It has been remarked that if you were to make two lists: on one, write the ten most influential people in history, on the other, write people who have claimed to be God, that only one name would appear on both those lists: Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate Jesus’s influence: much of art, politics, ethics, literature, music, and culture—in the west but also in large swathes of the east—has been influenced by his life.
And, of course, Jesus is the central figure of Christianity—making Christianity, uniquely, a historically grounded religion. Consider this: you could remove the founder of any other religion and that religion could still stand. Somebody else could have taught the system of thought that became Buddhism. The Qur’an could have been brought by somebody other than Muhammad. But Christianity is not a system of teaching taught by Jesus, in a very real sense, Christianity is Jesus Christ. Jesus’s personality, his character, his identity, are the heart of the Christian faith. Christianity stands or falls on Jesus.
For Christianity claims that “God” is not some mere abstract idea, some vague higher power, something “out there” like the Force in Star Wars, or a distant, remote deity, like the God of Islam, but a God who is very, very real. A God who took on human nature and, in Jesus Christ, walked and talked in history.
Now for some that can be quite unnerving. It’s one thing to believe in a distant, remote God, but Christianity says God is much more real than that—closer, more personal. A God who is deeply interested in who we are. A God who loves us too much to abandon us, but also a God who asks much of us.
That cuts so much against the grain of radical individualism that runs through human nature, that our natural temptation is to try to dismiss Christianity and the only way to do that is to do away with Jesus. Whilst we may not go so far as Jesus’s first-century enemies, who did away with him by crucifying him, we’re still tempted to relativize Jesus, to cut him down to size so that we can ignore him.
“JESUS NEVER EXISTED!”
One way to do that is to claim that he never existed. Now that idea isn’t taken seriously among academic historians, but among popular atheism, it’s found a hearing. Thus well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, writes:
The only difference between [Dan Brown’s novel] The Da Vinci Code and the [New Testament] gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.[1]
Dawkins goes on to compare the writing of the gospels to The Telephone Game, that children’s party game where a message is passed by whispering from one child to the next and gets utterly corrupted in the process. This, for some skeptics, is how ancient history was done and thus we can’t trust it. Of course, the problem with this is it would mean we can’t merely not trust the gospels, we can’t trust any ancient history—if we can’t know anything about Jesus, we can’t know anything about the Caesars, or Plato, or Alexander the Great, or anything before the Modern Age.
No historian takes this kind of thing seriously. Listen to these words from atheist historian Bart Ehrman:
Virtually every scholar of antiquity, of biblical studies, of classics, and of Christian origins in this country and, in fact, the Western world agrees. Many of these scholars have no vested interest in the matter. As it turns out, I myself do not either. I am not a Christian, and I have no interest in promoting a Christian cause or a Christian agenda. I am an agnostic with atheist leanings, and my life and views of the world would be approximately the same whether or not Jesus existed … But as a historian, I think evidence matters. And the past matters. And for anyone to whom both evidence and the past matter, a dispassionate consideration of the case makes it quite plain: Jesus did exist.[2]
So when it comes to history, what can we say about the gospels, the four short biographies from which we derive most of our information about Jesus of Nazareth? Well, most scholars are comfortable with the fact that their authors—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were writing history. In terms of genre, the gospels look like other ancient Greco-Roman biographies.
Furthermore, as you read them, you’re immediately struck that these are documents concerned with dates, times and locations. For example, the gospels refer to dozens of place names, along with geographic detail—which is a strong clue to their eyewitness nature. If I asked you to name the capital of France, most of you here would get that right, but if I asked you to name and describe minor villages, hundreds of miles from Paris, you’d probably struggle, unless you’d visited the region. Yet the gospels get that level of detail right—they also get lots of local information correct, everything from politics to agriculture, weather patterns, economics—vast amounts of detail. In short, the New Testament gospels have the flavour of eye-witness testimony.
A GOOD MAN?
But even if he existed, maybe Jesus was merely a good man, a wise moral teacher, an ethical example. Years ago, I used to frequent a place in London, England, called Speakers’ Corner. Speakers’ Corner is part of one of the big parks in London and is known as the world centre of free speech—anybody can stand on a ladder or box there and speak about anything (politics, religion, sport) and draw a crowd. One of my favourite characters at Speakers’ Corner was a man called Barry, who billed himself “The Christian Atheist”. He would stand in the rain, holding a placard that read, “Reject God. Follow Jesus.” … and explain to people that Jesus’s moral teaching was incredible and that you didn’t need to believe in God to follow it.
Now on the one hand, you can see Barry’s point. If more people lived by principles like “Do to others what you’d have them do to you” the world would no doubt be a happier place, with considerably cheaper insurance premiums. But what about some of Jesus’s other teaching: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Now hang on a minute, maybe that’s a bit too far. Have you seen my enemies? Come to think of it, have you seen some of my friends? Or what about: If somebody takes your coat, offer them your shirt, too. Okay, Jesus, now you’re just being ridiculous. That’s just not practical. Look, I’m basically a good person, I vote Liberal, give to Oxfam when they shake a tin outside Tescos, so cut me a little slack, eh? Oh, but then Jesus goes further: Be perfect, as God is perfect. Perfect? Okay, that’s just nuts.
