divinity of Christ Archives - Held By His Pierced Hands

Is Jesus God? (Part 4.2: Did Jesus Rise?)

It’s been a long road, this “proving” the divinity of Christ business.¹ And after 8,000+ words, all we’ve got is a man who claimed to be God and did some pretty crazy stuff to back it up, a man who was tortured and died and whose body is suddenly missing. For some, the empty tomb might be enough. But I have to keep pushing: where’s the body? It stands to reason that someone stole it, so let’s consider the possibilities.

The Romans

In Jesus’ world, there were three groups of people: the Romans, the Jews who opposed Jesus, and the Jews who were friendly to him (the disciples). Of these three groups, nobody had more power than the Romans. If they were looking to steal Jesus’ body, they certainly had the means.

But did they have the motive? Was there any reason for them to steal Jesus’ body? I’ve heard it suggested that they were just trying to stir up trouble between the Jews and the Christians to weaken their opposition to Roman rule. It’s an interesting thought but it fails to take into account the modus operandi of first century Romans: peace at any cost. These were the originators of the pay, pray, and obey model, with the emphasis on paying and obeying. Pax Romana wasn’t just a happy consequence of Roman conquest, it was the point. The Roman empire gave people enough freedom and sovereignty in their territories to keep them mollified so they didn’t revolt. These soldiers whose livelihood—and likely their lives—depended on keeping the peace would have no reason to steal Jesus’ body. It would only have led to unrest, the last thing they wanted.

The Jews

It’s possible, of course, that the Jews stole it. They certainly had the means, given that they were the ones who got Jesus killed in the first place.² They had power and they had money and they had the guards in their pocket. But again, they had no motive. Remember that they posted a guard to make sure that nobody stole the body and claimed that he rose.³ While the apostles were wondering what Jesus meant by “dying and rising again,”⁴ the Jews knew exactly what he was going for and they knew that stealing the body would only increase the fervor of his followers.

Besides, if they had stolen the body, don’t you think they would have produced it when people started claiming that he rose? I don’t know about you, but if I had the ability to put those suddenly-confident fishermen in their places, I would have done it right quick. “Oh, you think he rose from the dead? Yeah, well I’ve got your Messiah right here.” Nip that little sect in the bud and get pack to my prayers. No, there’s no way the Jews took it.

The Christians

Ah, now here’s a likely group. I mean, think about it. After Jesus’ performance on Good Friday, his followers look like a bunch of fools. They gave up everything to follow this wandering preacher for three years and then when the time comes for him to declare himself and rise up against Rome he says nothing? He clamps his mouth shut and doesn’t even try to defend himself? If I were one of the Apostles, I’d sure as heck want to make it look like he rose. They’re the only ones around with motive: the body disappears and they go from morons to heroes in a matter of days.⁵

Okay, so Peter's being brave here. Impetuous but brave. But check out Mark on the left! — Okay, so Peter’s being brave here. Impetuous but brave. But check out Mark on the left!

But obviously they’re not going to be the culprits or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. They had the motive but they didn’t have the means. These are the same guys who ran away from the soldiers not three days earlier. Mark was so terrified that when someone grabbed his tunic he ripped it off and ran away naked.⁶ There is literally nothing in the world I’m so afraid of that it would compel me to rip off my clothes to get away. Peter, of course, ran from a little girl. These guys weren’t exactly Braveheart material. And we’re supposed to believe that they suddenly had a change of heart (and intestinal fortitude), left the Upper Room where they were cowering, snuck through Jerusalem, took out the guards ninja-style without them noticing, rolled away the stone, unwrapped the body, and then died to tell the story?

Let’s unpack this. There’s obviously the fear factor, which in and of itself is pretty convincing. Then there’s the guards. If you’re a guard and you fall asleep on the job, do you concoct some crazy story about being blinded by the light⁷ or do you go with the more obvious explanation that a horde of tough, angry fishermen knocked you out? In the second case you might get in trouble, but in the first case you get fired and probably told to pee in a cup. It’s not a logical go-to excuse if they just fell asleep.

And the fact that they don’t blame the apostles also tells us that they weren’t attacked. Accusing the obvious suspects is far less ridiculous than “we all just passed out cause we saw this crazy angel thing.” The Jews know something funny happened—that’s why they just shut them up with some hush money instead of punishing them in any way.⁸

And then there are the burial clothes rolled up in the tomb.⁹ If you just knocked out some Roman guards to steal a dead body, do you bother peeling off the blood-soaked burial clothes in the tomb, or do you throw the corpse over your shoulder and book it? I don’t know about you but every time I go grave-robbing I like to unwrap the corpse so I can get all nice and goopy while I’m carrying the rotting flesh around—oh wait, that’s revolting. Nor can I imagine that the Apostles were forward-thinking young philosophers who were covering their tracks by doing the unthinkable in the moment—not these guys, not dealing with this kind of fear, not in this culture.

Finally, there’s the clincher: they died to tell the story. If they stole the body, they knew the Resurrection was a lie—why would they die for it? 10 out of the 11 Apostles who survive the Resurrection were martyred, and John’s survival wasn’t for lack of trying; they poisoned him, they boiled him, he just wouldn’t die.¹⁰ Even those early Christians who apostatized¹¹ never claimed the Resurrection was a hoax. What convinced me of the truth of Christianity was that these men who walked with Jesus, heard him preach, watched him die, and then touched his risen body died to tell that story. I just couldn’t find any better explanation than the Resurrection.

Dogs

There are those who call themselves Christian who claim that Jesus’ body was eaten by dogs. Magical ninja dogs, I suppose, who knocked the guards out without them noticing, rolled away a stone it would have taken more than three grown women to move, unwrapped the body, and dragged it away (including all the bones) without leaving a mess or a trail? Give me a break.

Swoon Theory

Others—many of whom also claim to be Christian—assert that Jesus didn’t die on the cross, he just passed out. Passed out so thoroughly that the Romans, the Jews, and his mother thought he was dead. Passed out to the point that being stabbed through the pericardial sac elicited no response. Maybe I’m unclear on the definition here, but if you pass out without a pulse or respirations for an extended time, isn’t that death?

