Table podcast. We're not sure if this has happened before but we're going to have a conversation about the historical Jesus and it's going to be a lot of fun.

Darrell Bock:

Thank you, Kasey, for hosting.

Kasey Olander:

Oh, yeah. This is backwards, I know that you're used to seeing Dr. Darrell Bock in the primary driver seat of the conversation but he is here joining us as senior research professor of New Testament studies and executive director for cultural engagement here at the Hendricks Center at DTS. So, Darrell, thank you for being here.

Darrell Bock:

Glad to be here.

Kasey Olander:

I feel like people don't usually thank you for being here when you're hosting.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, it's true.

Kasey Olander:

We also want to say welcome back to Dr. Mikel Del Rosario. He's currently a professor of Bible at Moody Bible Institute but we all worked together during his time at the Hendricks Center at DTS when he was working on his doctorate. So, Mikel, it's good to see you again.

Mikel DelRosario:

Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's good to see you too.

Kasey Olander:

Yeah. So, this is a topic that the two of you are particularly passionate about, that you're interested in but then, also, that you're extremely qualified to talk to us about. So, I'm going to start off with, Darrell, this is going to feel backwards to you but I'm going to ask your question. How did a nice guy like you get into a gig like this? What about historical Jesus studies?

Darrell Bock:

Well, I got pulled into historical Jesus studies because I was writing on the gospels and, in the midst of writing on the gospels, particularly commentary initially, faith commentaries, actually, on the Gospel of Luke, a beginning one, a middle road one in terms of level and then an advanced one, all kinds of questions about historicity came up in terms of could you trust the text. Is what the text says necessarily what happened? And, of course, in the church, for many people, that's not even a question, they come with faith and they believe the Bible is the word of God but there are a lot of people for whom that's not true.

And so, some of the writing that I did in the commentary was aware of what the New Testament discussion was which tracks down that road as well with a lot of skeptical takes on the Bible, et cetera. So, I was writing to deal with questions that people have, sometimes very, very naturally, about what the Bible has to say and to deal with that.

And so, I ended up, not just writing commentaries on the gospels, but also diving into a particular area of New Testament study entitled the Historical Jesus and, really, I've been there for a long time, almost as long as the school's been alive. And so, been doing that for a long time and then Mikel came in along the side and I'll let you ask that form of the question to him because he's the one who has to fill in the story.

Kasey Olander:

Perfect. Mikel, how did a nice guy like you get into a gig like this?

Mikel DelRosario:

Well, when I was at Dallas Seminary doing the THM, there was one personal situation that highlighted this for me where I was talking to this woman after a church event one day and she wanted to raise the question of where we ever got the idea that Jesus is God and I had my Bible out on the table as we were talking. In the middle of our conversation, she grabs my Bible, she holds it up like a visual aid and she says, "According to this, Jesus never said He was God."

I was stunned because, this woman, she'd been going to church every weekend and yet she was saying some of the same kinds of things as some of our skeptical atheist friends do. And then I started to thinking because she started saying, "Well, okay, we're looking at Bible verses but I'm not asking where in the Bible does Jesus say He's God, I'm asking did Jesus really say He was God historically?"

And so, then I got to thinking, there are a lot of people, like Darrell was saying, who have questions that are not literary questions but are historical questions. And whether it's the problem of evil you're talking about in terms of apologetics or the arguments for God's existence, eventually, we're going to get to who is Jesus and so I wanted to focus in on that. I took a class with Darrell on the historical Jesus, which met at his house, and that's really where I fell in love with historical Jesus studies and thought, you know what?

I'm going to do my PhD in New Testament and do a dissertation on the historical Jesus and His claim to be divine. And so, reading all these great books and making use of Darrell's library, I really had a good time working through a lot of these things in the doctoral program at DTS and so I'm teaching a historical Jesus class, actually, at the Moody Bible Institute as well for undergrads.

And so, it's something that helps us come to the table with people from different backgrounds so we can all have a conversation about what Jesus said, what Jesus did even if they don't see the Bible as an authority, I love that.

Darrell Bock:

There's a fun detail in this story in that I actually met Mikel right when he hit campus and we were sat next to one another at the student reception for the new students, struck up a conversation. He told me what his background was in apologetics and having come from Biola and I suggested to him he ought to think about working at the center and so he applied and came in and that's how the connection happened in terms of a personal relationship which we've had now for well over a decade.

Kasey Olander:

Yeah.

Mikel DelRosario:

Yeah.

Kasey Olander:

Yeah, thought about it really thoroughly.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, yeah.

Kasey Olander:

Yeah, yeah. And that's when Mikel and I got to work together as well. We met in the middle of COVID and so that's a bizarre time to meet any humans.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah, that's right.

Mikel DelRosario:

I didn't know what Kasey looked like-

Darrell Bock:

Is that right?

Mikel DelRosario:

… until four months into working with her.

Kasey Olander:

Right, exactly.

Darrell Bock:

Yeah. Myriads of people were just two-dimensional to us so, anyway, yeah.

Kasey Olander:

Mm-hmm, exactly. So, as we bring the … Let's say that the scriptures paint a three-dimensional picture of Jesus, He has a number of different titles, hope you guys like that segue. He has a number of different titles that people refer to Him as but why don't we start with Jesus as a prophet and work our way to divinity.

Darrell Bock:

So, the idea here is is that, when you talk about Jesus as being divine, you're actually creating a category for people that they don't have. And you think about all the people who've walked the earth. I once asked Google, "How many people have walked the earth in the history of the earth?" and Google has an answer to that question. So, it gave me an answer, it was 119 billion people and I said, "Okay, give or take a few people."

119 people have walked through, how many of them have actually been able to credibly try and claim that they're the creator God incarnate? It's just one. That means that every person who walks the earth has to have that category created for them, the question is how do you do that. If someone is a religious none, that's not N-U-N but N-O-N-E-S, among the religious nones, agnostic or atheist, they don't have a theological bone in their body, they're not going to have that category.

So, how do you have that category? Well, my argument would be that the synoptic gospels work up to that category. They take you from the earth up and you gradually, you watch it dawn on people who Jesus is as He reveals himself. So, the first stopping point is the term prophet which is generally how the crowds reacted to Jesus. We know from Caesarea Philippi and the exchange Jesus had with His disciples that when Jesus asked, "Who do people say that I am or who the people say the son of man is?" the response was, "Well, You're one of the prophets which means You're one among many." And then, of course, Jesus follows up that question, we're going to come back to this later, Jesus comes back, "Who do you say I am? Who do you say the son of man is?" and they give a different answer.

But the starting point is Jesus a prophet, He's someone who declares the way and the will of God, end of story. He is a sage prophet who points us to the way God wants us to live and He's not really in the middle of the story other than being the messenger through whom the message comes and that's how the crowd saw Jesus. It's a respectful recognition of who Jesus is, being sent from God, but it's not quite enough and so that's the first title, that's the title prophet.

Kasey Olander:

Yeah. You're not disagreeing with Him saying He's not a prophet but you're just saying it's-

Darrell Bock:

There's more to Him than that.

Kasey Olander:

There's more to it.

Darrell Bock:

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Kasey Olander:

Mikel, what would you ad