Joel Kramer Interview Part 3

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Let's get all the evidence that's necessary to hopefully present a good case. As a result, Joel has produced a lot of DVDs dealing with the Christian faith in the United States. And as we were discussing yesterday, one of the reasons that he went over there was to get information to help respond to some of the claims of the Mormon Church.

I mean, if you're going to have a legitimate response, let's get all the evidence that's necessary to hopefully present a good case. As a result, Joel has produced a lot of DVDs dealing with the subject of Mormonism. Yesterday we were discussing DNA versus the Book of Mormon and the Bible versus the Book of Mormon, the Bible versus Joseph Smith, but you've done a number of other subjects as well that I think will help Christians in their witness to Latter-day Saints. Let's talk about some of the videos that you have done that really don't deal with Mormonism specifically, but certainly do deal with a lot of the secular claims against what Christians have historically believed. One video that you did during the Da Vinci Code days when that movie was coming out and the book was very popular was called The Jesus Tomb on Mass. What's that all about? Yeah, I mean, one thing I would like to clarify and one challenge that I was given by Mormons, which I thought was a good challenge was, hey, if you're going to challenge Mormonism, what we believe, you should also be about answering the challenges to your own faith.

That's right, that's true. So this is an example of going to Israel and dealing with the challenges to specifically Christianity. This claim was by a filmmaker who claimed that the bones of Jesus had been found in a tomb in Jerusalem. It was funded by James Cameron who came out with the hit movie Titanic, but who was the filmmaker? It was Semka Jacobovici. It was interesting because my archaeology professor, Shimon Gibson, was the first one into this tomb in question. He's the one that recorded it. He is really the source and the expert on this particular tomb. So I did this DVD because a rebuttal to what was being claimed needed to be done.

The claim by this filmmaker was obnoxious in the first place. The bottom line is this is a typical tomb from the time of Jesus from the first century AD. It does have ossuaries with the common names of that period. It does have an ossuary that says Jesus. Explain what an ossuary is. An ossuary is a bone box. It's where people are buried. They're given a secondary burial and they oftentimes have inscriptions about the deceased that remains inside. This particular ossuary that it possibly says Jesus, son of Joseph.

When Shimon Gibson excavated there and they put it into storage, it's no big deal. Why? Because there's three other ossuaries that have been found through archaeology in the Jerusalem area that also say Jesus, son of Joseph.

Why? Because these are very common names. So you're going to have a lot of Jews at that time named Jesus and several of them are going to be the son of Joseph. So it wasn't seen as any big deal because it wasn't. Then quite a long time later, the filmmaker came and tried to claim that these were the bones of Jesus of Nazareth. So I did a rebuttal to that. Today that issue continues.

It continues getting worse and worse in my opinion and another rebuttal needs to be done. It's become an academic issue and that is because we're talking about secular scholars who lean towards wanting those to be the bones of Jesus of Nazareth even though there's evidence that shows clearly that they're not. And of course the reason they need to try and demonstrate that is if you are going to say that Jesus rose from the dead, that would certainly give credence to his claims being God in the flesh.

Exactly. But it's amazing if Jesus really had been buried, hadn't resurrected in the way that Christians believe, then all the disciples would have had to do is go get that body. They would have known where the tomb was. If that was Jesus's tomb, let's produce the body. That would have taken care of the myth if that's what they wanted to believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Exactly and that many of them went to horrible deaths to defend something that they would have known to be a lie. None of it adds up and apart from all those very powerful reasons, the archaeology itself is not there for such a claim. I mean this was the tomb where a man named Jesus was buried. He had a son named Judah and he had a father named Joseph.

Nothing more to it than that. You've done several videos that are not on a theological theme necessarily but more on what the Bible teaches as far as the soul shepherd. You did one with sheep and shepherds. You followed a lot of shepherds around in your time.

What exactly did you do with this video to bring your point out? This was an interest of mine. I grew up in the Middle East around Bedouin as they're called today. This shepherd lifestyle that you see lived out in the Middle East. Then I was a pastor which is a shepherding role. Of course, as I think many pastors do, we are constantly wondering what our responsibility is and what our responsibility is not.

We want to do a faithful job to our shepherd who is Jesus. This was what I was interested in and what I wanted to explore. So I spent two and a half years running around with these shepherds and just being with them and seeing how they related to their flocks. I learned so much.

I really almost got addicted to it. It was so engaging. The Bible just came alive in a very real way as I saw this relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. All these things I hadn't understood about the Bible came clear because there are so many shepherds in the Bible. So many of the truths in the Bible are spoken in what I call shepherding terminology and concepts.