See the problem? Jesus’s “moral teaching” goes beyond a mere code of ethics in much the same way as a Saturn V rocket goes beyond a bottle rocket. Normal ethics, normal moral teaching, says things like “Keep your nose clean, toe the line, be nice, and you’ll be okay”. Manageable, bearable, doable, and other words ending in “—able”. Not too onerous. Instead, though, Jesus was as much concerned with attitudes, motives, and our thought life as actions— “If anyone even looks lustfully at another person, it’s as bad as cheating on your partner with them”. What the heck do we do with that? In our appearance-obsessed, desire-fuelling, sex-saturated culture, it seems wildly impractical. Jesus’s teaching, in other words, is so bold, so outrageous, so far beyond a mere moral checklist that you’re forced to make a choice: either Jesus was mad for teaching this kind of stuff, or else something very different is going on, way beyond the Jesus The Moral Teacher stuff.
A PROPHET?
So what other options are there—could my Muslim friends have it right, could Jesus be some kind of prophet, a special messenger from God? Well, that idea doesn’t work much better, largely because of the staggering personal claims Jesus made about himself. Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins (something that in first-century Judaism only God could do); he put his words on the same level as the words of God in the Jewish scriptures; he told stories that portrayed God as a king and him as the king’s son; he borrowed language and imagery from the Old Testament and retold it in such a way that suggested Jesus believed the Old Testament was all about him.
Jesus did this so boldly and consistently it got him killed, as finally the religious leaders of the day cried “blasphemy” and had Jesus arrested and executed by the Romans. The first Christians, too, reflecting on Jesus’s claims worked out what it meant. “Who do you say I am?” Jesus loved to ask his followers, ask the crowds. And we need to answer that question too.
As Oxford Professor and former atheist, C. S. Lewis, famously put it:
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 the 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 with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
ONE SOLITARY LIFE
That we’re even having this discussion, two thousand years after the events of Jesus’s short public ministry is itself startling, when you stop and think about it. The point is well made by the famous meditation written almost a century ago:
He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter’s shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book, never held an office, never went to college, never visited a big city. He never travelled more than two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend … All the armies that have ever marched, all the navies that have ever sailed, all the parliaments that have ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned put together, have not affected the life of mankind on earth, as powerfully as that one solitary life.[3]
So what does account for the influence of this One Solitary Life? One answer, of course is: the resurrection. Had Jesus’s followers not claimed he had risen from the dead, it would all have ended there. But that doesn’t quite work, does it? Imagine, for a moment, that on the first Easter morning, in AD33, Jesus’s followers had encountered some other random person risen from the dead—perhaps one of the thieves who had been crucified next to Jesus. Would such a miracle have been enough to start a whole new religion? Arguably not, because the power of the stories of Jesus’s resurrection in the gospels is not because they describe a random miracle, but because of who the resurrection happened to. In short, the resurrection of Jesus vindicates all of his teaching that had gone before.
The gospels are not claiming “Hey, people pop back from the dead all the time.” I think the average first-century person knew more about death than we do, given the brutishness of life. No, the more radical claim of the gospels is that this one specific life, this one, solitary, remarkable, incredible life—this Jesus, uniquely, was raised from the dead. Dismiss this as an invention if you wish: but then you’re still left with the huge question of Jesus’s identity, character, and teaching.
And remember, too, that the question of Jesus brings the whole “God Question” into sharp focus. Too many debates about whether God exists are, for me, glorified exercises in missing the point. The question at the heart of Christianity is not “Does God exist?” but what kind of God? And the life and resurrection of Jesus answer that question profoundly. A God who created us and loves us, but a God from who we are separated by our self-centredness and brokenness. But a God who wasn’t prepared to leave it at that, but who stepped into history in the person of Jesus, who went to the cross, offering his life to deal with the consequences of all our wrong choices, stupidity and foolishness. “For God so loved the world,” said Jesus, “that he sent his beloved son, that whoever puts their trust in him might not die, but have eternal life.” A Jesus who also said: “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness.”
Deep down, I think most of us have a hunch that all is not right with the world and that all is not right with us. Sure, we can try to distract ourselves with busyness, or pursue our identity in work, or in causes, or in abstract arguments about God that distract from the real thing. And if Jesus isn’t who he claimed to be, that’s the best we have.
But if Jesus is who he claimed to be, then there’s much more on offer. Because the life, teaching, cross, death and resurrection of Jesus shout from the rooftops that all is not acidic skepticism, or unyielding despair, or the utter blackness of the void, or a life of weary hedonism. Jesus’s life and death and resurrection proclaim that there is hope, there is forgiveness, and that everything that is broken, including us, can be mended. If Jesus is who he claimed to be, then because of history and what God did in the middle of it, we can have a future.
[1] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Transworld, 2006) 216.
[2] Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperCollins, 2012) 5.
[3] A combination of the original version in James Allan Francis, The Real Jesus and Other Sermons (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1926) 123-124 and that found in Os Guinness, The Long Journey Home (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook Press, 2001) 158.
