Ok, hypothetically speaking here, lets suppose he wasn't being completely honest. Here is a guy who is going around the Jewish comunity, claiming to know the Messiah, and claiming that the Messiah sent him to preach His gospel. First question; Did any of you read the Old Testiment or the Torah? Remember the Mosaic Laws? Do you know what God says to do to a false prophet? It was an edict From God to stone people (specificaly other Jews) who preached any God but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Here you have a man who the Jews would have concidered to be twisting the word of God, a false prophet. Being a prophet is a bad enough gig for a Jew at any rate, tell a lie and get stoned, tell the truth and get stoned, these guys where hard on their prophets, but they where even harder on the false prophets. Yet here is a man going around preaching and teaching the salvation of men, not just for the Jews but for the gentiles as well, by grace, through faith in Christ Jesus, whom the Jews did not accept as the Messiah. Whether he's telling the truth or not, he's K.O.S. (Kill On Sight) If anyone has any doubts about this I'd like to see them march into the middle of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and start preaching Christ as the Messiah. Ten buck says they'll be throwing rocks (if not granades) inside of ten minutes. Furthermore there are atleast 2 accounts (one his own and another from a later date) that say he was beaten more than once, stoned more than once, imprisoned more than once, and he was probly even killed for what he was teaching. Why, in the world, would anyone go through all of that trouble if it was a lie? Not to mention all of the other Apostles who where put to death for teaching Christ as the Messiah. Granted there are probably quit a few cases where someone might be willing to die for a lie, provided they do not know it is a lie? But the apostles, Paul included where supossed to have seen, and in most cases to have traveled with Jesus throughout his minestry, and after His resurection. These people would have KNOWN that they where lieing, if in fact they where. The number of people I can name off the top of my head that would be willing to die for something that they KNOW is a lie...(for something that doesn't implicate them in another crime)...frankly I can't think of one. What purpose is there in it? So that some potentate 3, 4, or 5 hundred years down the road can say, "give to the church, support the ministry?" Come on now, there are only two possibilities, either they where lieing, and knew that they where lieing, or they where telling the truth as best they could about what they saw. There really is no middle ground here.
At any rate, keep digging.
21 Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon [all] four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth;
22 [Even] these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind
™ Version 4.2