It was really an important project for me personally in what I learned. My hope was to pass some of that on to an audience by demonstrating that. My goal was to teach them their relationship with Jesus who is the shepherd of their soul, thus the soul shepherd.

That's really what I'm getting at. I'm using actual shepherding to make those points. The most powerful point in that movie for me is when you were showing the sheep following the shepherd and he has his own little whistle and call so they do know his voice as you talked about in the video. But there was one sheep that ended up getting away and you were there filming it and then the sheep stopped and you then commented as the sheep looked back at the shepherd you said he's making his one last look and then he's going on. And actually the sheep must have gone really close to where you were and went out into the wilderness and you talked about the danger of going out on your own.

I thought that was powerful. And you also talked about the separation of the sheep and the goats. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, the first thing that Bedouins do in the morning is they milk their sheep and their goats and the next thing they do is they, many of them, not all of them, it depends on the terrain, but they separate out their sheep and their goats from each other. They send one shepherd with the sheep, another with the goats.

Why? Because goats can feed in very rough terrain and sheep need a much more gentle terrain and so they don't want their goats eating what only their sheep can eat and so they separate them out. It's just one thing like that after another that you experience while you're there and that's what the Bible is talking about. That's one of my deep passions is to learn myself and then teach others. Here is what the Bible is talking about. You can still see it played out in reality today. And if we want to understand the culture that we're reading about, especially let's say during the patriarch period, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Moses also, they were all shepherds. They thought like shepherds and they lived that lifestyle and so the ones today who are living closest to that culture and that lifestyle are the Bedouins and here you can hang out with them.

They're living and shepherding in the very same places that the biblical shepherds shepherded thousands of years ago in the Bible. When Jesus calls us sheep, flattery or pejorative? You know, I used to think differently about that now.

I used to think obviously that's not a compliment. Your first impression of sheep is that they're just dumb and God is just calling us dumb. And I wouldn't say that's entirely not true but I think that really what that metaphor is getting at is that God created sheep uniquely to be 100% dependent upon a human shepherd in order to survive. So their need for the shepherd is what that's really getting at and calling us sheep. Our souls are in need of God like sheep are in need of their shepherd and without their shepherd they die.

They can't survive and the same is the case with our souls. We don't have much time but can you tell us in a nutshell about The Sacrifice which is probably your most controversial movie? Yeah, it's probably the least popular because it does actually show The Sacrifice of an animal. But the reason that I did it again was we need to understand what Jesus did for us and the significance of His sacrifice for all people and for all time and the perfect sacrifice, Him being God. And we can't see it and so what the Bible provides is it provides a foreshadowing of this animal sacrifice that helped people understand this concept of atonement and the need for blood for God's requirement to forgive. I can't show you what happened to Jesus but I'm not teaching animal sacrifice. I'm showing you what animal sacrifice is and teaching you animal sacrifice to help you understand what Jesus did for us and why it was necessary for Him to do that. To fulfill the requirement, the righteous requirement of the law so that we could have forgiveness. Animal sacrifice isn't fun to watch.

Nobody ever thought it was. It's not fun to watch an animal lose its life. But how can we take sin seriously? In the concept of sacrificing animals for the forgiveness of sin, you take your sin more seriously. If you're taking this animal and you realize this animal's got to die for what I did, that's pretty heavy and that God was willing to humble Himself and do that for us, it just blows my mind. What I took away from that film was you're showing this taking place in Samaria and there is a group in Israel to this day that still sees the significance of an animal sacrifice. Absolutely. And I think you're right, in a 21st century Western culture, not being connected with that, we don't see what a 1st century Jewish culture would have clearly understood.

Exactly. And I think that's one of the great things about that film, even though, I admit, you have to force yourself to watch this, but I think you get a lot out of it if you do. I really think you ought to consider getting some of these videos we've been talking about.

You can go to SourceFlicks.com, that's F-L-I-X for Flicks, SourceFlicks.com, you can order any of those videos, they're $10 each and well worth the investment of looking at them. We've been talking with Joel Kramer, good friend of ours, has a Masters in Archeology, spent a lot of time over in Israel and we're just gleaning from his expertise. Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another Viewpoint on Mormonism. All of us at Mormonism Research Ministry want to reach out and thank you for your kind support of Viewpoint on Mormonism. We hope that the information coming your way has been a help and encouragement as you share the hope we all have in Jesus Christ. During this holiday season, would you prayfully consider a year-end donation to MRM to help give us a much needed financial boost into the new year? Your tax deductible gifts are much appreciated and will be used to further our efforts at Mormonism Research Ministry.