Was the Road to Emmaus a Mental Breakdown?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. As you may know, I’ve been doing a series this Easter season exploring fittingly enough the resurrection. I’m looking at the biblical evidence for the resurrection as well as some other sources. What are the theories against the resurrection? How else do people explain the evidence? What have we gotten from other sources like Tacitus? But right now I want to go back to the Bible itself and explore maybe an aspect of the resurrection we don’t normally spend a lot of time looking at. And that’s the road to Emmaus. This is an encounter that two travelers have with Jesus on this journey from Jerusalem to, you guessed it, Emmaus. I want to look at three things. After kind of exploring what are we talking about with the story I want to look at, first, what does this mean for the hallucination hypothesis?

The idea that the apostles just imagined the whole thing. They just imagined that Jesus had risen from the dead. They really wanted to believe so they kind of let their minds get away from them or they were under extreme anguish and stress. You get the idea. So it’s the idea, the apostles weren’t lying, but they were just mentally diluted. That’s the first thing we’re going to look at. The second, there’s this part where Jesus presents himself as a fulfillment of what the Old Testament had to say about the Messiah suffering and rising again. And I want to explore what does he mean by that? And third, there’s an important dimension that deals with the Eucharist, and I think we can learn a lot about the Eucharist and what this means about Christ’s presence. So all of that is jam-packed in this one account. Now let’s start with the account itself.

In Luke 24, this begins in verse 13. I’m not going to go verse by verse because there’s too much there to do it justice, but I’ll give you kind of the basic synopsis. So it’s Easter morning and at this point in the narrative, the women have been to the empty tomb. We talked about that last week, and they’ve left and there’s confusion because they haven’t seen the risen Christ, but they have seen two men who seem to be angels who tell them he is not here, he is risen, and this is startling, this is confusing. They were going there to anointed a dead body and they don’t find a body and instead have strangers telling them that he’s risen from the dead. Their account is confusing and people don’t immediately believe it. That’s clear even from the apostles. Well now we catch up with two disciples. These aren’t members of the 12th, but these are two disciples who are walking from Jerusalem, the sixties stadia is a unit given in the Bible. It’s about seven miles, to the village of Emmaus.

Now, we don’t know exactly who these two are. Only one of them is named Cleopas. This is an interesting kind of detail. We’re not told that this Cleopas is the same person as Clopas who is mentioned in the gospels. This could be a variation of the name. If so, there’s good reason to believe that Clopas is Jesus uncle. So you hear about the brothers of the Lord like James and Joseph, but if you read the biblical account carefully, you’ll see that James and Joseph are actually the sons of Mary, the wife of Clopas. So Clopas and Mary have these kids, James and Josephs, who are near enough relatives to Jesus that they’re being called brothers. In Hebrew, you’ve got a brother used for a wide variety of near relations.

Abraham and lot are uncle and nephew, they’re called brothers. So all that’s to say there’s some indication here maybe that this is Clopas, that Cleopas and Clopas are the same person. That would make sense of a detail we’re going to see in a minute. It would also tell us who the other traveler is. We’re not told the sex or the name of the other disciple on the road, and so it’s easy reading it to just assume it’s another male disciple. But these two live together and seemingly just the two of them live together that looks more like a married couple. And so this could very well be Jesus aunt and uncle. The second traveler could be Mary, the wife of Clopas. Nevertheless, all of that is purely speculative going just off of the fact the names are the same and off of one or two other details, which we’ll cover as we dive in it.

I just think it’s an interesting kind of bit of context. Whatever the case, we’ve got these two fairly anonymous disciples who are going home and they’re confused. And while they’re having probably a pretty intense discussion, a third person joins them and we know it’s Jesus because Luke tells us so, but they don’t know it’s Jesus because they’ve not seen the risen Christ, and as Luke says, their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Now, that’s an interesting detail because it gives us a little clue about this really mysterious thing about the nature of the resurrected body. We know for instance, Mary Magdalene doesn’t recognize Jesus right away, she thinks he’s a gardener. There’s something going on there where they’re being seemingly supernaturally prevented from seeing him. This is actually kind of an important detail in the sense that this is not just wishful thinking where oh, is that Jesus in the crowd?

There’s not that. It is quite the opposite of that. Even when they encounter Jesus, they have no reason to believe that they’re going to be walking with Jesus to Emmaus. This is seemingly pretty random. Nevertheless, he then asked them what they’re talking about. They ask if he’s the only person who hasn’t heard the news. They talk about how they were following this Messiah, but he was crucified. And then there’s this interesting line where one of them says, moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body. And they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.

Now the reason this is interesting is because if this is Mary and Clopas, Mary is one of the women who went to the tomb. So she’s not just hearing this second hand. If Clopas is telling the story about, well, some women went to the tomb, he means also his wife, although he may not want to share that information with the traveler who might think they’re crazy and it would explain why he already knows about this visitation to the empty tomb sometime during the day on Easter. We don’t know exactly when on Easter Sunday this falls, but we know this, they’re making a seven mile journey and they get to Emmaus at dinnertime. So you can kind of do the math in terms of how long that would take to walk. So we’re probably looking at the afternoon of Easter Sunday.

