I concluded my last post with the assertion that, if one assumes both that our senses are reliable and that there is inherent meaning in the world, then there is a solid basis for reflecting on the our experiences through the lens of theology. Yet, it’s somewhat of a leap to go from the general philosophical premises I outlined to any particular religion. To do that, one needs additional input — that is to say, evidence of what the world is really like. In this post, I intend to present the evidence that compels me to believe specifically in Christian doctrine. I set about this task fully aware that much of this evidence, being historical in nature, is incomplete both because it has come to me through generations of selective interpretation and because it was likely never really understood in the first place. Accordingly, it is not my intention to argue that any non-Christian religions are “wrong”. I don’t even mean to argue that my own understanding of Christianity is “right”. Quite to the contrary, I’m perfectly happy to accept that any attempt to understand anything greater than ourselves will never be totally successful. Nonetheless, I also think that if there is indeed meaning in the world, then that we are endowed with reason surely suggest that we are intended to use that reason to try to grasp the purpose of our existence. In our western tradition, we call that purpose “God”. So then, what can we say about Him?
Although I am not an historian, my understanding is that there is a general consensus among scholars of antiquity that there was, in fact, a man named Jesus who was crucified by the Romans for sedition. To the extent that I have investigated the matter myself, I find the fact that Jesus is referenced independently by both Josephus and Tacitus to confirm that there is at least a kernel of truth in the Gospel accounts. Admittedly, none of these sources are themselves first-hand accounts, but considering that we’re talking about a peasant from a small town of a remote province of the Roman Empire, it seems to me that there is more historical evidence to establish that Jesus was crucified than can reasonably be expected. That he rose from the dead and was God incarnate is obviously a more contentious claim. Even so, I think there is good reason to believe that also.
Surely, Jesus was neither the first nor the only Messianic figure whom the Romans crucified in Palestine. The historical record highlights several other prominent revolutionaries, and I think we can safely assume that there were still others whose memory has been lost to us. So what was it about the Jesus movement that enabled it to survive the humiliating execution of its leader while so many other moments withered away when challenged by the same Roman tactics? Part of the answer probably lies in the message of the moment itself (Christianity wasn’t just about political revolt), but the inescapable fact here is that Christianity survived because thousands of people were so convinced that they saw and interacted with the risen Jesus that they were willing to suffer terrible deaths for proclaiming His resurrection. We may question the correctness of their belief, but we cannot question their sincerity. In our modern western world where Christianity is often used to control and manipulate, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the first Christians had nothing but torment and disgrace to gain from proclaiming the Gospel — nearly all of them were martyred and a great many of them were entirely forgotten within just a couple generations. So, how do we make sense of the fact that a multitude of people genuinely believed that they witnesses first hand something so extraordinary that we generally believe it to be impossible?
The dead don’t just come back to life — this is a fact of nature that was no more lost on the ancients than it is on us today. Yes, there are other examples in pagan mythology of men and gods coming back from the afterlife, and yes, there are sects of Judaism that believe in a general resurrection at the end of time. There’s even the Gospel account of Jesus restoring Lazarus back to life. However, none of this changes the fact that revivified corpses were no more common in the ancient world than they are today. Indeed, if we suspected otherwise, then there would no reason to disbelieve the resurrection story in the first place.
So, what happened to convince the early Christians that they had seen their risen Lord? Maybe there were many cases of mistaken identities. Or maybe it was a case of metaphoric language growing into a collective belief in something that was never really true. Or maybe there was a concerted effort by some of Jesus’s followers to keep the movement alive through lies. We will probably never be able to know for sure exactly what happened after Jesus was crucified, but none of the possibilities I’ve just suggested seem to me particularly likely (the Gospel accounts suggest very close interactions between Christ and the apostles that would have eliminated the possibility of mistaken identity; metaphoric resurrection of an incorporeal soul only makes sense in terms of neoplatonic thinking that was developed at least 300 years after the time of Jesus; and inconsistencies among the Gospel narratives are more suggestive of many people not understanding what they were experiencing than they are of a small group intentionally propagating a series of lies). There are probably other “explanations” for the resurrection about which I’m not aware, but I’m skeptical that any one of them is ultimately more verifiable than the simple proposition that numerous early Christians did, in fact, see Jesus (with some sort of glorified body) alive after His crucifixion. We are, after all, talking about people who lived in an advanced society whose traditions and practices have come to define our modern notions of logic and reason.
At this point, I suspect that my secular humanist friends are objecting that I am making arguments “from authority”. It’s true that I cannot know for sure that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. It’s also true that the argument I’ve just made essentially boils down to, ” The Resurrection likely happened because people who were alive at the time said it did.” However, this is only part of the story. Philosophically, if one starts with the proposition that evil exists in the world on account of our very human nature, then one can begin to see in the narrative of Jesus’s passion a certain logic in which incarnation, atonement, and resurrection become the obvious solution to the problem at hand. More on that in my next post, but for now, I’d like to suggest that that logic combines with the historical accounts we’ve inherited to justify a faith in Christ that is neither blind nor purely owing to a sense of deference to authority.
