Matthew 7:28-29
Remarkable Sayings
28 When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, 29 because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.
John 8:1-11
Jesus and the Adulteress
1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
11 “No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
John 20:24-29
Jesus Appears to Thomas After His Death
24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
1 Corinthians 15:1-8
Jesus Appeared to Five Hundred After His Death
1 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried,that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
Jesus taught with authority...He challenged the way we lived and how we thought of this earth, and how we think about our eternal soul and life after death...He was and always is teaching about His Father...Jesus teaches us the eternities...
For those to think that Jesus is a Jewish legend must look at His background and the background of those He taught...When Jesus said these remarkable things, we must remember He is Jewish and that His disciples are Jewish...Jesus' disciples and His Jewish listeners knew the First Commandment...Most of the people He taught and ministered to were Jewish...The knew that their is only One God...They knew that they could have no other Gods before and beside the God of Israel...For the Jewish believer to believe anything else is blasphemy...
Was Jesus just a legend?...The nation of Israel and all its people were the most familiar with God...So they knew quite well and maybe best of all countries who God was and His history...Even the followers of Jesus, even after three years, had a very difficult time grasping His divinity...C. S. Lewis said this about Jesus being a Legend, "What are we to do about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena?...One attempt consists in saying that the Man did not really say these things; but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them...This is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God — that there could not possibly be another...It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake...On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily...Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends...Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends...I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing...They are not artistic enough to be legends...From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly...Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so...Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there is no conversation that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel...There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence...In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger...Nothing comes of this...No one has ever based any doctrine on it...And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art...Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened?...The author put it in simply because he had seen it."...
So for His followers after His death to exaggerate and make Him a legend does not make sense...For them to exaggerate His stories, seem difficult to me, because of what He said, and how He said things with such great authority...How could His disciples and followers believe the things He taught knowing that there is Only One God?...His followers had to make a decision on who He was and who He is...They could not get the/their First Commandment wrong...There probably was confusion about who He was up until a point, a final point...His followers would, in my opinion, were somewhat confused who He was raised, and they saw His final sign...That sign is the Sign of Jonah...Jesus was resurrected by God and alive again...His Disciples and the early Christian followers believed He was the Messiah, and was God, or came from God, or part God for one this one basic reason...But everything He had done in His previous three year ministry backed up this final miracle of the resurrection...His Disciples and His early followers were changed and knew that He did not commit blasphemy of the First Commandment, when He was resurrected (however, we do know that there were still those who did not believe Him after His resurrection, and today there are non-believers for one reason or another, similar to those non-believers of His day)...So for His followers, this makes the resurrection the most important historical fact in the history of mankind...
If you saw Him after the resurrection or heard others you believed talk about His resurrection, you would believe somehow He is from our Father...If you were around, and did not see Him, but knew someone who had seen the resurrection (after all He appeared to over five hundred men, after His resurrection you had the chance probably to talk to any number of them...For Him to be a legend or myth, does not make sense because of His resurrection...The Jewish nation could not accept another God...The Jewish belief system would have to have a great reason, to believe He was the Messiah that was to come...And after all the Old Testament said that, in fact, a Messiah was to come -and He did...Now those who saw and heard Him die on the cross, were not ready for the resurrection...But we have a great reason to believe that He is the Messiah...That great reason is the resurrection...His resurrection makes us believe, what Thomas told Him, My LORD and My God...That He is the Messiah and is Divine...He existed in His regular life, and in His resurrected life...And He lives today, just as much as He lived two thousand years ago...