Jesus, in any new case, responds to this by saying, oh, foolish men in slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And then Luke says that beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself. Now, as I kind of indicated, we’re going to get back to what kind of things those might be. Luke doesn’t tell us, which drives me nuts, but there it is. In any case, they then get to Emmaus and Jesus acts like he’s going to keep walking and he makes them invite him in. They say, stay with us for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent. Jesus then goes in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them and their eyes were opened and they recognized him and he vanished out of their sight.

We’re going to get back to that part too, but for now just notice their reaction. It’s only at this point where they’re like, oh, how did we not see? Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures. He was making all this sense of all of these Old Testament scriptures. They wouldn’t have called them Old Testament then, but you get the idea. And they rise that hour and they take the seven mile journey back to Jerusalem. Hey, you walked seven miles at least today, here’s another seven after dinner. And they find the 11 there and the 11 then tell them the Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon. So they’ve both got exciting news of the resurrected Jesus appearing to them. And so this is itself a great little detail because it’s independent corroboration. In other words, you don’t have the power of suggestion in either direction.

It isn’t. They heard about all of these resurrection appearances thought, man, it’s too bad we don’t have one of those and then decided the traveler who was with them might actually be Jesus. No, they had this incredible experience with seeing the risen Christ. They come back and find out as they’re going to tell this news that the people they’re going to tell it to have also seen the risen Christ and neither of them made the other one kind of dispose to imagining that. That’s an important detail when we get into the psychological factors. In any case, the two Emmaus disciples then tell the apostles what had happened on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread. Okay, so the three issues I want to look at. First, did the disciples hallucinate? Because they’re really are really three ways of explaining any kind of evidence.

I don’t just mean Christian evidence, I mean any kind of evidence for anything. If you are on trial and someone’s trying to prove you committed a crime, the witness who gets up there, there’s three possibilities. Number one, they’re telling the truth. It’s the authentic truth. Number two, it’s a benign falsehood, meaning they’re wrong unintentionally. Maybe they thought they saw something but their vision’s not very good or they’re bad with faces or they saw you there but they had the day wrong or they misremembered or they got confused. Whatever the case. The third possibility is it’s a malicious falsehood that they’re lying under oath to try to get you in trouble for whatever reason. And now it’s possible we should say it at the outset for the same testimony to have elements of two or even three of these things. You might tell a story that’s partially true, but partly you get the details wrong and partly you intentionally lie about some things maybe to make yourself look better.

So we don’t have to just say everything goes in one bucket here, but as we’re looking at the resurrection accounts, it’s worth asking, well, what do we make of these? And for many people, there’s a desire to put the claims of the resurrection in this middle category of benign falsehoods because the apostles don’t seem like malicious liars. They don’t seem like the kind of people who would just make this kind of thing up for no apparent reason, especially when you realize how much damage it causes. You would think if they had an ounce of goodness in them and they saw that their lie was getting people tortured and killed and separating them from the Judaism they’d grown up in, it would take something pretty sociopathic to continue to convince people of this lie to spread it all over the Roman Empire even when you know it’s going to result in your own death.

Now, I should say there’s a great conversation between William Lynn Craig and cosmic skeptic in which he raises the objection. Well, how do we know they weren’t just too far gone? And that’s a really good question because we know from correspondence, I believe it’s Pliny, the younger, has a letter around the turn of the century, around 100, where he’s writing to the emperor and wanting to make sure that they’ve got the right kind of judicial proceedings. And so we know that in the early Roman persecutions, if Christians would renounce a faith, they’d be allowed to live. You just offer a little bit of incense. And so yeah, we don’t know for sure. It’s possible things would’ve worked differently a few decades earlier. It’s possible the apostles would’ve been too high ranking to be given that kind of amnesty for idolatry kind of deal. But nevertheless, it seems still very implausible that many people would be that dedicated to a falsehood for no apparent reason, for no obvious gain.

And so all that’s to say, a lot of people say, okay, maybe it’s not that, but it might be a benign falsehood. They’re grief stricken. And so maybe they were imagining things, maybe they were seeing things. And there’s a few major problems with this. The first is the people saying this almost invariably are not actually familiar with the psychological literature on this. They are just assuming a certain model of mass hallucination that isn’t real because second, hallucinations are definitionally an interior rather than an exterior phenomenon. Like the difference between an optical illusion where there’s something, the color of the dress looks really confusing or red and yellow and you spin them really fast on a color wheel look orange. All of those are optical illusions. There’s something in the external stimuli that is causing the confusion. With the hallucination, that’s not the case. Something within you is causing the confusion, that’s why it’s a psychological disorder. It’s an abnormality I should say.

This is not how you are meant to operate. And so the problem with a mass hallucination is you’re saying everybody has this internal thing happening and this thing that’s subjective, that’s individualistic, and yet it happens to all of them. It’s like suggesting all of them had the same asset trip. That’s not plausible. If you understand how these things work, it doesn’t work. And one of the ways we know this is there’re actually the decent amount of literature written on both mass delusions and hysteria. Now, this is from 2001. Some of this terminology is no longer used. And this is also from the skeptical inquiry, which is like this is a believe, atheistic or at least skeptical publication. And it’s two sociologists who specialize in this area, Robert Bartholomew and Eric Goode.