Even if he had just passed out, he would have had to come to 40 hours after being in critical condition, peel off the burial clothes clotted into his battered skin, roll away a stone so heavy that three women couldn’t move it without help,¹² beat up the guards without their noticing, walk 7 miles away to Emmaus, appear entirely undamaged with the exception of the 5 major wounds, teleport back to Jerusalem, and walk through a locked door. This would be almost a greater miracle than the Resurrection—if it’s not a miracle, it’s just ridiculous. And if we’re acknowledging that Jesus performed miracles, it seems more reasonable to accept the miracle that he foretold and not one devised by 19^th-century German theologians.

The Best Explanation

The evidence indicates that Jesus died and (unless you count the few crazies who thought he was a hologram) nobody really claims he didn’t until Mohammed. When the body goes missing, there’s no earthly explanation for it. Fortunately, we’re not looking for an earthly explanation. The only thing that makes sense is the thing that was so surreal the disciples couldn’t understand it when he explained it in small words: he rose from the dead.

Witnesses

And in case an absent body isn’t enough evidence for you (and it shouldn’t be), there are the witnesses. Tons of them. Mary Magdalene,¹³ other women,¹⁴ Cleopas and his companion¹⁵, the twelve (eleven) with and without Thomas,¹⁶ Peter and six others,¹⁷ and to the apostles at the ascension¹⁸ At least those specific times, probably more. Then there are Paul’s references to Jesus appearing to Peter and to James and to 500 people at once.¹⁹ These weren’t hallucinations—500 people don’t have the same hallucination, nor do eleven guys dream the same dream three different times. And Jesus makes very sure to show them that he wasn’t a ghost—eating with them²⁰ and asking them to touch him.²¹ They touched his wounds, saw his scars. There was no body double, no swooning, no collective memory modification.

Then, of course, there’s the transformation of the apostles and the spread of Christianity throughout the known world not by violence but by preaching—impossible without the Holy Spirit. Forget the empty tomb, the only possible explanation for Pentecost or the Edict of Milan or 266 popes in a row or anything good to have come out of the Church of Jesus Christ is the Resurrection.

So there you have it.

The Gospels are fairly reliable accounts—at least for the general themes and major events of the life of Christ. They tell us that Jesus claimed to be God. If he claimed to be God, he couldn’t possibly be just a good man, just a great teacher; he was either God himself, a crazy man, or a vicious liar. The miracles he worked show us that he’s more than a lunatic or a liar, as does the most cursory reading of the Gospels. But it comes down to this: Jesus died. He was buried. On the third day, the body was missing. The only possible explanation is the Resurrection. If Jesus claimed to be God and he rose from the dead, he’s God. Full stop.

Final Word

And now here we are at the end of an excessively long series. But you wanted to know why I believe that Jesus is God. Someone did, I’m sure. And this is it—the intellectual part, anyway. The emotional part–the part that keeps me here when everything in and around me is shaking–you read in everything I post and watch in my face when I receive communion. I believe that Jesus is God because of everything I’ve said in this series; I believe in Jesus because I know him. I meet him in the Eucharist and in his Word and in his Church and in the poor and in you, dear brothers and sisters. Thank you for your kindness and prayers and comments and shares and all that you do for the body of Christ. You are a great blessing to me.

See parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.1. [↩]
As a reminder, we’re not blaming all Jews for the crucifixion. It’s everybody’s fault, Jews no more than anyone else. [↩]
Mt 27:64 [↩]
Mk 9:32 [↩]
Of course, the Gospels they write and disseminate don’t do much to encourage their status as heroes, but we’ve already discussed that. [↩]
Mk 14:51-52—the world’s first instance of breakaway pants. [↩]
That’ll be stuck in your head for the rest of the day. You’re welcome. [↩]
Mt 28:11-15 [↩]
Jn 20:6-7 [↩]
I don’t know about you, but if I’m trying to kill someone who just won’t die, I might consider buying some of what he’s selling, but maybe that’s just me…. [↩]
Renounced the faith. [↩]
Mk 16:3 [↩]
Jn 20:10-18 [↩]
Mt 28:8-10. By the way, women in the ancient world weren’t considered reliable enough to be able to testify as witnesses. If you were making up the Resurrection, why would you invent a story in which the most immediate witnesses are practically non-entities, they’re so unreliable? [↩]
Lk 24:13-32 [↩]
Jn 20:19-23, Jn 20:26-30 [↩]
Jn 21:1-14 [↩]
Mt 28:16-20 etc. [↩]
1 Cor 15:3-8 [↩]
Lk 24, Jn 21 [↩]
Lk 24, Jn 20 [↩]

Is Jesus God? (Part 4.1: Did Jesus Die?)

(This is part four of a series on the divinity of Christ. Start by deciding if the Gospels have any historical value; follow that with Jesus’ claims of divinity; look into prophecies and miracles; then come back here. As an aside, there are a lot of footnotes on this one, so if you’re reading it in your email or your reader, you might want to click through so you can hover over the footnotes to see the text rather than clicking or scrolling to the bottom. Be warned: this post gets a little grisly.)

The Resurrection is Jesus’ ultimate miracle, the defining argument of Christianity. Paul tells us that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is empty.¹ Because not only did Jesus foretell that he would be crucified and rise again,² he also said it was the one essential sign he would give.³

The first step in “proving” the Resurrection⁴ is establishing that Jesus died. Let’s look a little bit at the suffering that preceded his death:

The Agony in the Garden

The night before he died, Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. As he awaited his betrayer, he prayed so fervently that he began to sweat blood.⁵ This is an actual medical phenomenon—hematidrosis. When a person is under extreme stress, his capillaries can burst under the skin; the blood then oozes out through his pores. This is, as one might expect, an extraordinarily painful situation resulting in extreme bruising wherever the blood vessels burst. Not a good way to start the night.

When his betrayer showed up, Jesus wasn’t surprised. It had been foretold that he’d be betrayed by a friend⁶ after all, and sold for 30 pieces of silver.⁷ After he’s dragged away, he’s interrogated,⁸ punched repeatedly in the face⁹ and kept up well into the early hours of the morning.¹⁰ It seems unlikely that he got much sleep; still less so that he got any food or water. By Friday morning, he would have been in pretty bad shape before the Romans even laid a hand on him.

The Scourging at the Pillar

After a night of torment at the hands of the Jews,¹¹ Jesus made his way to wimpy Pontius Pilate, who questioned him weakly and had little but blustering to offer in response to Jesus’ taciturn acceptance of his fate.¹² When Pilate found that there really wasn’t any legitimate charge to pin on him, he wanted to let him go. Well, scourge him, then let him go.¹³ That’s generally my response to people who’ve done nothing wrong.

