Chapter 1: Man, Myth, or Messiah?: History’s Greatest Question
There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.1
—ALBERT SCHWEITZER
IT’S ONE OF THE STRANGE QUIRKS OF HUMAN NATURE that we tend to believe wild and absurd things while doubting and dismissing the credible and important.
This tendency to give credence to foolish and baseless speculations was satirized on the long-running US TV show Saturday Night Live. It ranks as one of my favorite comedy skits of all time. It was the one where there was an exchange between an angel and someone who had recently died and gone to heaven. The new arrival was quizzing the angel on all the unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries of his past existence. The dialogue went something like this: “What happened to the fifty-dollar bill I lost at graduation?” and “Who had a crush on me that I didn’t know about?” You get the picture. Finally, heaven’s newest inductee asked “What is the one thing that would surprise me the most if I knew it?” The character playing the angel dramatically paused and then said, “Professional wrestling is real.”2
I guess what struck me as funny is that I’ve actually met people who believed that TV wrestling was authentic (and not staged entertainment); my grandmother was one of them. Of course, there are many people who consider silly things, such as UFOs or Elvis sightings, to be real. As Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.”3
This highlights the tendency to deny events that should be believed, like the Holocaust or Americans walking on the moon and the fact that 9/11 was a terrorist attack carried out by radical Muslims, not a conspiracy of the US government.
Regrettably the amount of misinformation and rumor is rampant in an age where every outlandish viewpoint has its own website and Facebook page. Finding the truth becomes hard work. It also requires our being willing to accept it, regardless of our own personal preferences or biases. In other words, we must be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
While many spurious beliefs are relatively harmless and inconsequential, others could have devastating consequences, especially if real history is obscured or ignored. This was never more obvious to me than when visiting sites like the World War II Nazi concentration camps, such as the one in Auschwitz, Poland. Walking through massive rooms of shoes, suitcases, and hair in what remains of this testimony to hell on earth will dismiss any absurd suggestion that the Holocaust never happened. Millions of Jews were murdered in one of humankind’s darkest moments.
The same can be said of a trip to Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. It is simply outrageous that someone could deny that these unthinkable events did not occur just seventy short years ago.
Forgetfulness of this kind is intentional—a deliberate refusal to remember. This seems to be an all-too-familiar pattern in history. That’s because remembering is hard work that requires all our faculties to be unencumbered by bias and personal agendas. These types of painful memories bring us back to the reality of the shameful proclivity in human nature toward cruelty and injustice. If left unchecked and unaccountable, the strong will dominate the weak and helpless, rather than stand up and defend them—especially at the risk of losing our own lives or credibility.
It is because of this fatal flaw in human nature that God sent His own Son in the likeness of humans to walk among us and model the antithesis of this kind of self-centeredness. Jesus Christ lived a life that went against that strong current of history. He lived the life that we should have lived, one that was morally and ethically spotless. No other figure in human history could or would make such a claim to be without sin—Jesus did. For this reason, it was the most unique and important life in history—one we cannot dismiss or ignore.
Yet something so precious and amazing is rejected as an impossibility by skeptics who readily accept absurd and irrational explanations of our existence, especially if they are devoid of any moral implications. They frame all religious beliefs in a one-size-fits-all framework and dismiss it with the charge that faith is blind, or, as they love to say, “faith is believing what you know isn’t true.”
As atheist writer Michael Shermer states, “Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.”4
Nothing could be further from the truth. While there are many who believe in God without being aware of all the evidence and logic attesting to its truth, this doesn’t mean that the evidence and logic don’t exist. If you believe in God and are a follower of Christ, that faith is well grounded in history and reason—real faith isn’t blind. Yet the Scripture warns, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6 NKJV).
If we desire to not be engulfed by a tsunami of digital absurdity, we must find the solid foundation of something that is true and trustworthy. It’s much easier to sit back and flow with what the culture is saying about something rather than sincerely and objectively searching for the truth, regardless of where the evidence may lead.