And as I said, it’s like 2001. So they’re looking at the last millennium and they’re looking at, a lot of people got really worried about the year 2000. And so they’re saying, okay, this looked like a mass delusion. What about some other ones? But they actually defined their terms and they explained that mass hysteria is the rapid spread of something called conversion disorder in which you have bodily complaints with no organic basis. So psychological distress is converted or channeled into physical symptoms. You have a lot of anxiety and you become convinced you’ve got cancer or you suddenly feel like a sharp pain in your chest and your heart is fine, but you are just afraid that your heart’s not doing well. That’s conversion like that. The kind of conversion we’re talking about, not religious conversion, it’s this conversion from psychological to somatic, bodily kind of things.

And then they subdivide this into anxiety hysteria and motor hysteria. I’m only going in depth here to show you that people who claim mass hysteria for the apostles don’t know what mass hysteria is because it just does not apply. So anxiety hysteria is usually short term. It’s often triggered by something like a strange smell. You smell something weird, you think, oh no, something is going seriously wrong, I’m getting sick from this. And so you start to have all these psychosomatic effects like headache, dizziness, nausea, breathlessness, general weakness. There’s also motor hysteria. So this is something like you are in an overly strict environment like an overly strict household. You have no kind of outlet, no way of expressing your frustration, your anger, your hurt, whatever else. And it builds up and it builds up and it builds up and it can lead to all kind of weird breakdowns bodily. You can have twitching and spasms, shaking, all of this. And that can take weeks or months to subside. Notice here, none of this sounds in either case, anything like what the apostles are describing.

We don’t have cases of, and then the apostles all fell to the floor twitching and spasming. There’s nothing like this. So they note these two sociologists. So mass hysteria is often used inappropriately to describe collective delusions. You can have a collective delusion where everybody gets convinced of a certain false thing, they have false or exaggerated beliefs. That’s collective delusion. That’s not mass hysteria. For mass hysteria to be the case, you need illness symptoms. So let me give you a couple examples of mass hysteria and collective delusions. So mass hysteria, one of the headline cases recently was there was this craze or phenomenon of primarily teen girls, but a variety of young people who started reporting having Tourettes like syndromes or what they imagined Tourettes was like. And it turned out that there were 4 billion views on TikTok of videos related to Tourettes. And I don’t want to say it glamorizes it, but it kind of glamorize. It makes Tourettes look interesting and weird, and for kids who want an identity, it was kind of attractive.

And this wasn’t something that was just intentionally adopted, but people who were psychologically susceptible to that found themselves experiencing Tourettes like syndromes. In the Wall Street Journal article that originally announced this case or kind of broke this to kind of the broader public, one of the things researchers were noticing is that a lot of these young women were saying beans in a British accent. And then it turned out, sure enough, there’s a TikToker who’s British and the Tourettes like syndrome, she’s showing, she says beans in a British accent. So they weren’t just copying her symptoms, they were copying her accent and it was like, okay, we know where this comes from. Now as you get people away from TikTok, it turns out the Tourettes were not real Tourettes, it goes away. That’s the kind of thing we’d be dealing with. That’s not what the apostles are talking about. That doesn’t relate. You can’t get from that to resurrection appearances.

In terms of collective delusions, an interesting case is in the spring of 1954 in Seattle, because there were reports of a string of vandals and so concerned car owners began to go out and look at their windshields and lo and behold there are little dents and cracks and what’s called pitting in the windshield, gravel hits it, that sort of thing. And so there were just a tremendous number of calls to the police. Oh no, the vandals got my windshield. And what they quickly realized is that this was mass hysteria or more accurately, this is a collective delusion. It’s not a medical thing, it’s not necessary in the strict sense. It’s collective delusion that people were looking at their windshields rather than through them. Well, notice here two things. One, it isn’t like they’re imagining that their car’s been spray painted, there actually is physical damage to their car. They just had never noticed it until someone pointed it out. That’s actually similar to the way mass hysteria and stereotype events occur, which is if you suddenly become really aware of your body, you might notice you don’t feel great.

You maybe didn’t feel great for an hour, but you suddenly are aware of it when you’re in a high stress environment an have a bodily symptom, that may be a very real bodily symptom that goes along with your anxiety, that kind of thing. But all that’s to say. And then the second thing, this again, is just a world away from resurrection. So neither collective delusions nor mass hysteria get you there. Okay, there’s one more kind of scientific ish research that I want to point out because this isn’t really science, but this is scholars in the biblical field trying to use sciencey sounding things to make their case. So Steven Smith, who makes an argument for the hallucination hypothesis, he argues what the apostles were experiencing was hallucination. He points out that Gilmore and Ludeman, we looked at Ludeman earlier in one of the, I think a couple episodes ago, identify the appearance to the more than 500 with the Pentecost episode. Now again, that is a bad equation because the Pentecost episode, Jesus notably does not show up.

