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Martin Luther King Jr. was an apostate. This is clearly revealed in a paper entitled, ‘What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century Led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection’.
In King's theology regarding the divine Sonship of Jesus, “Jesus went through a great process of development. It seems quite evident that the early followers of Jesus in Palestine were well aware of his genuine humanity. Even the synoptic gospels picture Jesus as a victim of human experiences. Such human experiences as growth, learning, prayer, and defeat are not at all uncommon in the life of Jesus.” His desire here was to stress the point that Jesus was merely human.
How then did the idea of the divinity of Christ develop? “We may find a partial clue to the actual rise of this doctrine in the spreading of Christianity into the Greco-Roman world. I need not elaborate on the fact that the Greeks were very philosophical minded people. Through philosophical thinking the Greeks came to the point of subordinating, distrusting, and even minimizing anything physical. Anything that possessed flesh was always underminded (sic) in Greek thought. And so in order to receive inspiration from Jesus the Greeks had to apotheosize him.” (Apotheosize is to elevate to the rank of a god). King emphasizes this with a quote from another source; “the church had found God in Jesus, and so it called Jesus the Christ; and later under the influence of Greek thought-forms, the only begotten Son of God.” (George Pearce Hedley).
As for the virgin birth is concerned King believed that “the evidence for the tenability of this doctrine is too shallow to convince any objective thinker. To begin with, the earliest written documents in the New Testament make no mention of the virgin birth. Moreover, the Gospel of Mark, the most primitive and authentic of the four, gives not the slightest suggestion of the virgin birth. The effort to justify this doctrine on the grounds that it was predicted by the prophet Isaiah is immediately eliminated, for all New Testament scholars agree that the word virgin is not found in the Hebrew original, but only in the Greek text which is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’.”
As for how this doctrine developed King thought that a “clue to this inquiry may be found in a sentence from St. Justin's First Apology. Here Justin states that the birth of Jesus is quite similar to the birth of the sons of Zeus. It was believed in Greek thought that an extraordinary person could only be explained by saying that he had a father who was more than human. It is probable that this Greek idea influenced Christian thought.”
He goes on to state that “a more adequate explanation for the rise of this doctrine is found in the experience which the early Christians had with Jesus. The people saw within Jesus such a uniqueness of quality and spirit that to explain him in terms of ordinary background was to them quite inadequate. For his early followers this spiritual uniqueness could only by accounted for in terms of biological uniqueness. They were not unscientific in their approach because they had no knowledge of the scientific. They could only express themselves in terms of the pre-scientific thought patterns of their day.”
On the question of resurrection King stated that “this doctrine, upon which the Easter Faith rests, symbolizes the ultimate Christian conviction: that Christ conquered death. From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions. In fact, the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting. But here again the external evidence is not the most important thing, for it in itself fails to tell us precisely the thing we most want to know: What experiences of early Christians lead to the formulation of the doctrine? The root of our inquiry is found in the fact that the early Christians had lived with Jesus. They had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality. This basic experience led to the faith that he could never die. And so in the pre-scientific thought pattern of the first century, this inner faith took outward form.”
How can anyone be a Christian and deny the divinity, virgin birth and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ?
If you take away Christ’s divinity you deny His perfection and, as a result, have no ‘Lamb without blemish’ to be sacrificed for your sins. Also, you place yourself under the sentence of death that Jesus declared for such people (see John 8:24 where the ‘I am’ is, in the Greek, ego eimi, the same divine title of Exodus 3:14).
If you take away the virgin birth you say that Jesus was conceived as the sinful seed of Adam (through Joseph – Psalms 51:5 and Psalms 58:3), rather than by the Holy Spirit. Thus He was in need of a Savior himself.
If you take away the resurrection you say that God did not approve of Jesus as the Christ for that event proved that Jesus had not sinned (death could hold Him as it does sinners) and was the satisfactory sacrifice for sin. It further shows that Jesus was acceptable to God as undergoing the death that sinners deserve, and on their behalf, thus nullifying the death penalty against those who have faith in Christ (Acts 17:31, Romans 4:24-25).
King was also heretical on other issues as an honest search of the documentation will make plain. While he could legitimately represent himself as a Civil Rights worker, and leader, he was utterly deceptive in passing himself off as a Christian and, what’s worse, as a Pastor of God’s flock.