Then, of course, the real punishment began. If you’ve seen The Passion of the Christ, you’ve got an idea that this was more than a cursory beating. It was torture, plain and simple. Roman soldiers were excellent at inflicting pain and just because this was a preamble to the far more painful crucifixion doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have done a thorough job. While Scripture is silent on the extent of the scourging, we can get a pretty good idea from the blood stains on the Shroud of Turin.¹⁴ Scientists who have investigated the blood stains on the Shroud¹⁵ say that the man it was wrapped around would have been in critical condition before he even made it to the Cross.

The Crowning with Thorns

As if all the beatings weren’t enough, let’s add insult to injury by mocking the Lord with a crown of thorns.¹⁶ And these weren’t your Grandma’s thorns. We tend to depict the crown of thorns as something that would have scratched poor Jesus’ sweet little face, but the evidence¹⁷ indicates that these were skull-piercing thorns.¹⁸ Long enough to do some serious damage.

The Carrying of the Cross

Now, we don’t know exactly how much Jesus’ cross weighed, although recent scholarship suggests 100 pounds at the very least. And we don’t know how far he walked, although it was probably at least a mile and it was certainly uphill. But we do know that the task was so hard—or Jesus was in such bad shape—that he couldn’t do it himself.

Bear in mind once again that Roman soldiers weren’t exactly known for their compassion. Especially not toward Jews. So when they impress Simon of Cyrene into service,¹⁹ it’s probably not because they were feeling nice. It makes more sense to assume that Jesus had been beaten so raw that he looked likely to pass out. And the soldiers’ job wasn’t just to kill him. Romans are more specific than that. They were supposed to crucify him. Crucifixion was the most humiliating and painful way to die—so painful that they had to invent a new word to describe the pain: excruciating. Ex cruce. From the cross.

So if they wanted to stay out of trouble, they had to make sure he made it all the way up to Calvary. God seems to have wanted it that way, too, given all the types²⁰ of the Cross that he put into salvation history. Isaac carrying the wood of his sacrifice,²¹ Noah saved by the wood of the ark,²² the bronze serpent lifted up²³…. Then there’s the fact that crucifixion was the most shameful and agonizing way one could die—this God of ours wasn’t content with a quick painless death for us; he wanted us to know that he was willing to suffer everything for us. And that he had already suffered everything with us.

The Crucifixion

Now comes the real fun.²⁴ Jesus, having been stripped, beaten, and mocked, is now nailed to a cross and hung—most likely stark naked—to suffocate to death. I’m sure you know that’s how crucifixion works, but take a moment to give it a try. Stand up and hold your arms out to the side. Far enough behind you that they could be nailed to a cross. Now lift them above your shoulders like you’re hanging there. Good. Now take a deep breath.

You can’t do it, can you? Your diaphragm is lifted by the position of your arms, leaving very little room for your lungs to expand. You can get enough oxygen that our little experiment won’t kill you, but it would if you did it long enough. (You can put your arms down now.)

This is how crucifixion works. It’s long and slow and terrible. Men who weren’t beaten first would usually hang by the side of the road, being ridiculed and spat at, for three days before they finally died. Jesus was such a wreck that it only took him three hours. Only three hours of slowly suffocating to death, having to rip the nails further through his wrists every time he pulled himself up far enough to take a deeper breath. Only three hours of horrific pain aggravated by the panic that an inability to breathe sparks in the human body.

This is where the typology really goes nuts. Jesus even calls out the first line of Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—to make sure we’re making the connections.²⁵ He’s mocked by onlookers who insist that God would save him if he loved him.²⁶ He cries out with desperate thirst.²⁷ His hands and feet are pierced.²⁸ They divide his clothing and cast lots for his robe.²⁹ Quite the coincidence if it’s not really the fulfillment of prophecy.

By the time he breathes his last, it seems like a sure thing that he’s good and dead. Nobody could survive all this. But the Romans weren’t taking any chances. After all, Romans who botched an execution were likely to be executed themselves. So we can be fairly confident that he’s dead simply from the fact that they don’t break his legs. To speed up the process—to make it impossible for the condemned to push up with their legs and get a little more oxygen—they broke the legs of the two thieves. But Jesus was already dead, so they didn’t bother.³⁰ If they didn’t break his legs, they must have been certain that he was dead—they’re pros, after all.

Just to be sure, though, they stabbed him in the side.³¹ And he didn’t flinch. That might not mean anything on its own, but John gives us a key detail: blood and water poured out. Sure, that symbolizes baptism and the Eucharist, his divine and human natures, and any number of other things. But it’s also scientifically relevant. When a person suffocates, there’s a clear fluid that collects in the pericardial sac, the region around the heart. While one might expect Luke, the doctor, to fabricate this information, we get it from John, who recounts it not because it’s convincing but because he was there and probably got sprayed.

What does it matter that it was the “water” from the pericardial sac? It means he got good and stabbed. This is no surface wound, it’s a serious attack on flesh and organs. Any living body would react to this. Even if the spear miraculously missed the lungs and heart, the trauma of the thrust would have caused a living body to gag or seize or something. Even if he had passed out, even if he was comatose, even if he was completely paralyzed, his body would have reacted. But it didn’t. If he’s not flinching when he’s stabbed through (or at least near) the heart and lungs, he’s good and dead.

Nobody at the time claimed he didn’t die—that would be ridiculous. Even the Jews (in Biblical times and later) affirmed that Jesus was dead. Nobody could suffer all this and survive. See Acts 25:19, for example: “Instead [the Jews] had some issues with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus who had died but who Paul claimed was alive.”

Burial

But exploring the death of Jesus is, of course, only part one of the question of the resurrection. We’re following the body now, a body that was buried³² in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.³³ He wasn’t stolen away and hidden somewhere secret. His burial place was widely known—to the point that the Jews posted a guard.³⁴ The disciples may not have understood his predictions of the resurrection, but the Sanhedrin sure did. So they checked on the body, sealed the tomb, and posted a guard.