It’s the dissent of the Holy Spirit. So they’re messing with the evidence, they’re distorting the evidence theory, they’re inaccurately grouping the appearance to the 500 with Pentecost, which by the way involved 120 in the upper room and then them preaching this to a group of thousands and 3000 conversions. You don’t have the 500, you don’t have the appearance of Christ. I guess it’s just arbitrary to say these are the same event, there’s nothing linking them together. Also chronologically as you look at first Corinthians 15, Pentecost would be in the wrong order, it all goes to say, bad theory out the gate just on a biblical level. Nevertheless, they account for this event in terms of an outbreak of psychologically generated mass ecstasy. It was popularly called mass hysteria, but what psychologists now call mass psychogenic illness or mass sociogenic illness. Now the difference being psychogenic illness is when you convince yourself you’re sick or a bunch of people convince themselves they’re sick. Sociogenic illness, everybody’s kind of convincing everybody else they’re sick.

There’s a pretty famous case of this happening at a school where there was an outbreak of food poisoning and then one person after another started reporting symptoms and then it turned out there was not actually any food poisoning, you just had susceptible teenagers once again. That the idea is what’s happening here. But once again, there’s a world of difference between, you’ll notice mass psychogenic illness, mass sociogenic illness, both have illness in the description for a reason. What the apostles are feeling is not a vague sense of ecstasy or euphoria or anything like that. They’re claiming an exterior phenomenon. They’re claiming not just I felt great and so I knew Christ was risen. No, they’re saying he actually appeared to us. But nevertheless, just notice this is the kind of thing being claimed and that it’s being claimed by researchers who are applying these psychological phenomenon in areas where they just don’t make any sense and don’t apply at all, and they just seem out of their depth. So Stephen Smith has a footnote here.

It’s saying people are more likely to see a phenomenon if it is suggested to them that they will do so or if they already have a sense of expectancy. Footnote there gives the example of hundreds of Marian apparitions that have occurred over the centuries. Notable among these is a so-called miracle of the Sonic Fatima in 1917 at which an estimated 70,000 people were reportedly present. Many of these claimed to have seen the sun dance or change color on this occasion, but not everybody saw the exact same spectacle. And significantly some of those present reported nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, nothing of this supposes solar phenomenon was witnessed beyond the environs of Fatima, and no unusual activity was reported by astronomers. So let’s break this down. This is what’s called begging the question. If you assume that Marian apparitions couldn’t possibly happen, then you can use that same, well, obviously that didn’t happen to say obviously the resurrection didn’t happen. But on what basis are you saying obviously Marian apparitions, aren’t happening? I mean, you’ve got hundreds of cases here.

You’re going to say hundreds of cases of people reporting this are all false. And what’s more, you have 70,000 people here, most of whom seem to report seeing the same thing. There might be discrepancies in their account, but that’s not unusual. Some people don’t see it. Okay, fair enough. But that’s completely consistent with a real event. In a real event, someone may not see it, someone may not be a good eyewitness. If you know anything about crime, again, I’ll go back to that example. You will have people who were present who didn’t see the important thing go down. Not surprising, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. You’ll have people who didn’t remember key details who aren’t lying, they just don’t remember. If you had 70,000 witnesses to a crime and most of them said, yeah, we saw this, I think you would say, yeah, that crime seems like it actually happened.

And so it really is just this bias against Marian apparitions and the resurrection that accounts for this because once you get rid of that kind of irrational prejudice, any other event that has 70,000 witnesses, you’re going to say, well, obviously that’s real, not obviously that’s fake. All that’s to say is psychologically there’s not really a support for the mass hallucination. They’re not getting this from any of scientific literature, they’re getting this from a bias against the supernatural. And you see this when you actually read the scientific literature on things like psychosomatic illness and things like sociogenic illness and all of this stuff. The mass hysteria type literature, it exists. It doesn’t support the idea that 500 people all have the same hallucination at once. Even in the example that he’s giving. His argument is this has to be fake because they aren’t all seen exactly the same thing. But in the case of the appearance to the 500, they seemingly are seen the same thing.

But in any case, it’d be very hard to take the hallucination theory and apply it to the road to Emmaus. Let’s recap what we saw. The traveler walks with them on the seven mile journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus. That’s not like we thought we saw a light in the sky and it looked like Jesus. No, he walked with them for seven miles. He explained the scriptures to them in a new way that totally eyeopening to them. He joined them for a meal. He took blessed and broke the bread in this Eucharistic way, we’re going to get to that. They then and only then realizes Jesus. He then disappears from their sight. And then independently of all of this, the Jerusalem apostles report independently having seen Jesus, none of that sounds like a hallucination. It would be very difficult to explain with any half coherent understanding of how hallucinations work, how you get those phenomenon, not just an auditory and a visual hallucination, but a tactile hallucination.

One who could teach you things, who can have a meal with you. That is not how a hallucination works. It just isn’t. And so getting back to the three ways you have to handle the evidence, the benign falsehood, the hallucination type theories, they just don’t hold up well. So you have to either say The road to Emmaus is true, or for some reason they’re just maliciously lying about this. They’re taking this obscure event about going to Emmaus and they’re making up a lie for no apparent reason. And this is all just like some invention, some concoction, and that is a much harder kind of theory to defend itself because it’s just implausible. They better to say it seems have actually happened. Okay, that is the first of three things I wanted to cover, but I think it’s the longest of the three hopefully. The next one’s going to take a little bit of time as well because I want to, oh, yeah, sorry, I have an image of whack-a-mole.