In King's theology regarding the divine Sonship of Jesus, “Jesus went through a great process of development. It seems quite evident that the early followers of Jesus in Palestine were well aware of his genuine humanity. Even the synoptic gospels picture Jesus as a victim of human experiences. Such human experiences as growth, learning, prayer, and defeat are not at all uncommon in the life of Jesus.” His desire here was to stress the point that Jesus was merely human.
How then did the idea of the divinity of Christ develop? “We may find a partial clue to the actual rise of this doctrine in the spreading of Christianity into the Greco-Roman world. I need not elaborate on the fact that the Greeks were very philosophical minded people. Through philosophical thinking the Greeks came to the point of subordinating, distrusting, and even minimizing anything physical. Anything that possessed flesh was always underminded (sic) in Greek thought. And so in order to receive inspiration from Jesus the Greeks had to apotheosize him.” (Apotheosize is to elevate to the rank of a god). King emphasizes this with a quote from another source; “the church had found God in Jesus, and so it called Jesus the Christ; and later under the influence of Greek thought-forms, the only begotten Son of God.” (George Pearce Hedley).
As for the virgin birth is concerned King believed that “the evidence for the tenability of this doctrine is too shallow to convince any objective thinker. To begin with, the earliest written documents in the New Testament make no mention of the virgin birth. Moreover, the Gospel of Mark, the most primitive and authentic of the four, gives not the slightest suggestion of the virgin birth. The effort to justify this doctrine on the grounds that it was predicted by the prophet Isaiah is immediately eliminated, for all New Testament scholars agree that the word virgin is not found in the Hebrew original, but only in the Greek text which is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’.”
As for how this doctrine developed King thought that a “clue to this inquiry may be found in a sentence from St. Justin's First Apology. Here Justin states that the birth of Jesus is quite similar to the birth of the sons of Zeus. It was believed in Greek thought that an extraordinary person could only be explained by saying that he had a father who was more than human. It is probable that this Greek idea influenced Christian thought.”
He goes on to state that “a more adequate explanation for the rise of this doctrine is found in the experience which the early Christians had with Jesus. The people saw within Jesus such a uniqueness of quality and spirit that to explain him in terms of ordinary background was to them quite inadequate. For his early followers this spiritual uniqueness could only by accounted for in terms of biological uniqueness. They were not unscientific in their approach because they had no knowledge of the scientific. They could only express themselves in terms of the pre-scientific thought patterns of their day.”
On the question of resurrection King stated that “this doctrine, upon which the Easter Faith rests, symbolizes the ultimate Christian conviction: that Christ conquered death. From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions. In fact, the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting. But here again the external evidence is not the most important thing, for it in itself fails to tell us precisely the thing we most want to know: What experiences of early Christians lead to the formulation of the doctrine? The root of our inquiry is found in the fact that the early Christians had lived with Jesus. They had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality. This basic experience led to the faith that he could never die. And so in the pre-scientific thought pattern of the first century, this inner faith took outward form.”
How can anyone be a Christian and deny the divinity, virgin birth and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ?
If you take away Christ’s divinity you deny His perfection and, as a result, have no ‘Lamb without blemish’ to be sacrificed for your sins. Also, you place yourself under the sentence of death that Jesus declared for such people (see John 8:24 where the ‘I am’ is, in the Greek, ego eimi, the same divine title of Exodus 3:14).
If you take away the virgin birth you say that Jesus was conceived as the sinful seed of Adam (through Joseph – Psalms 51:5 and Psalms 58:3), rather than by the Holy Spirit. Thus He was in need of a Savior himself.
If you take away the resurrection you say that God did not approve of Jesus as the Christ for that event proved that Jesus had not sinned (death could hold Him as it does sinners) and was the satisfactory sacrifice for sin. It further shows that Jesus was acceptable to God as undergoing the death that sinners deserve, and on their behalf, thus nullifying the death penalty against those who have faith in Christ (Acts 17:31, Romans 4:24-25).
King was also heretical on other issues as an honest search of the documentation will make plain. While he could legitimately represent himself as a Civil Rights worker, and leader, he was utterly deceptive in passing himself off as a Christian and, what’s worse, as a Pastor of God’s flock.
