Joel Kramer Interview Part 3

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My colleague at MRM. We also have with us.

Our good friend Joel Kramer, Joe Kramer used a pastor in Brigham city, Utah before he left the United States to go live in Israel to study archaeology 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 and I mean if you're going to have a legitimate response. Let's get all the evidence it'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, 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 that the defense, she co-days when that movie was coming out in the book was very popular was called the Jesus tomb en masse what's at all about yeah I mean one thing I would like to clarify in one challenge that I was given by Mormons which I thought was a good challenge was hate it. If you're going to challenge the Mormonism what we believe you should also be about answering the challenges to your own faith.

That's right. That's trail 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 came out with the hit movie Titanic, but who is the filmic was I sent guy jack up a veggie.

It was interesting because my professor my archaeology professor Shimon Gipson was the first one into this team in question. He is the one that recorded it. He is really the source and the expert on this particular Tim so I did this DVD because of 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, is this is typical Tim from the time of Jesus from the first century A.D. it does have ossuary's with the common names of that. It does have an ossuary that says Jesus explain what an ossuary is an ossuary is a bone box where people are married or given a secondary burial, and they often times have inscriptions about the deceased that are it remains inside this particular ossuary that it possibly says Jesus son of Joseph.

When Shimon Gipson excavated there and they put it into storage is no big deal. Why because there's three other ossuary's that have been found to archaeology in the Jerusalem area that also say Jesus son of Joseph. Why, because these are very common names and so you have a lot of Jews at that time, named Jesus, and several of them are going to be the son of Joseph.

And so it wasn't seen as any big deal because it wasn't and then quite a long time later the filmmaker came and tried to claim that these were the bones of Jesus of Nazareth and so I did a rebuttal to that today. That issue continues. It continues getting worse and worse in my opinion, another rebuttal needs to be done.

It's become an academic issue and that is because were talking about secular scholars who lean towards wanting those to be the bones of Jesus of Nazareth. Even though there is evidence that shows clearly that they're not in the course. The reason they need to try and demonstrate that it is as if if you were 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 that all the disciples would've had to do was go get that body they would have known where the tomb was exact that was Jesus's tomb. Let's produce the body that would've taken care of the math. If that's what they wanted to believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead exactly that many of them went to horrible deaths to defend something that they would've known to be a lie.

None of it adds up in 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 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 theological theme necessarily, but more on what the Bible teaches.

As far as the sole 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, yellow this, this was an interest of mine. I grew up in the Middle East around better when as they're called. Today these Shepherd lifestyle that you see, lived out in the Middle East than I was a pastor which is shepherding role and, of course, as I think many pastors do. We are constantly wondering what our responsibility is and what our responsibility is not and we want to do a faithful job to our Shepherd, who is Jesus, so this was what I was interested in and bought what I wanted to explore, so I spent 2 1/2 years running around with that, the shepherds and just being with them and seeing how they related to their flocks and I learned so much.

I really almost got addicted to it. It was so engaging that the Bible just came alive in a very real way, as I saw this relationship between the shepherd and the sheep in all these things I hadn't understood about the Bible came clear and because there's so many shepherds in the Bible. So many of the trees in the Bible are spoken in what I call it shepherding terminology and concepts. It was really an important project for me personally, and what I learned in the my hope was to pass some of that onto an audience by demonstrating that and I and my goal was to teach them their relationship with Jesus, who is this shepherd of their soul. Thus, the soul Shepherd and that's really what I'm getting at, and 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 sheet that ended up getting away and you are there filming it and then the sheep stopped and you then commented that as a sheep look back at the shepherd you said he's making his one last look and then he's going on and actually the sheep must've 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, that the first thing that better when due in the morning as they 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.

This, in 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 when 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 if we want to understand the culture that were reading about especially say during the patriarch. Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob, Moses also they were all shepherds.

They thought like shepherds and they live that lifestyle and so the ones today who are living closest to that culture and that lifestyle are the better one.

And here you can hang out with them their living in shepherding in the very same places that the biblical shepherds shepherded thousands of years ago on the Bible when Jesus calls a sheep flattery or you know you know I used to think I 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: is Dom 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 out and calling a sheep.

Our souls are in need of God like a sheep or is it in need of their shepherd and without there 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 is in a nutshell about the sacrifice, which is probably your most controversial movie yeah it's really 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 as it provides a foreshadowing of this animal sacrifice that help people understand this concept of of atonement and the need for blood, for God 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 sacrifices in 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. Yeah it animal sacrifices and 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 in the concept of sacrificing animals for the forgiveness of sin, you take your sin more seriously if you're taking this animal and realize this animals gotta die for what I did. That's pretty heavy and 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 near showing this Taking Pl. in Samaria and there is a group in Israel to this day that still sees the significance of an animal sacrifice, absolute, and I think you're right in a 21st-century Western culture not being connected with that we don't see what a first century Jewish culture clearly understood and I think that's one of the great things about that film even though I admit you have to force yourself to watch us, 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 source flex.com that's FLIX reflects sourcebooks.com you can order any of those videos are $10 each and well worth the investment of looking at them we been talking with Joe Kramer good friend of ours has a Masters in archaeology. Spent a lot of time over in Israel and were just gleaning from his expertise. Thank you for listening you would like more information regarding his research ministry.

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