If you’re listening to the audio, you might be like, why did he just interrupt himself? Because I had an image of whack-a-mole, I didn’t want it to go wasted, and I didn’t want to just pass by an image of whack-a-mole without commentary. That we have to watch out for this kind of flipping between the benign and malicious explanations. And again, by all means. It’s possible for someone to both get one detail wrong and lie about another detail. But nevertheless, it’s a little suspicious. If you’re in trial and you say, oh, yeah, this eyewitness is just making a mistake. He thinks it was me and it wasn’t me. And then someone says, oh, but look, your DNA’s there and you say, oh, the cops planted it. You’ve combined a series of benign and malicious explanations and that just doesn’t look plausible. It’s possible, but it’s a heck of a coincidence to have one whole set of benign falsehoods and their whole set of malicious ones.

In other words, it’s quite a weird coincidence that on the one hand you’ve got a group of people apparently willing to just make up resurrection stories and independently of that, you’ve got another group of people having hallucinations of that same thing. Man, that’s coincidental. And all that’s to say, I don’t think it’s plausible to argue for both benign and malicious and just go back and forth between them. Not that it’s literally impossible. It could happen. It just isn’t a plausible explanation. Okay, now, under the second of the three things, everything written about Jesus. Don’t worry, we won’t cover all of it. But there’s this bit in Luke’s account in verse 25 to 27 of Luke 24, where again he says, wasn’t it necessary that Christ should suffer these things and entered his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures of things concerning himself.

And as I said before, it drives me crazy that Luke doesn’t say for instance, this, this and this, but I think we can make a bit of an educated guess. What are the kind of things that he showed them that were Old Testament prefigurement of the necessity of the Messiah to suffer and then to enter into his glory? What are the prefigurement of the death and resurrection of Jesus that we see? Well, we have some clues from other parts of the New Testament because presumably the Emmaus disciples then share these kind of insights, and these insights probably show up in one way or another in other places in the New Testament. Hopefully that makes sense. If they’re sharing, look, Jesus showed us these passages, really point to him. Well, later on, apostles writing or evangelist writing are going to say, oh, okay, yeah, let’s mention this connection.

So what connections do we see in Hebrews 10? There’s this quotation of Psalm 40 in the Septuagint 2 version, and that Psalm 40:6, Hebrews 10 says that when Christ came into the world, he said, sacrifices and offerings, that was not desired, but a body has now prepared for me. And so it’s the notion that the perfect fulfillment, like the perfect offering won’t be some animal sacrifice or offering. It’s rather going to be the incarnation that there’s someone coming who can say A body you’ve prepared for me, someone who pre-existed and who when taking on a body is able to offer the perfect sacrifice. That’s the first place. The second we have Matthew one also quotes this Septuagint, Isaiah 7:14, behold a virgin shall conceive and bears son in his name shall be called Emmanuel, which means God with us.

So again, you’ve got this incarnation prophecy from the Old Testament. Then we’ll jump forward from the incarnation to the death of Jesus. I’m obviously skipping a lot. I love wisdom too, and I think when Catholics and Protestants are debating whether the seven disputed books called deuterocanonical by Catholics, called apocryphal by Protestants, whether those should be in the Bible or not, more people should read wisdom too before they jump to a conclusion, because it’s clearly prophetic. It is written well before the time of Christ, and yet it describes what can only be his death. It’s depicting the wicked here and it describes him as saying, let us lie and wait for the righteous man because he’s inconvenient to us and opposes our actions. He approaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and calls himself a child of the Lord.

It goes on to say, we are considered by him as something base and he avoids our ways as unclean. He calls the last end of the righteous happy and boasts that God is his Father. So you’ve got the righteous one, the Son of God, and they then say, let us see if his words are true and let us test what will happen at the end of his life. For if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture. We may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to his shameful death for according to what he says, he will be protected. Now, I’d encourage you to read that passage and then go read Matthew’s account of the passion.

And I mean Matthews intentionally, all of them would be good, but Matthews has some really striking parallels where they say, if you are the son of God, come down. This is our way of finding out if you really are God’s son or not. They’re clear about this and they’re mocking about it. I don’t think they’re really like, I wonder. Because you wouldn’t crucify him if you actually thought he was. But they presented as a sort of test like, oh, prove. If you really are the son of God, this should be no problem to get down from the cross. And that’s what Wisdom 2 says they’re going to do. They’re going to condemn him to a shameful death to make him prove that he is God’s son. That’s all right there. It’s in the Old Testament.

The next kind of New Testament application we have of the Old Testament will be John 19. The soldier breaks the legs of the two thieves on the cross on either side of Jesus. When they get to him, they see he’s already dead and they don’t break his legs. Now, breaking the legs of the soldiers leads to his asphyxiation. I kind of looked at this in an earlier episode when we talked about how the cross just what happens with the crucifixion, but with Jesus’s case, there’s no need to do this because he’s already dead. And so instead the soldier pierces his side and blood and water flow out. But strikingly John says that these things fulfill the scripture, not a bone of him shall be broken. And again, another scripture says they should look on him whom may have pierced. Now the second of those scriptural references is really clear in Zachariah 12:10.