The Body

And then, on the third day, the body was missing. The stone was rolled away, the tomb was empty, and the guards had some cockamamie story about seeing some glowing guy and going catatonic with fear.³⁵ The burial cloths were rolled up in the tomb and there was no trace of yesterday’s bloody corpse. The guards’ story—and the Jews’ hush money³⁶—indicate that the conflict at this point wasn’t about whether the tomb was empty but why. Nobody, it seems, could produce the dead Messiah. So it all comes down to this: where’s the body?

For that, friends, you’ll have to tune in next time. This post is plenty long enough already. But I’ll give you a little hint (spoiler alert!): he rose.

1 Cor 15:14 [↩]
Mt 20:18-19, among others. [↩]
Mt 12:38-40 [↩]
By “proving,” I mean demonstrating that it is the best possible explanation. [↩]
Lk 22:44 [↩]
Ps 41:10 [↩]
Zec 11:12-13 [↩]
Mt 26:57-68 etc. [↩]
Mt 26:67 etc. [↩]
After Peter denies him, the cock crows. Whether that’s the Roman hour of cock crow—gallicinium—or an actual rooster crowing, he was still being tormented at 3am. [↩]
Let’s take a moment to remember that while historically the Jews crucified Jesus, so did the Romans. Really, though, it was our sins that crucified Jesus. So, and I hope this is obvious, we do not in any way blame the Jews of today for the sufferings of Christ. No more than we blame ourselves, that is. Don’t be an anti-Semite. Jesus is a Jew. [↩]
Is 53:7 [↩]
Lk 23:15-16 [↩]
Look into some of the research surrounding this fascinating artifact. While some dubious test results have convinced people that it’s a medieval forgery, the bulk of the evidence suggests that it’s legit. Suffice it to say that the image on the Shroud cannot be reproduced. It isn’t paint, dye, pigment, lead, or ash. In fact, scientists have no idea how it was created. Their best bet is that the body it was wrapped around suddenly emitted a great deal of radioactive light, resulting in the image that we have today—which, by the way, is a photo negative of a person. It would be pretty impressive—that is to say, impossible–for a forger of the middle ages to even have a concept of a photo negative let alone the capacity to emit radioactive light. This skeptic is convinced. [↩]
Check out A Doctor at Calvary if you really want to get into the medicine behind all this. A shorter version linked to here. [↩]
Mt 27:29 etc [↩]
Pollen on the Shroud [↩]
Which, by the way, would make a great name for a Christian screamo band. I’ve been saying this for years and one day I just know I’m going to turn on the radio and hear the end of some awful shrieky thing. “That’s the newest single from Skull-Piercing Thorns,” the announcer will say, and my life will be complete. [↩]
Mt 27:32 etc. [↩]
Old Testament people or events that foreshadow New Testament realities [↩]
Gen 22:6 [↩]
Gen 6-9; Wis 14:5, 7 [↩]
Nm 21:4-9; Jn 3:14 [↩]
/sardonic [↩]
Mt 27:46 etc. [↩]
Ps 22:9, Wis 2:18, Mt 27:43 etc. [↩]
Ps 22:16, Jn 19:28 [↩]
Ps 22:17-18, Is 53:5, Is 49:16 [↩]
Ps 22:19, Mt 27:35 etc. [↩]
Also fulfills prophecy—Ex 12:46, Jn 19:36 [↩]
Zec 12:10, Zec 13:6, Jn 19:37 [↩]
Is 53:9 [↩]
Mt 27:57-60 etc. [↩]
Mt 27:62-66 [↩]
Mt 28:4 [↩]
Mt 28:11-15 [↩]

Is Jesus God? (Part 3: Was Jesus a Fraud?)

(Despite the length of time it’s taking me to post these installments, this is part of a series. Check out part 1 on the credibility of the Gospels and part 2 on Jesus’ claim of divinity before you jump in.)

Part of what makes me a good apologist, I think, is that I’m a skeptic by nature. So when you tell me about the miracle of how you had a cold and now you don’t, I’ll smile and nod and tell you how lovely that is but I tend not to buy it. I tend to assume that there were natural causes for whatever people are calling a miracle or a vision or whatever. I don’t contradict people because if it encourages them in their pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful it doesn’t much matter if it was a supernatural phenomenon or a natural one that God used to his purposes.

Dead 350 years, looks like he's taking a nap. NBD. — St. Vincent de Paul: dead 350 years, looks like he’s taking a nap. NBD.

What this means is that any miracle I’m convinced by is probably pretty convincing. The miracles at Lourdes,¹ for instance, or Padre Pio’s² or Bonnie’s little boy who was dead for an hour. These miracles are impossible things well-attested by reasonable, educated people. And when you look at the Gospels, you see all kinds of prophecies fulfilled and miracles worked; enough to convince this skeptic that there’s something going on.

Prophecies

At first glance, the alleged fulfillment of prophecies isn’t terribly impressive. Many of them just seem too easy to fake. So that whole “born in Bethlehem”³ thing strikes me (when I’m wearing my hypothetical skeptic hat) as something Jesus could have made up. After all, he was from Nazareth. But if the prophecies said he would be from Bethlehem, he could say he was from Bethlehem. “This one time, there was a census….” Bada-bing, bada-boom, Messiah from Bethlehem!

And being of the tribe of Judah would have been no problem—almost all the Jews were. That’s where they got their name from. House of David⁴ would have been a little harder, but if you cross your fingers when you jot down your genealogy, maybe nobody will check into it.

There’s a problem with this theory of deliberate fulfillment of prophecy, though; beyond those two, Jews at the time of Jesus had little idea what was prophesied about the Messiah. They knew the Messiah was supposed to save his people and they were sure as heck in need of saving. After decades under Roman rule (following centuries ruled by everybody else in the Near East), they were ready for a knight in shining armor to come riding in and save the day.

Slightly anachronistic, but still more of what they were expecting in a Messiah than some carpenter from Nazareth. (Source.) — Slightly anachronistic, but still more what they were expecting in a Messiah than some carpenter from Nazareth. (Source)

They say that every woman at the time of Christ hoped that she’d be the one to bear the Messiah. Not a one of them was hoping for Jesus. None of this meek and humble of heart business—the Jews wanted action, violence, intrigue. They were looking for a temporal ruler, a military genius who’d unite the Jewish people to overthrow their oppressors. When people started calling Jesus the Messiah they were all ears. Even with all his talk of love and forgiveness and repentance they were willing to listen. Heck, they were willing to acclaim him as king and throw palm branches before him.

