Eyewitnesses!: Face to Face with Jesus

By Chuck Zehnder

What if Lukes interviews were found? No original autographs of any of the New Testament have even been found. Very early copies of some of the books and letters exist and early codices also exist, but when it comes to original handwritten notes, they remain hidden.

Eyewitnesses! covers an archaeological dig sometime in the future, in modern Romes ancient catacombs. The dig uncovers an earthenware jar containing Lukes original interviews with some of the personalities in his Gospel account. These accounts are much more detailed than Luke was spiritually led to record in his Gospel.

In Eyewitnesses!, you will meet some of the people who are only mentioned in passing, others who have greater backgrounds than recorded, and some we have never even heard of because Luke didnt include them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490849874

Chuck Zehnder

Chuck Zehnder has been a church planter in Utah and Missouri, a cross-cultural missionary in Africa, and a college dean. He brought in speakers, such as: Del Tackett and William Dembski to College of the Ozarks in southwest Missouri. He continues to organize and lead mission trips worldwide.

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Copyright © 2014 Chuck Zehnder.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-4985-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-4986-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-4987-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014915654

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/06/2014

Contents

Preface

Original Autograph Unearthed

Luke’s Cover Letter

Bethlehem Innkeeper

A Shepherd

Temple Teacher

Claudius, a Centurion

Witness to Jesus’ Baptism

Nazarene Citizen

Witness of Demon-possessed Man in Capernaum

Peter’s Mother-in-law

Jacob – a Leper

A Paralytic’s Friend

Witness of a Sabbath Healing

A Jewish Elder

Widow from Nain

A Prostitute

Mary of Magdala

Joanna

Vashti

Samuel

Ehud

Simeon – A Pharisee

Witness to the Healing of a Crippled Woman

A Samaritan Leper

Bartimaeus

A Friend of Judas Iscariot

Simon of Cyrene

Joseph

An Older Barbarian

Recommended Reading

"Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. –Jude 24 (ESV)

Preface

The Bible is the inerrant, God-breathed, Word of God without any error or even mixture of error. It is absolute truth and the only instrument for truly ordering our lives.

I love it. I love to read it and try to follow it. It has proven truly inspiring to me and actually exciting.

When it comes to the New Covenant, it reveals the truth of who God is by grace and truth… through Jesus Christ (John 1:16). It certainly is God’s love letter to us who are disciples of Jesus; and to any who would explore it with diligent hearts.

I love it all and really enjoy reading the historical books of the New Testament – the four Gospels and Acts. We get our Christian doctrine from the letters of Paul, James, Peter, John, Jude and the author of Hebrews. But we see Jesus and the early church in these historical books.

As I read these five books, I thoroughly enjoy reading about the biblical backgrounds of the writers and those living at that time. William Barclay did this better than almost anyone else in his Daily Word Studies.

For a much different perspective, I have often turned to author Gene Edwards. His books are exceptional. The Chronicles of the Door series and, for me, the very best, The Divine Romance, show a perspective of what God has been doing from before creation to after Revelation through the eyes of the angels.

Always, as I read about Jesus and the people who walked in and out of his earthly life, I wish more had been written about them. John even said there was so much more that Jesus did and said than what had been recorded, and he wrote his Gospel last.

Matthew, Mark and Luke wrote biographical sketches of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Matthew, concentrating on the Old Testament prophecies of the coming of the Messiah, obviously wished for Jewish readers to see in Jesus the Anointed One. He wrote as an eyewitness to most of Jesus’ ministry.

Mark was a very young man when he wrote what most scholars believe was the earliest Gospel. Perhaps some of it is written as an eyewitness account – he may have written himself into the narrative as evidenced in 14:51-52. Reading Mark, one will see Mark often using the word immediately. His is the Gospel of immediacy.

From John’s Gospel, we see Jesus’ ministry as being three years long. John points out seven signs (miracles) and seven I am sayings while showing the divinity of Jesus. For all of those three years, John is also an eyewitness to the ministry.

But then we get to Luke. Luke was not an eyewitness nor a Jew. He was a Gentile who wrote for us Gentiles. And he did it by interviewing those who had been eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2). He spent a great deal of time with Paul in Acts, but in the life of Jesus, he relied on the testimony of others.

But what if he had recorded those interviews and kept them safe? What if these interviews contained much more about the personal encounters these people had with Jesus? What if, someday, these lost interviews were found? What if, in the future, this…….