But the first of those is really confusing. Not a bone shall be broken. There’s two kind of possible contenders. One is Psalm 34:19-20, which says that many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones. Not one of them is broken. That’s sort of similar, but the more direct parallel’s actually really striking, it’s Exodus 12:46, which says, in one house shall the Passover lamb be eaten. You shall not carry forth any of the flesh outside the house and you shall not break a bone of it. Now, if that’s the verse that John has in mind, it seems like it is, it shows us something really striking about the way that the New Testament gooses the Old Testament. So for instance, Jesus says, streams of living water will flow out of his followers, and we see streams of living water flowing out of his side right here.

This is all references to Ezekiel about the new temple, but it’s not really about a temple, it’s about a nonphysical, not a building. It’s about the temple of the Holy Spirit, every Christian, but in a special way, Jesus himself. And so we see this really fascinating employment of the Old Testament of things you wouldn’t even expect were prophetic where they say, look, that thing about how you had to eat the Passover lamb without breaking its bones, that wasn’t just a random detail, it’s not just a sacrificial rule or legalese. No, that was fore telling, that was Prefiguring how the true lamb of God Christ wouldn’t have any of his bones broken. So it’s fascinating, it’s brilliant. And so it shows they’re not just fulfilling, Jesus doesn’t just fulfill the obvious messianic stuff like Isaiah 7, he fulfills all this stuff you wouldn’t even expect was a messianic prophecy, and that’s really remarkable.

I mean, it’s easy 2000 years on to just say, oh, well maybe they’re making it all up. That just doesn’t really work. I haven’t even talked about things like Psalm 22, which makes it really clear that this the person proclaiming to God, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, is being killed by having his hands and his feet pierced. And this is written over a millennium before the invention of crucifixion. And yet we know historically Jesus is crucified and cries out on the cross. That’s a heck of a coincidence. You have all of these things where you say, how in the world does he manage to fulfill all of these different Old Testament passages? Now again, you could come up with a malicious explanation that, oh, well, they made up all of these details, but they didn’t make up the Old Testament scriptures.

It isn’t like many times biblical scholars when they see something that is just clearly fulfilled, their explanation will be that it’s a prophecy ex vitro that is a prophecy after the facts. Something’s called a post diction. So when Jesus says that the temple will be destroyed, skeptical scholars say, well, this must have been written after 70 when the temple was destroyed because how could Jesus possibly know the future? He’d have to be God or at least a prophet. And so because of the bias against the supernatural, this standard scholarly kind of shift is to just make everything a later date say, oh, it must have happened later. You can’t do that with the Old Testament because there’s no question that the Old Testament has written centuries before. In some cases, maybe even a couple millennia before the events that are being described in the life of Jesus. And so when he’s fulfilling all of these things, you can’t use that dodge. You can’t just say, maybe the apostles invented this. You have a whole religion that has the Old Testament and not the New Testament.

The Old Testament is not a Christian forgery, right? So when Jesus is fulfilling all of these things, it really is quite telling. There’s one more I want to talk about. Hebrews 11 looks at Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, what was called the binding of Isaac in Jewish tradition. And Hebrews 11 says it like this, said by faith Abraham when he was tested, offered up Isaac and he who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son of whom it was said through Isaac shall your descendants be named. He considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead, hence, he did receive him back. And this was a symbol. And you might say a symbol of what? A symbol of the resurrection. Now I want to just point this out because oftentimes when modern readers look at the events of Genesis with the sacrifice of Isaac, we’re looking through a moral framework saying, well, is it moral to sacrifice Isaac? And of course not that you can’t have, talks about the technological suspension of the ethical.

You can’t do that. You can’t just say, well, if God tells you to do an immoral thing, you can do it. No. But that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is what Hebrews 11 highlights, and it’s a part we actually miss most of the time that you have to first understand Genesis 17 before you can understand Genesis 22. In Genesis 17, God promises Abraham that he will have descendants. Remember he promise descendants numerous as of stars, and in Genesis 17, God promises that this will happen through the son of Sarah Isaac very explicitly.

And then in Genesis 22 he says, take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. The point of this passage is not, are you willing to do really barbaric things for God? The point of this passage is, are you willing to trust God when he’s told you A, that your son who has no children at this point will be the one through whom you have descendants as numerous as to stars, and B, that he wants you to take him up to Mount Moriah and offer him up as a sacrifice? Are you willing to trust God when it doesn’t make sense when you don’t understand his plan? And Abraham is, that’s the point of the story. The point of the story is not how blood thirsty human sacrifice is.

The point of the story is not you should be willing to sacrifice your children for God. The point of the story is that Abraham is willing to do the radical thing, not just in the face of this is wrong, to kill an innocent person, but in the face of God has made promises that this seems to be in conflict with that. Abraham’s trust is so profound that he knows there’s some way this will all get worked out. He doesn’t know what, he doesn’t have a clear vision of an angel’s going to stop me at the last second, but he knows somehow, some way, God is faithful to his promises. And so even though this looks like the end that it looks like this is going to negate all of God’s promises, I trust God enough that that’s not what’s going to happen. That’s actually the point of the story, and it’s really clear if you read it in that context.