And then, like a lamb led to the slaughter or a sheep before the shearers, he was silent and opened not his mouth.⁵ He didn’t call down legions of angels or even speak in his own defense. This was not the Messiah they’d been raised looking for. Jesus was a failure.

Because he wasn’t looking to fulfill their expectations. He was fulfilling prophecy instead. If he’d come charging in just as they’d expected it would be reasonable to think he was a fraud. But he didn’t conform himself to their image of him. He didn’t go out of his way to do what they thought the Messiah should do. It wasn’t until he opened the Scriptures to the disciples on the road to Emmaus that they began to see how everything—everything—pointed to him.

Everybody’s favorite, of course, is Isaiah 7:14: A virgin shall be with child and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. We’re so used to hearing this in Christmas pageants that we assume the Jews would have understood it just as we do: a virgin will have a baby. But “virgin” can also mean young woman and that’s how the Jews would have read it. It wasn’t until a virgin actually did have a baby—a baby who is Emmanuel, God with us—that we began to see the fullness of the meaning of Isaiah’s words. And then we started wondering if maybe naming him “God-hero” and “Father forever”⁶ might hint at his divine nature. Certainly, his virgin birth and divinity could have been invented,⁷ but why would the evangelists make up the fulfillment of a prophecy that nobody was looking for?

The bulk of the prophecies that Christians point to are about the Passion. We’re told that they’ll pierces his hands and his feet⁸ for our offenses.⁹ We see his unbroken bones foretold in the Paschal Lamb,¹⁰ who was slaughtered at twilight and whose blood marked the chosen ones for their salvation. We watch him die for the sins of his people¹¹ in order to justify them.¹² And we know that he will rise because he himself told us he was the new Jonah.¹³

Jews at the time of Jesus were looking for a liberator, one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah 61. But liberation from sin and suffering wasn’t what they were trained to look for. They didn’t see those miracles coming. And while they may have expected the Messiah to be a miracle-worker à la Isaiah 35, it seems to me that if a guy is healing the blind and the deaf and the lame and the mute, he is who he says he is.

Miracles

Jesus was kind of a baller. When he worked a miracle, he left no doubt. These miracles of his are radical, unmistakable miracles. And because he is all in all, these miracles aren’t just evidence of his divinity;¹⁴ they’re also, for the most part, moments of reconciliation and liberation for those healed or exorcised or fed or raised. Jesus never uses people to exalt his own reputation—more often than not, he asks them to tell no one. He knew that if he was merely a miracle-worker, people would come to him to get what they wanted, not to get him. But he couldn’t leave them in their suffering and isolation, so he became a miracle-worker. These miracles are powerful evidence in the case for his divinity, but he himself says that they won’t be enough.

Even those who deny Jesus acknowledge that there was something unexplainable about him—the Babylonian Talmud says he practiced sorcery. Clearly something strange was going on. But in a world of Chris Angel and discredited faith healers, we tend to think we can explain away the miracles of Christ. They’re psychosomatic or faked healings, “magic” caused by sleight of hand or mirrors. The trouble with these theories is that Jesus went hard in the paint;¹⁵ his miracles were unmistakable.

First of all, there were too many of them to be coincidence. It’s not like that one time you said you wished it would quit raining and it did. Jesus wasn’t just in the right place at the right time when the man with the withered hand was healed. And even with miracles like the calming of the storm, which could have been luck, they just happened too often. Despite their reluctance, the crowds are convinced by the sheer number of miracles: “When the Messiah comes, will he perform more signs than this man has done?”¹⁶ Over and over and over again the Gospels recount stories of healings and exorcisms and resurrections. How many times do you have to walk on water before we get impressed?

Admittedly, it would have been more impressive if he had turned a leopard into a leper.

Because these miracles were also too big to be faked. Maybe you could fake something small– the feeding of the 5, for example, or healing the guy with an astigmatism. But 5000? Blind from birth? Ten lepers? How do you fake that? Take a look at some of these stories; there are impossible odds, witnesses, and immediate results. Lazarus had been dead for four days when he came walking out of that tomb. The waves Jesus walked on were so high even seasoned fishermen were nervous. These aren’t parlor tricks and mild hypnosis. These are miracles, plain and simple.

And he didn’t work these alleged miracles in the secret of the Upper Room. For many of them, he had witnesses. Even discounting the ones he worked only in the sight of his disciples (the Transfiguration, for instance), there were too many witnesses to his miracles for them to be imagined or fabricated after the fact. You can’t hypnotize 5,000 people into thinking they had lunch. Peter points out the importance of this eyewitness testimony in his second letter: We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.¹⁷ Peter knew who Jesus was because he was an eyewitness. So, it seems, were many of those who threw down palm branches that Sunday in Jerusalem—and who decided miracles weren’t worth risking the wrath of the Pharisees when they called for his execution later that week.

With the volume, the size, and the witnesses of these miracles, it seems pretty clear that they weren’t just lies or exaggerations or tricks. There was something supernatural going on. But God isn’t the only one who can pull off the supernatural. Satan’s pretty good at that, too. Is it possible that Jesus is just a liar and that his miraculous “evidence” was fueled by demonic power?

Note to self: don't do a Google image search for Satan when little ones are looking over your shoulder. Or maybe ever again. Creepy. — Note to self: don’t do a Google image search for Satan when little ones are looking over your shoulder. Or maybe ever again. Creepy.

A quick look at the nature of these miracles settles that issue. Satan is evil, the complete absence of good. He wouldn’t heal and calm storms and feed people, he would maim and kill and cause devastation. If he were clever enough to heal in order to seduce people, his true nature would show through somewhere. He’d behead people and then restore them, rip off their arms before reattaching them. He wouldn’t calm a storm and feed people, either; he’d show off with tornadoes and tidal waves, terrifying miracles to show his power and scare people into following him. And while he could cast out demons, it seems an unlikely strategy.¹⁸

But while it seems that he wouldn’t do any of these things, the fact remains that he could. And Satan is on his game, as anyone with a TV set can tell you. There’s one thing he can’t do, though: he can’t raise the dead. The prince of this world has no power over the next, no power over the human soul. Perhaps he could reanimate bodies, but a dead little girl who suddenly needs a snack¹⁹ would be beyond him. What this leaves us with is supernatural phenomena that couldn’t have been caused by the devil. By my count, that makes these miracles divine.²⁰

All this isn’t (in and of itself) to say that Jesus’ miracles prove his divinity. Just about everything Jesus did, Elisha had done first. What I’m saying is that these miracles were done by the power of God. And if Jesus claimed to be God and then worked miracles by God’s power, he must be God.

