2-Life of Christ, Preview of Who Jesus Is

Former President of The Master's Seminary, John MacArthur, wrote in the Foreward to THE JESUS CRISIS (The Inroads of Historical Criticism into Evangelical Scholarship, by Thomas & Farnell), "More than 100 years ago religious liberals began mixing rationalism and Christianity on an unprecedented scale. The elixir that resulted from that blend turned out to be a deadly poison. One of the more highly touted products of this turn-of-the-century religious modernism was a new approach to the Scriptures known as 'higher criticism', a principal aspect of which was Historical Criticism. The historical critics subjected the Bible to a cynical brand of scholarship. They devised speculative literary theories--all rooted in skepticism--about the authorship and origin of various biblical books. They routinely denied both the authenticity and the historicity of Scripture. Before long the critics' theories themselves were canonized, and the word 'scholarship' became synonymous with higher criticism in many people's minds. The movement itself is far from dead. In recent years the higher critics have undertaken a public-relations campaign to breathe life and interest into their dying movement. For example, the secular media has trumpeted the work of 'The Jesus Seminar.' This is a group of liberal intellectuals who claim they are engaged in a 'quest for the historical Jesus'...that starts with the presupposition that the Scriptures are NOT a reliable historical record. This movement is hostile to the Christian faith. It is also antagonistic to historical Chrstianity's high esteem for the Word of God. This movement furthermore is the very spirit of antichrist (1 Jn 2:22) and a doctrine of demons (1 Tim 4:1)... Some of evangelicalism's best-known theologians and seminary and college professors are now debating among themselves ideas that would have been deemed entirely nonnegotiable before the last quarter of the 20th Century." Far from borrowing from each other or supposed source documents, each gospel writer worked independently, namely, without relying on another canonical gospel as a source of information. The first 3 gospels, the synoptics, each record the Lord Jesus' life from the same general perspective as the other two. They are distinctive, but not conflicting accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Today is part 2 of the Life of Christ, as we look at a "Preview of Who Jesus Is," as established in the variegated presentation of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.