But significantly in verse four, so remember, this is on Mount Moriah, which by the way is the mount on which the temple of Jerusalem is built. This is a critical way of understanding the whole sacrificial structure. They get there on the third day. On the third day, Abraham lifts up his eyes and he sees the place far off. He then takes his son and he lays the wood on his son and his son ascends the mount to his own sacrifice. And the parallels to Jesus carrying the cross are obvious. And Isaac the son says, behold the fire in the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? Abraham says, God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. Now if you take the view that this is just about human sacrifice, you can kind of cynically read this as Abraham lying to Isaac to make him more docile. And I don’t think that’s right. I think Abraham really has a sense that somehow God will intervene and he’ll provide the sacrificial lamb.

And that’s very close to what happens except it’s not a sacrificial lamb. The angel stays his hand and shows him the ram crowned with thorns in the thicket and they offer a sacrificial ram. But there’s something strange here that gets left incomplete. Where’s the lamb that Abraham promised that God would deliver? And we don’t have an answer to that question until we see Jesus walking the earth and John the Baptist proclaims behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. That Genesis 22 is pointing towards the fact that Abraham who is praised in this account for not sparing his own son, for being willing even to lay down his son, is prefiguring the way that God will do the same for us with his own son. This is absolutely a motif through which we should understand the cross. But it also as already alluded to, Hebrews looks at this as a prefigurement as well of the resurrection because Isaac seemed to be dead.

And then on the third day, he gets to come back down the mountain with his father and he’s fully alive and there’s a proof that God is faithful to his promises.

This is a pledge of the resurrection and a pledge of the fidelity of God. And so that’s why Hebrews 11 can look at this passage and say that Abraham considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead, hence, he did receive Isaac back and this was a symbol. In other words, that Abraham knew even if it should come to this, that he should kill Isaac in this sacrifice. Isaac would not stay dead because he could not stay dead and God still be faithful to his promises. So even if the angel had not stopped his hand, Abraham had to know God was capable of resurrecting the dead. And that is the key to understanding the story. So says Hebrews 11, and I think that’s the right reading, not just because it’s inspired, but it also makes good sense of the text. These are just a handful of the biblical texts.

But I just mean to point out that there’s all of this stuff that Jesus fulfills in his death and his resurrection, and it really is striking how well Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection explain these sort of loose ends in the Old Testament and how everything fits really neatly. I did a Star Wars reference in another episode and people liked it, so I’ll give another Star Wars reference. The prequels were bad and the sequel trilogy somehow were worse. And one of the reasons the sequel trilogy were worse is because it was clearly not the same authors. They didn’t have the same vision. And so you see this with the prequels where there’s kind of a betrayal of even look the Star Wars trilogy, the forces this vague, seventies spiritual woo woo, and then when the prequel trilogy comes out, atheistic materialism is all the rage.

And so now the force is like middle chlorine and it’s all scientific. It’s like that’s not at all, that doesn’t work. And so there’s these major betrayals of kind of the vision both George Lucas does this to himself, but then of course later when Disney takes over the franchise. You don’t have that with the olden New Testament. I know people say like, oh, there’s this massive personality shift in God and it’s just really not true that you have all of these things that are kind of being teed up, that are pointing towards the messiah, that Jesus fulfills many of them in this really kind of surprising, in some of this paradoxical way, where you think, okay, that works, that makes sense that these loose ends aren’t just left hanging. And so the New Testament is well written in a way that a lot of multi-million, multi-billion dollar franchises today aren’t. That needs some explanation because even if you’re going to say it’s a forgery, why are the apostles better forgers than these professional authors?

Because they weren’t professional authors. So I’ll leave it there. But when Jesus is interpreting all these things pointing to himself, I think we should take that very seriously and say can’t just say maybe they invented the whole thing because certain details of Jesus’ life were just publicly known. For instance, when he was alive, where he was alive, all of that stuff, I didn’t even get into all of that. But like Daniel 2, I’ll give you one more on this. And Daniel 2, this prophecy, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream of a statue and it’s four different metals. Well, the last one is rock, but metals and then rock, and it represents four empires and the first one is Babylon. The second one is the Persians and Medes and then the Greeks and then the Romans. And we’re told in the time of the fourth one that a stone not built by human hands will come and form this mountain.

So it gives us a timeline that we should expect the messiah to come and establish an everlasting kingdom on earth during the Roman Empire. During the time when Israel’s under Roman domination. That doesn’t last forever, that window is closed now. So you have a relatively short span of time in which the messiah could come, and here Jesus is in the right time, in the right place from the right city. All of these ways he seems to fulfill these things where you say, okay, he either was a ridiculously lucky con man or he really is the messiah who was foretold. Okay, I’ll leave it there, but that’s the idea. The third and final point, I want to make sure to cover, the third theme is the way that Jesus is made known in the breaking of the bread.