Original Autograph Unearthed

It was on June 12, 2019, that a team of international archaeologists made the most startling biblical discovery since the 1947 initial finding of the Dead Sea scrolls.

The team was led by veteran archaeologist, William D. Johnson, PhDs in archaeology and anthropology from Yale University and full professor of both at the University of Nebraska. They were digging out old catacombs that had been partially filled in antiquity not far north of ancient Rome and the Coliseum, when they made the find.

What they uncovered was an earthenware jar that contained a letter and pages of written interviews with various people. Truly astonishing is that this is a letter to Theophilus written by the physician Luke, author of two New Testament canonical books.

Luke’s letters to Theophilus, this now being the third, all ascribe to Theophilus the usual title of an official in the Roman government.

It is assumed from finding this letter in Rome that Theophilus was a government official in Rome who had heard about Jesus from Paul, and maybe even Luke himself, and he asked to know more. Luke wrote to him the two accounts today recorded in the New Testament as the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.

First, Luke told about the life of Jesus and who he was. In that first account, he clearly delineated the life and ministry of the Son of God. More than the others, Luke’s account of the life of Jesus is certainly the most well-known of the four gospels in that it shows more of Jesus’ humanity and his chronological life.

It has been used often over the years in making films, plays and musical adaptations of the life of Jesus. Luke’s account of Jesus’ encounters with others is beautiful in that they describe the compassion of the Savior when dealing with the people for whom he came to serve. It is also the gospel of praise of God and God’s wooing of all men.

In his second letter to this Roman official, now known as the Acts of the Apostles, or simply, Acts, Luke tells how the life of Jesus affected those around him; those who became committed followers of the man from Nazareth; those who referred to themselves as members of The Way.

This second letter concentrates mostly on the life and travels of Paul as Paul sought to serve the Savior who had miraculously called him into service.

Much of the letter, beginning with Paul’s second missionary journey, is a first person account, showing that Luke was with Paul much of the time that is covered by the account. It ends abruptly with Paul in prison in Rome.

In this third letter, now being revealed to the world for the first time, Luke tells how he hopes to write again to Theophilus and complete the story which the Bible records as Acts. That letter, if it was ever written, remains to be found.

How this third Lucan letter found its way into the catacombs can only be surmised. It was not found with other writings, other than the interviews, but was within the sole container of documents in a solitary hiding place.

This original is written on parchment and was found inside an earthenware jar that had been plugged with cloth and the cloth covered with melted beeswax. This formed an airtight seal for these more-than-1900 years, preserving the writing very clearly and keeping the parchment from drying itself to dust.

That it is an original autograph, can be doubted none at all. Radio carbon dating of a corner of the parchment on the final leaf, confirms the authenticity of the date of the leather.

There were no markings on the jar or anything accompanying the manuscript inside. It was found in the back of a collapsed loculi (rectangular niches used for burials) which was part of a cubicula that was filled with human skeletal remains.

When the bones were removed, a lighter color of fill was noticed about three feet up the side of the back of the burial chamber. Such a discoloration led archaeologists to surmise correctly that something, indeed, was behind the wall.

This lighter fill was slowly and carefully removed and the jar found alone inside a smaller niche that had been dug into the wall, seemingly for the purpose of hiding the jar and its contents.

For several weeks, investigations of the jar proved fruitless in making an identification of its place of manufacture or ownership, but X-rays showed the manuscripts inside.

The origin of the mica temper used to harden the pottery could not be determined; far too much mica exists in the Mediterranean area and this type was very common to many regions and used in many locations for the manufacture of pottery.

Eventually, the jar was opened in a hermetically controlled room where temperature and humidity were carefully monitored. Researchers found the parchment was in incredibly good condition when removed and it was quickly stabilized. Translation was begun immediately.

The manuscript is written in exceptionally fine Greek, even considered classic Greek, much like the opening verses of Luke’s first letter to Theophilus.

The interviews, also found in the jar, are all in the same hand, so it appears that either Luke or a secretary he hired to take his dictation wrote the first-person accounts as they were given by the interviewee. They are mostly on papyrus but some on parchment.

The accompanying letter is also in the same handwriting, leading most researchers on the project to believe it is Luke, himself, who took down the interviews.

Luke may have used the same amanuensis during the interviews, but that is doubtful as there probably would have been several years between the writing of them and the letter. Most all