Who Killed Jesus? The Witness of Acts

According to the preaching of the Apostles in the the book of Acts, who killed Jesus?

God	Men
“This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23)	“This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23)
	“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:23).
	“The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. (Acts 3:13-15)
	Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders…let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. (Acts 4:8, 10-11)
“for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27-28).	“for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28)
	The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. (Acts 5:30)

	“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered” (Acts 7:51-52).
	“And we are witnesses of all that he [Jesus] did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They [the Jews] put him to death by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39).
	26 “Brothers, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to us has been sent the message of this salvation. 27 For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him. 28 And though they found in him no guilt worthy of death, they asked Pilate to have him executed. 29 And when they had carried out all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb” (Acts 13:26-29).

Can the Bible's inerrancy be maintained when its own quotations aren't exact?

On Wednesday, February 8th, I posted the following as my Facebook status update:

At The Fall Eve technically "quoted" the Word of God in response to Satan (Gen. 3:2), but she sinned nonetheless. Quoting Bible verses is pointless if it's not coupled with obedience.

Someone asked, “Is it really a quote if the words/meaning are modified?”

And I replied,

That’s a good question. My answer would be that a quote is verbatim. So the answer wouldbe no. It's not a quote if the words have been modified. Let’s look at the difference between what God said and what Eve said God said:
God said, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).
Eve said to the Serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die’” (Genesis 2:3).
The point in my post is that Eve understood God’s prohibition as made known by his “word.” She conveyed the prohibition to the Serpent by appealing to God’s word and yet she disobeyed. It's the same for many today. Many people know how to quote (Copy and paste, anyone?), recite, paraphrase, allude to etc. scripture, but it is all useless if we ultimately do not submit to it.

I was not too happy with my initial answer because I didn’t think it through thoroughly, but answered rather in haste. It later dawned on me that the Biblical authors are known for quoting loosely from others and so by our modern standards they aren’t “quoting” directly, but indirectly. Quotes by today’s standards are expected to be verbatim, but one of the principles when reading and interpreting works of antiquity such as the Bible is that we ought not to import our modern standards upon such works, but apply the standards of their time.

The next day I began reading from Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology in preparation for Sunday School and by God’s good providence I came across a section that deals with this issue of loose and free quotations. Grudem writes,

The method by which one person quotes the words of another person is a procedure that in large part varies from culture to culture. In contemporary American and British culture we are used to quoting a person’s exact words when we enclose the statement in quotation marks (this is called direct quotation). But when we use indirect quotation (with no quotation marks) we only expect an accurate report of the substance of the statement. Consider this sentence: “Elliot said that he would return from home for supper right away.” The sentence does not quote Elliott directly, but it is an acceptable and truthful report of Elliott’s actual statement to his father, “I will come to the house to eat in two minutes,” even though the indirect quotation included none of the speaker’s original words.
Written Greek at the time of the New Testament had no quotation marks or equivalent kinds of punctuation, and an accurate citation of another person needed to include only a correct representation of the content of what the person said (rather like our indirect quotations): it was not expected to cite each word exactly. Thus, inerrancy is consistent with loose or free quotations of the Old Testament or of the words of Jesus, for example, so long as the content is not false to what was originally stated. The original writer did not ordinarily imply that he was using the exact words of the speaker and only those, nor did the original hearers expect verbatim quotation in such reporting.

Works Cited
Grudem, Wayne A. "The Inerrancy of Scripture." Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000. 92+. Pr

A Lack of Faith Versus Misplaced Faith

I sent a tweet out earlier during the day in which I said, “A lack of faith is as bad if not the same as misplaced faith.” My tweets get posted as FB updates as well. So I finally got around to writing up an explanation. This is what I was thinking when I sent the tweet.

The Apostle Paul expressed “great sorrow” and “unceasing anguish” (Rom. 9:2) for the lost condition of his fellow Jews. He writes, “My heart's desire and prayer to God for them [Israel] is that they may be saved” (Rom. 10:1). The question then is why were they NOT saved despite their “zeal for God” (v. 2). Was it a case of no faith or misplaced faith? It was both.

Paul writes that the reason for their lost condition was that they sought to “establish their own [righteousness]” and “did not submit to God's righteousness” (v. 3, emphasis added). When Paul says they sought to “establish their own [righteousness]” he means they “trusted in themselves that they were righteous” (Lk. 18:9). Trust is another word for faith. They had faith that God would accept them on the basis of their own perceived goodness. This means they found it not only necessary, but also unacceptable to trust in someone other than themselves. They had “a lack of faith” in “God’s righteousness” offered freely through Jesus. Instead of placing their faith in Jesus they fatally misplaced it themselves and it cost them eternal life because “all who rely on works of the law are under a curse” (Gal. 3:10). “No one is justified before God by the law” (v. 11). This is why Paul writes, “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Phil. 3:8-9).

When Paul said he wanted to be “found in [Christ]” he meant he trusted in Christ for acceptance before God on the basis of what Christ did on his behalf. He did not want to try and establish, as he put it, "a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” (self-trust).
The point is that everyone without exception has faith. The issue is what or in whom are you trusting? The object of our faith is what makes the difference between Heaven and Hell.