What Do We Know about Jesus?
Our planet came into existence almost five billion years ago, human civilization emerged at the end of the last ice age twelve thousand years ago, and the pyramids were built between four and five thousand years ago. Christianity, by comparison, is relatively new.
Christianity is based on claims about who Jesus was and his significance for us today. No reputable scholar doubts that Jesus was a real person, although they debate who he was, what he said, and what he taught. The question thoughtful people face is whether he was more than a flesh-and-blood man.
Again and again, throughout the four Gospels in the New Testament, Jesus is reported to do extraordinary things, and through them he revealed more fully the nature of God. The authors of all twenty-seven books in the New Testament all reach the same conclusion, and some probably didn’t even know each other.
Their most astounding claim is that after Jesus was executed in Jerusalem, God restores him back to life. Many people at the time found this as hard to believe as many people do today. The claim of resurrection was so extraordinary that the New Testament writers risked ostracism, ridicule, and in some cases death for insisting on it. If you strip away this claim, Jesus is reduced at best to an ethical teacher, and everything supernatural about him vanishes. Along with it, so does Christianity as a life-changing force in people’s lives.
Some skeptics insist that people living at the time believed in the resurrection because of a mental disorder, perhaps a kind of mass hysteria. Or even that they shared the same delusion. Perhaps Jesus only appeared to die but soon revived. Maybe belief in his resurrection was a conspiracy, even that the entire narrative about Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was one big myth.
Explanations involving mass hysteria are not credible because such events are typically short-lived, involve considerable anxious dread, and seem to affect women more than men. Belief that Jesus came back to life, however, persisted. It brought hope and joy rather than anxiety and dread, and it was accepted and promoted predominantly by men.
Two people occasionally share a delusion, which is a rigidly held bizarre belief. One deluded person might believe she’s the Virgin Mary and another that he is Jesus Christ. Such people soon end up in psychiatric facilities. Although whole populations can share unreasonable beliefs, bizarre beliefs rarely if even center around a single miraculous event.
The idea that Jesus only appeared to die but rapidly recovered overlooks that Roman executioners were skilled and likely to ensure that their victims were dead. Given how controversial Jesus had become, this would have been especially the case with him. Even if Jesus survived, he would have been in horrendous physical shape, critically in need of medical attention, and he certainly would have required a long convalescence. None of this even remotely matches the reports that appear in any of the four Gospels. And if you consider how long and detailed each one is, the so-called swoon theory falls apart.
As for a conspiracy, no first-century Christian, including the ten or more authors of the books in the New Testament, seems to have renounced or disavowed the resurrection, and if it never happened they would have had good reason to do so. The lightest penalty for insisting on it would have been expulsion from the synagogue, which likely involved estrangement from unbelieving loved ones and the loss of everything that had been spiritually meaningful.
Accepting the thesis that the crucifixion never happened would require the wholesale dismissal of all of the documents in the New Testament, which as noted above was written by many different people, all asserting essentially the same thing. This is as unlikely as concluding green men from Mars come every afternoon to have tea.
Jesus, according to the New Testament, came to serve as the bridge between humanity and the creator, to repair and restore what was broken. Doing so required the ultimate sacrifice. Through Jesus, God offers to rescue us from the prison of rebellious self-absorption that can make it difficult to love others, and to give us new life. How we respond to this offer can make all the difference.
People who have never opened a New Testament are likely to discover, if and when they do, that the documents in it speak for themselves. The actor David Suchet, renowned for his portrayal of Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, became a Christian as an adult when he opened a Bible he found in a hotel room. He later narrated the entire Bible with the professionalism one would expect of a seasoned actor.