But still the doubts creep in. Maybe all the stuff about the miracles was made up? Once again, there was too much accountability. Maybe it was embellished? Oh, fine. Let’s knock this one out of the ballpark. Next time, we’ll look at the ultimate proof of the divinity of Christ: the Resurrection. Until then, spend some time praying over the miracles Christ worked and ask yourself what healing he’s trying to work in your heart. Mark 5’s a good place to start and evidence that your healing may hurt but the joy on the other side is worth the struggle to get there. God bless you, my friends.

The Church is pretty nuts about what she’ll declare an official miracles. Of over 7,000 alleged miracles at Rome, she’s only approved 67. That means they’re just as skeptical as I am! [↩]
How about a little girl with no pupils who can suddenly see–despite still having no pupils!! [↩]
Mic 5:1 [↩]
Is 11:1-2, 2 Sam 7:12-14 [↩]
Is 53:7 [↩]
Is 9:5 unless your translation numbers them differently. Then Is 9:5 is about boots tramping and cloaks rolled in blood. The one after that. [↩]
Well, not his divinity, but we’re building to that. Very, very slowly. [↩]
Ps 22:17 [↩]
Is 53:5 [↩]
Ex 12:46 [↩]
Is 53:8 [↩]
Is 53:11 [↩]
Mt 12:39-40 [↩]
Jn 5:36 [↩]
Something kids say these days. It means, I’m told, that he gave 100%. Not 110%. Not one thousand, million percent. That’s neither a number nor a possibility, Randy Jackson. Stop it. [↩]
Jn 7:31 [↩]
1:16 [↩]
Mt 12:24-28 [↩]
Mk 5:43 [↩]
Assuming that there is a God and that there’s only one and that Satan is the only other supernatural force in the world yada yada yada. [↩]

Is Jesus God? (Part 2: Was Jesus Just a Good Guy?)

(If you want to know why you should trust anything the Gospels say, check out Part 1: What Good Are the Gospels?)

I was talking recently to a girl from Boulder whose mother was Buddhist while her father was Mormon. Needless to say, she had an interesting take on religion. When I asked her thoughts on Christianity, she had this to say:

“I mean, Jesus was a BAMF.¹ Like, he was totally awesome. I really respect the guy. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to worship him.”

Okay, ignore the language and look at the point she’s trying to make. Essentially, she’s arguing (like so many secular humanists) that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not divine. You know, like those people who say, “I’m all about the love and forgiveness that Jesus taught, just not all those rules.” Like Jesus was some kind of hippie peace and loving everybody and too high to care that they’re sinning. Like he didn’t turn over tables and call people whitewashed tombs. Like he didn’t tell people to quit sinning.

If you like Catholic Memes, you’ll love #ThingsJesusNeverSaid

Read the Gospels and then tell me Jesus was just a really nice guy.

See, the Gospels don’t show a nice guy. A kind guy, yes. A loving guy, certainly. But so much more than that. The Gospels show a guy who claimed to be God. Sure, he never said “I am God.” But if you pay attention, there’s plenty in the Gospels that’s more than just nice, plenty that’s appalling and horrifying and insane or offensive–unless it’s true.

The Father and I are one.” (Jn 10:30)

Wouldn’t mean a lot coming from a Buddhist, but for Jews, God was wholly other. You wouldn’t claim oneness with God as a Jewish man–not ever. Unless, of course, you actually were one with God. Like in a “the Word was with God and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1) kind of a way, not a “make me one with everything” kind of a way.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (Jn 14:6)

He’s not an option. He’s claiming to be the only way to God. And not just to possess truth but to be truth. I can’t really see a “nice guy” like Tom Hanks saying something like this and not getting shredded in the tabloids for it.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” (Jn 6:54-57)

Let’s imagine I came to your church to give a talk and said this. You wouldn’t get on Facebook afterwards and say, “There was this great woman who gave a talk at our church today! She was really funny and so interesting. I mean, she was a little off on some things, but overall, awesome.” No! You’d be like, “There was this crazy chick who told me I was gonna burn in hell if I didn’t take a bite of her arm. So strange.”

And then there’s the kicker, the occasion of my all-time favorite G.K. Chesterton quotation²:

“Before Abraham was, I AM.”

Sounds like Jesus needs to brush up on his grammar–what’s with mixing past and present verbs there, bud? Remember back in Sunday School when you learned that God’s name was I AM? Jesus isn’t only claiming pre-existence here, or even insisting that he’s greater than the greatest patriarch–he’s doing it while claiming God’s name for himself. It’s like your punk 15-year-old cousin was talking smack before a pick-up game of basketball: “Jordan ain’t got nothin’ on me–I invented Michael Jordan and made LeBron James with the leftover scraps.” Funny, right? Now imagine he meant it. He seriously just told you he’s better at basketball than Jordan and James–and that he existed before them and created them. You’d make him pee in a cup, right? Because this last one, this “almost careless” remark–this is earth-shattering.

If you need more, you’re welcome to check out John 10:9, 28, 36, 38; Luke 5:20; Matthew 25:31-46; John 11:25-26; Matthew 26:27-28; Matthew 28:18-20; John 5:21-23, 26; John 17:5, 21-22; and John 8:12, 24, among plenty of others. I’m particularly impressed by how often Jesus claims that he can forgive sins and that he’s the only way to salvation. Kind of a jerk thing to say if he’s wrong….³

See, if Jesus said these things–and step one of this argument made it hard to claim that he didn’t–then he couldn’t have been just a nice guy, just a great moral teacher. As C.S. Lewis explained, if he claimed to be God, he was either a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord.

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

Really–read those verses again. That guy was either tin-foil-hat crazy or so evil he’d make Hannibal Lecter look like Rainbow Brite. He sure as heck wasn’t some sweet sage hugging trees and snuggling puppies.

To be honest, my Buddhist-Mormon-Boulder friend had it partially right–Jesus was a pretty hardcore guy. But he made it very clear that if you weren’t going to worship him you shouldn’t bother paying him lip service. As Chesterton said,⁴ “It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim.” Or, in simpler words, “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Lk 11:23).

