Recently, I connected via Twitter with a group of scientists, tech folks, and others who were interested in learning more about the world’s religions. They were starting a religious texts reading group and I got involved as someone who could explain the teachings of the Bible and Christian views, which I was extremely excited about. As it turned out, I ended up presenting a kind of “Introduction to Christianity” to this group. Today, I’ll begin a brief series where I summarize what I covered in my talk on that subject.

By way of background, this presentation was for a diverse group of people, only a few of whom were familiar with the Bible or had any idea of Christian teachings. Most could reasonably be called intellectuals of some variety, and many had more familiarity with Hindu teachings than the Bible, but all kinds of backgrounds were represented. (By the way, the group is open to additional members, so reach out if you’d like to know more.)

The first meeting of the group focused on reading a portion of the Bhagavad Gita and some of Gandhi’s commentary on it, which led to a rather interesting discussion. I presented at the group’s second meeting and was asked to address a number of things including:

  • The Bible and what it is
  • The Bible’s historical context and how the texts we were looking at fit into Christianity as a whole
  • The Sermon on the Mount (so I picked this for the text we mainly would focus on)
  • A brief overview of the major divisions of Christianity
  • The canon of Scripture (how we got the Bible we have today)

At the same time, I also wanted to explain the core Christian message (the “gospel”) clearly from the Bible itself, since any discussion of Christianity without that would be woefully deficient.

The group meets for an hour and a half, and we needed time for discussion, so I tried to move quickly and couldn’t devote much attention to some of the more minor points.

In this series, I’ll try and go over the major topics we discussed and give additional references.

The Bible

An image of a Bible

The Bible forms a single, coherent volume, consisting of 66 books divided across two major portions – the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is 39 books written from roughly 2000 BC to around 400 BC (with some drawing from earlier oral histories). It centers around the Jewish people and deals with God’s plan of salvation which would come to all nations through the coming Savior. The New Testament consists of 27 books, written from roughly 40 AD to around 100 AD, and primarily concerns the person and work of Jesus Christ, the promised Savior, and God’s plan of salvation for the past, present and future.

The historical facts behind our texts

In this series (as in my talk), we’ll be looking at the Sermon on the Mount, a very famous part of Jesus’ teaching, along with some passages from the book of Romans in the New Testament. Before we do so, let’s look briefly at some of the historical facts of Jesus’ life which are essentially undisputable.

First, even secular and Jewish historians of the time (as well as Christians, of course) agree to some core facts concerning the events of the time. Jesus of Nazareth lived from roughly 0-4 AD until around 32-34 AD, and ultimately was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate for his claims. Particularly, he claimed to be God, and the promised savior, the one the Jews had long been awaiting. These claims were precisely why the Jews insisted on his crucifixion, as they viewed his claim to be God to be blasphemy.

These historical claims lead to a critical question we all must wrestle with: Who was Jesus? Even his enemies agree as to his claims – he claimed to be God, and he claimed that this was the most important aspect of his teachings. Given that, who was he really? Was he a liar? Was he some kind of lunatic? Or was he really God himself, Lord of all creation? This can be summarized as the “Lord, lunatic, or liar” dilemma. His teachings did not leave any room to view him simply as a good moral teacher, as many do. Either he was wrong about what he said was most important – who he was and what he came to do – or he was right. If he was wrong, then he was not a good teacher, however good his moral teachings might be. Instead, he was a liar and a hypocrite of the very sort he condemned, or he was a lunatic, too insane to take seriously. However, if he was right, we need to look deeply at his person and work, not just his moral teachings.

Jesus’ moral teachings were not his primary focus. He said, “I and the Father are one,” (John 10:30) and “No one comes to the Father except through me,” (John 14:6) indicating that he was God become man, and that no one can come to God except through him. Was he right? Or was he wrong? We all answer this question one way or another.

The rest of this series

In this series, as in my talk, I will give a very brief explanation of core Christian teaching, what we call the “gospel”, then go over highlights from the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew 5-7 and show how this explains the gospel. Then, I’ll do the same from key passages in the book of Romans. Following that, I’ll address some of the questions I was asked.

If you’d like to read ahead, as folks in the religious texts group did, you could read:

I recommend the New American Standard Bible as a good translation, and that’s used in the links just prior.

If you want other additional readings on the Sermon on the Mount, you could check out JC Ryle’s exposition of the gospel of Matthew, especially Matthew 5:1-12 and 5:21-48. And for additional reading on Romans, you might read Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans, which explains the organization of the book of Romans and some of its key themes.

The next post in this series explains the Christian worldview/the gospel