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Lee Strobel's Pathetic “Case For Christ”

Ex-atheists (Why do so many Christian writers claim they used to be atheists?)

Martyrs

Prophets

Heroes

Why Believe in Jesus?

Jesus the Man, Jesus the Myth

Jesus the Nazarene

I believe in Paul. I have no reason to doubt that the stuff he wrote was sincere and he meant it all. Reading his letters I get the strong impression that he believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God and died for mankind. And that's about it. What I find much harder to understand is why he knew so little about what Jesus was supposed to have said, done or taught. The epistles and Acts are full of stuff about what Jesus was but virtually nothing about who he was or what he said. The gospels were written several decades later than the epistles and it shows. Paul seems to have been unaware of the details of the story that had not then been written, had not then been told, had not then been made up. Saul was living in Jerusalem when Jesus was supposed to have rode in triumph on a donkey and later been crucified in front of a mob. Saul knew nothing of Jesus until he claims he was asked to put down a heretical Jewish sect. He also displayed a curious lack of curiosity about this thoroughly remarkable man he met one day while dead. If you knew that a man who was alive until a couple of months ago in your city was the only son of God would you display Paul's lack of curiosity? Wouldn't you be rather interested in meeting his brothers and sisters? His mother? The places he lived, the place where he was killed? His tomb? Wouldn't you show a bit of curiosity about the things he said?

Paul is a very real historical character, he founded a religion. But he named that religion after a man who could well have been entirely mythological. To Paul the important thing about Jesus is his status as the crucified son of God, the saviour, the blood sacrifice to save the world. He does not tell of the wandering rabbi, the teacher or the man. He tells of what the death of Jesus means. He tells of scripture and how the death of the son of God fits into place in that framework.

There is no contemporary historical evidence for the life of Jesus.

Nothing was written about Jesus during the time Jesus was alive.

All the gospels, including Thomas, were written after the time of Paul's conversion, as much as anybody can verify. It is possible that they were written earlier but there is no proof, no circumstantial evidence, no cross references. There is certainly nothing in the way of a verbatim account of any of the events described in the gospels and no written record of any kind which records thoughts about the future doings of a living Jesus. Five thousand people are meant to have heard him preach, not one of those people wrote anything that survives about their thoughts or their intentions to follow him or to go to Jerusalem. Every single word written about the mortal Jesus is written in the past tense at least twenty years after his death (as far as anybody can tell), with the exception of the scandalously hazy mentions in Paul's writings.

The accounts of the historians quoted by McDowell are all far from contemporary and far from first person witnesses. Most of the historians quoted by Christian scholars claiming to show evidence of a historical Jesus fail the first test of credibility: was the author alive when the events described occurred? Those that pass that fail the next test, did the author meet the characters described, can we rule out the possibility that the story is hearsay? The best account for Jesus written by an author who does not acknowledge Jesus as his saviour is the account of Josephus. This account exists only in copies held by Christians. Two hundred years after the event Christian Origen freely acknowledged that the histories of Josephus did not provide an account of the life of Jesus, two hundred years later when the church had full control the only extant copy of the work of Josephus turns up in the hands of bishop Eusebius, well known for his support for the tactic of pious forgery and lies in the service of the "greater truth" and lo and behold it contains this wonderful account of Jesus expressed in words that would have Josephus the Romanized Jew spinning in his grave. It is an obvious forgery. For four hundred years nobody knew Josephus described the life of Jesus and a great Christian scholar was on record as saying he did not acknowledge Jesus and suddenly the Roman church claims it has the proof it needs that Jesus was historical because the great respected Jewish historian mentions him. That stinks.

The problems with the account of Josephus are:

1] it's a partial forgery

2] it was not contemporary, Josephus was born around the time Jesus was supposed to have died

3] it is not a first hand account

If you accept the story at face value it amounts to a description that there were Christians who tell of the tales of Christ. Josephus does not claim first hand knowledge, he's a historian of the old variety, the kind that makes out they know everything without describing how they know and who told them. He's saying what we already know, there were Christians telling tales about Jesus. We knew that! The other historians who give evidence of Jesus were further removed in time and so were not giving evidence directly of their observations but reporting what the Christians were saying. Nobody doubts there were Christians in 40 CE, the interesting question is whether there was a Christ in 30 CE.

We don't have evidence of it. No evidence from the Romans, no evidence from the Jews, only histories written a generation later, long after the accounts of the Christians could have become accepted simply because there were quite a lot of them about. Millions of non-Christians have accepted the idea that there could have been a man named Jesus who was crucified and died or seemed to have died. That much doesn't require much faith. But that much isn't supported by evidence either.

For atheists believing something with faith because the evidence isn't up to it doesn't give us a warm feeling inside as if we had done something worthwhile, I am fairly sure that many Christians do think the less evidence there is the more faith they are showing therefore the better souls they are. Ignorance leads to more faith, so it is good. That seems to be the Catholic approach. Ignorance and mystery (glorying in ignorance) deepen faith. The Protestant approach seems somewhat different, welcoming evidence when it supports the cause, ignoring anything that doesn't support the cause, perhaps attributing it to the bad faith of man or the work of Satan.

Martyrs for lies

The apostles were killed for spreading inconvenient and unpopular ideas about a god-man. They didn't have to believe he was a real man who lived alongside them. There is no evidence that they did believe such things in the modern literalist way. There were dozens of god-man religions around, they were very popular and fashionable, but people didn't believe in them literally, at least not sophisticated people, perhaps some of the peasants who didn't "have eyes to see" the more sophisticated inner mysteries.

Fulfilling prophesies

The account of the life of Jesus is not proof of the fulfillment of prophesies for very good reasons:

1] The account of the life of Jesus is not reliable as evidence

2] The account of the life of Jesus was written by men very familiar with the contents of the scriptures. They knew what the scriptures said so they knew what the scriptures could be taken to foretell and they wrote the story to match. A match is as remarkable and as difficult to explain as how a character in a soap opera won the lottery. This bit here says "he will ride into Jerusalem riding on the colt of an ass" so how should we describe his entry into Jerusalem? I thought a pink Cadillac, what do you think? And this bit says "he shall be born of David's line", so have you done any in-depth research on his, oops I forgot, it's so easy to think of him as real isn't it? Let me see, begetting, that's not hard, as long as we stick to Jewish sounding names we should be on safe ground, it's not as if anybody is going to be able to contradict us is it? (They did actually, but you lot can always make out that one account gave the line of Mary and one the line of Joseph and don't worry that Joseph was just the spook's cuckold).

3] Prophesies that have been fulfilled are identified after the fact (or fiction). Most of the prophesies were nothing to do with the saviour. Anything that looks like a prophesy but isn't fulfilled doesn't count as an unfulfilled prophesy, such a thing cannot exist, have faith, it will be fulfilled at a later time. Jesus didn't mean he would return in glory in the lifetimes of the people before him literally, you are being stupid if you think that, he meant it some other way, just trust us on this, OK?

400 years before Jesus did any Jewish prophet predict there would be a Jewish man who would be the son of God who would take a small number of Jews with him and create a new religion borrowing their Hebrew scriptures and founding a new religion for gentiles which would spread across the world over two thousand years with about a fifth of humanity believing it and split into hundreds of factions? Show me the passages.

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

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