At first glance, this simple little “trilemma” seems to resolve itself. People want to respect Jesus, they want to like him. Nobody who reads the Gospels comes away thinking he was loony or demonic. Your gut tells you this guy wasn’t a lunatic. Lunatics are erratic, irrational, incoherent; Jesus comes across as a clever, deliberate, reasonable guy. He out thinks the Sadducees (Lk 20:20-26, Mk 12:18-27) and the Pharisees (Mk 2:23-28, Lk 20:1-8), educated men who were hell-bent on trapping him. His explanations are clear, his actions purposeful. He doesn’t read like a lunatic.

And he sure doesn’t read like a liar. The reason people think Jesus is just all bunnies and rainbows is that he really was–among other things–kind and loving. He preaches love and mercy and holiness. He raises the dead and heals the blind and consoles sinful women. Sure, he could be the most brilliant con man there’s ever been, but any reader of the Gospels knows that there’s something off about that accusation. There’s a reason that even people who reject the central meaning of his life still put him on their imaginary dinner party guest list.

So he doesn’t feel like a lunatic and he doesn’t feel like a liar. But you know I’m not going to leave you with just vague feelings based on stories written about some of the things Jesus did. If I’m going to be a street-preaching hobo for this guy, I want some pretty clear proof that he is who he says he is. For that, though, you’ll have to wait for part 3, which I’ll try to crank out in less than the month that this post took me.

In other news:

Yup. I stayed two rooms down from Cardinal Burke. Kissed his ring, got his blessing, and stood next to him while we prayed vespers. The hierarchy totally makes me giddy like a Catholic fangirl. Follow me on Facebook to keep up with all my crazy adventures--like shooting my first gun, playing in the snow in June, and finding lilacs all over the country! — Yup. I stayed two rooms down from Cardinal Burke. Kissed his ring, got his blessing, and stood next to him while we prayed vespers. The hierarchy totally makes me giddy like a Catholic fangirl.

Follow me on Facebook to keep up with all my crazy adventures–like shooting my first gun, playing in the snow in June, and finding lilacs all over the country!

Bad-a@#$ mother-f$#^%*#$, for those of you who don’t speak hipster. Pronounced pretty much like Banff, Alberta, Canada. [↩]
Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble over something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I have here more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing time and the historic method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts, instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the monster that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We should have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ named for the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary, stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark staring incredulity is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic that would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter’s apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ [↩]
We’re so used to these verses, they tend not to shock us. If you want to get a real feel for how appalling Jesus was, read Eli by Bill Myers. It sets Jesus’ coming in the late 20th century. As I read it, I found myself getting angrier and angrier at the Jesus character. How dare he say those things?? Then I remembered that he was supposed to be Jesus and that was exactly the point. [↩]
In the passage that I already put in a footnote but what if you don’t read the footnotes? It’s too good not to share. [↩]

Is Jesus God? (Part 1: What Good Are the Gospels?)

I’m about as emotional as they come, so when the Lord grabbed my heart he reached right past my brain to do it. I knew him before I knew anything about him. But I’ve always been an intellectual and I knew–even at 13–that if I was going to do this Jesus thing, I was going to do it all out. And if I was going to do it all out, it wasn’t going to be because it felt good to think about Jesus. No, if I was going to give my life to him, I needed to know that he really was God. So I began investigating. I read the Catechism and the Bible and pretty much everything on the internet¹ and determined that it came down to this: the men who lived with Jesus, who heard him preach and watched him heal and saw him die and touched his risen body–those guys died to tell that story. It was more complicated than that, of course, but that evidence was enough for me–to begin with.

I’ve spent the ensuing 16 years fleshing it out. What can we know about Jesus? What claims did he make? Where could the body have gone? So here, for your Easter pleasure,² is a many-part series on the divinity of Christ. Because if Jesus isn’t God, my life is a serious waste.

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The majority of what we know about Jesus we get from the Gospels. So any argument we make is going to draw heavily from those texts–texts that were clearly written by biased men who were trying to prove that Jesus was God. And yet historians would agree that the Gospels are relatively trustworthy for the major themes and events of Christ’s life. Certainly, a non-Christian reader can’t be expected to believe that Jesus actually raised the dead and walked on water. But it’s clear that he did something unexplainable there, that these are not mere fabrications, and this clarity comes back to the reliability of the Gospels.

1. The Gospels were written shortly after the life of Christ.

A quick Google search will show that the four canonical Gospels were written between 30 and 70 years after the life of Christ. To our modern mind, that’s a lifetime. If I waited to write about my time as a hobo until I was 90 you’d be hard-pressed to believe that it was a terribly accurate account.

Kinda like how all parents on the planet can recite this entire book from memory.

But the Gospels weren’t written in our information-saturated culture. They were written in an oral culture by a people whose very existence depended on their ability to pass down the story. Men in this culture would sometimes memorize the entire Torah; even today, students of the Talmud perform impressive feats of memory that seem impossible to the rest of us. When the survival of your culture hinges on the ability of ordinary men and women to tell the stories that define you as a people, an excellent memory becomes essential. In the ancient Near East, where most people were illiterate, storytelling was more about truth than about amusement.

To give it a little context, the biography of Alexander the Great was written about 400 years after his death and historians consider it to be historically accurate. In a culture like that, writing 30 years later was practically live tweeting the life of Christ.

2. The Evangelists had access to eyewitness accounts.

When you read the Gospels, they don’t read like fables. They don’t read like legends the way stories of medieval Saints (or apocryphal Gospels) do. They aren’t painted with broad strokes, full of generalizations and exaggerated events. Certainly, a secular historian could discount some of the more impressive miracles as legendary, but even if you take those out what remains is a remarkably detailed account.

Abraham Bloemaert's The Four Evangelists — Abraham Bloemaert’s The Four Evangelists

There are so many details–and unnecessary ones at that–that the reader is left with the sense that he’s reading an eyewitness report. Tradition tells us that Mark was writing Peter’s account and Matthew and John were writing from their own memories. Luke the historian, on the other hand, combined the testimonies of a number of different sources to create his Gospel. But throughout we see little details like the time of day or the number of years someone had suffered or the man running away naked.