I’ll keep this short, but this is so profound you can’t talk about the road to a mess and not at least mention this, right? In verse 30 and 31 of Luke 24, it says that when Jesus is at table with him, he took the bread and he blessed and broke it and gave it to them, and their eyes were opened and they recognized him and he vanished out of their sight. Now, notice that he uses four verbs to describe this action of distributed in the bread. Now, one reading of that would just be, Luke doesn’t think you know how to eat and he’s giving you very rudimentary instructions that would be a misreading. Instead, this is liturgical language and particularly it’s Eucharistic language. And you see this in the gospel of Luke just two chapters earlier. At the last supper, Jesus took bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them.

So in Luke 22, you have took, gave thanks, broke, gave. In Luke 24, you have took blessed, broke gave. The only difference in terms of the verbiage is that while Luke 24 uses the generic blessed. Luke 22 is more explicit that this is a eucharistic blessing. Remember, Eucharist means thanksgiving. That this is a Eucharistic blessing. In any case, it would be a mistake not to read this in a liturgical and a Eucharistic light because that is the clear parallel. Luke is setting up within his own text. If that wasn’t clear enough, you then have the report of the two Emmaus disciples. They go back to Jerusalem and we’re told that they tell them what had happened on the road and how Jesus was known to them in the breaking of the bread. Okay, what’s the breaking of the bread? Well, that is a way Luke describes the early Christian Eucharist and Acts 2:42.

He describes the early Christian community and says they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Now, he doesn’t literally mean they just go around grabbing matza and just snapping it over their knees, no. The breaking of the bread is a way of describing the Eucharist, and we know this, that it’s not just a meal because four verses later in Acts 2:46, it says day by day attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook a food with glad and generous hearts. So you’ve got three things they’re doing. They’re attending temple together, they’re breaking bread in their homes, and then they’re partaking a food with glad and generous hearts. That their action of eating is something distinct from the breaking of the bread. This is a liturgical ritual kind of thing. Now, understood in that light, you can see that the road to Emmaus is in some ways the first mass, you have the liturgy of the word, you have the reading of scripture, you have the prophets in Moses, and you’ve got the gospel.

In this case, all of this is given by Jesus who also gives the sermon. He gives the harmony. He explains how all of this fits together and how it presents him, how it preaches him. And then as with the mass, you have a shift midway through and the shift here is they arrive in Emmaus. And then he comes in and rather than just being on the journey, they’re now at table together. And then you have the liturgy of the Eucharist. You have Christ just as he has made himself known in the Word, he is now making himself known in the Eucharist. And that’s not all. You then have this sending forth. So remember, mass comes from Ite, missa est, go it’s dismissed, and so it’s from the dismissal that mass takes its name. That you are energized by the Eucharist, and then you are sent out into the world. And so it is here that having received the liturgy of the word, having received the liturgy of the Eucharist, they now go forth proclaiming the glory of God.

That’s the mass. The whole thing follows this liturgical structure. So this is by all means, it is a resurrection appearance, but it’s more than that. It is a prefigurement of the mask. Now, this is an important kind of detail because as we’re going to see in next week’s episode, one of the things these post resurrection appearances are doing are preparing the church for the rest of human history because Jesus is with the apostles for 40 days and then the Holy Spirit is going to come 10 days later and then we’re good to go until the second coming, and then we see him again, right? So how does Christ remain with us? Because remember, he promises at the end of Matthew’s gospel, I’m with you always, even to the close of the age, and yet he ascends into heaven. Did he break his promise?

No. The answer is right here in the road to Emmaus. He is known to them in the breaking of the bread. It’s not just that they realize it was Jesus with them at the table, it’s that they also realize it’s Jesus with them in the Eucharist. That the way Christ remains faithful to his promise to not leave us orphans, to be with us always, that is fulfilled in no small part that is fulfilled, chiefly, we might even say in his Eucharistic presence. And so this is by all means, both the verification that the resurrection really happened and that the New Testament fits in with the old. It’s also a verification that Jesus is really present in the Eucharist because if that’s not the case, it was just a symbol, then he’s not made known to them in the breaking of the bread. At most, the breaking of the bread reminds them of him, just like if they saw a traveler on the road who looked like Jesus and they thought, oh man, Jesus was great.

Well, it’s not really him, it’s just a reminder. Well, that’s not what’s going on here. It really is Jesus that’s really critical in the text that he’s known to them in the breaking of the bread, not just at it, right, but in it. He is that which is being broken here. So there’s a lot more that could be said here, but this is a big episode, and so I hope that there’s enough to chew on, if you will. I hope there’s enough to make you view the road to Emmaus in a new light and to take it seriously that okay, this really does stand up to historical scrutiny. You can’t just explain this away as a hallucination, that it really does fit in very much like a glove with the Old Testament prophecies, including some we wouldn’t have even noticed.

That prophets are being fulfilled that didn’t need to be fulfilled to trick us, that things are being fulfilled where you think, I didn’t even know that was there to find, and here it is being connected. And ultimately that all of this points to Christ enduring presence in the Eucharist. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. If you like this, I hope you share it, rate it, review it, all that good stuff, comment below, especially if you’re on YouTube. I do read those comments as best I can. God bless.

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