Graham Greene’s faith rested in part on these details. When asked what made him a Christian, he answered that aside from meeting Padre Pio, it was the scene in John’s Gospel:

“where the beloved disciple is running with Peter because they’ve heard that the rock has been rolled away from the tomb, and describing how John manages to beat Peter in the race. … It just seems to me to be first-hand reportage, and I can’t help believing it.”

Simplistic as it sounds, there’s much to be said for examining the feel of the Gospels. Particularly when compared with fabricated accounts from the same era, the Gospels stand very clearly as the product of eyewitness accounts.

3. The Evangelists couldn’t have lied.

Despite the secrecy that shrouds some of Jesus’ claims and even some of his miracles, the majority of Jesus’ actions were too public for the Evangelists to lie; there was too much accountability. Think about it: if they had made up the feeding of the 5000, somebody would have objected: “Dude, I was there. There were 40 of us and we brought our own snacks.” Or the raising of Lazarus: “Wait, that was me! I wasn’t dead, I was just napping!” Jesus didn’t work miracles in secret, for the most part. He raised the widow of Nain’s son in the middle of his funeral procession and healed blind men while standing in a crowd. There were too many witnesses to too many events–if the Evangelists had been lying, somebody would have called them out on it.

And while Jesus said many things only to his disciples, his most outrageous claims of divinity came when he had a large and hostile audience. “Before Abraham was, I am,” he said to a crowd of Jews two chapters after declaring that unless they gnawed on his flesh they would burn in hell. If Jesus had just been a “nice guy” talking about love and friendship and forgiveness, those who knew him would have been furious when they heard these words put into his mouth a few decades later. The Evangelists couldn’t have gotten away with such a dramatic change in the character of someone so famous, someone who had boasted so many followers. They may have exaggerated their claims but the general shape of the person they describe must be accurate.

4. They wouldn’t have lied if they could.

I mean, seriously, have you read the Gospels? The Evangelists don’t exactly make themselves and their buddies out to be heroes. What exactly do they have to gain by enshrining their own stupidity and cowardice as Gospel truth? Because really, the Apostles are kind of the doofus all-stars of the Gospels. Jesus predicts the passion and they call shotgun. Or they ask him who’s the best. Or they tell him they’re going to save him (sure, Peter). How about Mark 8:15-16—like they think they’re in trouble for not bringing snacks right after the multiplication of loaves and fishes? They run and hide when he’s being crucified. They don’t buy it when he rises. If you’re going to make up a story about yourself, why look like an idiot?

St. Bartholomew was skinned alive to claim that the story was true. — St. Bartholomew was skinned alive rather than deny that the story was true.

And why make up a faith that’s so hard? If you’re a liar, why set such high standards for yourself? A made-up faith lets you do whatever you want. C.S. Lewis puts it this way:

“If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier and simpler. But it IS NOT. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.” (Mere Christianity)

But really it comes down to this: why would they die for a lie? Of the surviving 11 Apostles, 10 are martyred. They tried to kill St. John, but he wouldn’t die. Why would you make up a story where you sound like an idiot and then give your life to prove that it’s true? People might die for things they don’t know are lies, but they don’t die to prove a lie they made up, especially if they get nothing out of it.

5. The Gospels are telling essentially the same story.

People like to cast doubt on the truth of the Gospels by pointing out that they disagree on details like the date of certain events or their order. But remember that while oral culture is extraordinarily reliable in terms of the big picture, minor details are subject to human error. When we consider the genre of ancient biography, we see that the purpose of a biography in the ancient world wasn’t to give a play-by-play of a person’s life, the way it is now, but to tell the meaning of a person’s life. I’m sure that if you had sat John down and complained to him that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all said that Jesus died during Passover, not on Passover eve, he would have shrugged. What’s significant here is that Jesus is our Paschal Lamb, not the exact date of his demise.

When you compare the Gospels, you find that they’re similar enough to confirm one another and different enough to be real. Fabricated accounts tend either to be identical or contradictory; they were either prepared in advance to match and are too good to be true or they’re totally inconsistent (think: the story of Susannah in Daniel 13). When two people who were both eyewitnesses tell a story, the two accounts are mostly the same but not identical–just like the Gospels.

6. Today’s copies are accurate.

It doesn’t do us any good, though, if the Gospels were originally true but were so embellished that they can’t be trusted. There are those who argue that the original copies of the Gospel didn’t make any claims of divinity for Christ but that the idea of his divinity was inserted later by Christians trying to set themselves apart from Jews. So we have to ask: is the Bible I’m reading today essentially the same as what was written nearly 2000 years ago?

Fragment of the Gospel of Matthew from c. 250 AD

This is a fairly easy question to answer since we have very early copies, some from as early as the second century. The earlier the copies, of course, the fewer times they’ve been copied over and the less room there is for scribal error. And we have a large number of copies to compare to one another, a comparison that shows significant agreement between different manuscripts. If we had some Gospels of Mark that don’t tell about the resurrection and some that say Jesus was a duck, we’d probably discount the whole thing. But, aside from a few minor alterations or omissions, our ancient manuscripts all say the same thing. That naturally helps us to believe they’re the same as the original.

So what?

Naturally, the authenticity of the Gospels doesn’t stand or fall on any of these points individually. “Proving” Christianity isn’t a scientific experiment but a historical one. Our purpose here is to see whether the case for the Gospels is compelling, whether all these facts build to a secular conviction that the Gospels have some historical merit. Taken together, it seems reasonable to assume that the Gospels can generally be trusted.

So the Evangelists knew what they were talking about, they told the truth, and it’s been pretty well-preserved over the centuries. Does that mean the Gospels are Gospel truth? Not at all. Exploring this from a secular perspective, all we’ve determined as that they’re fairly reliable sources for the major events of the life of Christ. So we’re not (yet) going to buy the miracles or the theological assertions of the evangelists. But as objective historians, we can get some general facts about this man from the Gospels:

He was an Israelite
He had a following
His followers believed he had supernatural powers
He questioned the status quo of the Jewish faith
He changed the rules
His followers believed he was the Messiah
He claimed to be God
He was crucified
His body then disappeared
His followers claimed that he rose from the dead

But that’s just the beginning of the investigation. Tune in next time when we ask: Was Jesus just a good guy?

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This being a blog post, it’s obviously a pretty cursory discussion. If you’re interested in greater detail, I highly recommend Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.

I’m headed to Utah in a bit, then Vegas and California. If you want more frequent updates on my travels, be sure to follow me on Facebook!