Every person has the right to know the truth (facts) and make his own decision. With that said, there are definitely pitfalls and dangerous, dark alleys in which you can get mugged and stripped of your faith. It’s worth repeating: the voices you listen to in this journey of faith and discovery are critical.
GOD’S NOT DEAD REVISITED
After thirty years of working with university students around the world, I decided to write down the arguments for the existence of God in what I hoped would be a straightforward, concise manner. That effort became the book God’s Not Dead. It gave a glimpse into the emotionally charged debate that rages between these two opposing views of the world—materialism (atheism) and theism. This is not a friendly discussion. Though there are voices of reason and moderation on both sides, the usual fare is a shouting match of insults rather than arguments, and rhetoric rather than reason. I have been overwhelmed with responses from believers of all ages and backgrounds, who told me the stories of how the voices of intolerance did everything possible to silence their views because they were Christians. They, too, had to take a stand at the risk of losing credibility, grades from a teacher, or even their occupations.
For the follower of Christ, there is a fierce conflict on two distinct fronts. On one side is the challenge we have mentioned of materialism and atheism. The materialist believes that nature is all there is. The world and everything in it can be explained by natural causes with no need for any “supernatural shenanigans,” as physicist and atheist Lawrence Krauss puts it.5 The theistic worldview believes that the order and information in the physical universe point to an intelligent mind behind it all. Information itself is a nonmaterial entity with no mass or physical quality. To the materialist, this defeats the notion that only physical things are real. The nonmaterial nature of information joins the list of other nonphysical realities that scientists depend on to make their hypotheses, observations, measurements, and conclusions. These include mathematics, reason, and the laws of logic. Science itself rests on the assumption that these things are true.
The proponents of the atheistic worldview hope we don’t notice that this view doesn’t rest on cold, hard facts but rather on a set of presuppositions. It claims to be the worldview endorsed by a majority of the top scientists and thus the only conclusion of the rational and scientifically literate mind. Life is merely a product of random chance and purely natural forces. Since there was no real beginning to humanity, we are just a branch in the evolutionary tree of life; therefore, there is no sin to atone for and no need for a Savior. Life is simply a struggle where the fittest survive. The rest face extinction. We are reduced to being animals programmed by our DNA to survive.
The cloak of academic pretense must be drawn back in order to see the true influence behind this brand of atheism and radical skepticism: the philosophy of naturalism. Contrary to Stephen Hawking’s pronouncement that “philosophy is dead,”6 the writings of the popular atheists demonstrate that bad philosophy is still thriving in the darkness of the unbelieving mind.
The reality is we don’t act just like a group of animals struggling to survive. We can think philosophically about the human condition, create ways to remedy injustice wherever it is found, and serve the poor and needy. These actions that help the weak and infirm do not logically follow from an evolutionary instinct or survival point of view. In fact, Darwin said we are hindering the evolutionary process by these acts of inexplicable altruism.7 Instead, this comes naturally to us because we have been instilled with a moral law that reflects our distinction as humans, made in the image of God. Contrary to Darwin, Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). This is exactly what Jesus did in laying down His own life to pay for our sins by His death on a Roman cross. He now calls us to love and serve others in His name.
On the other side of the Christian struggle is the challenge that stems from the fact that there are many religions in the world and many contradictory voices describing what God is like and what this God expects of us.
With all the religions in the world, which one is right?
Is it just a matter of sincerity? How can they all be right when, as we shall see, the truth claims of the world’s religions are mutually exclusive? In other words, by their own testimonies, they all can’t be right. Some believe in one personal God, others in multiple deities, and some in an impersonal force. There are millions of people who will never question what they have been told and blindly follow their cultural beliefs and the faith of their parents. But there are millions more who will examine what they have been told in light of the free market of ideas. They will desire to know what is actually true over what is culturally preferred. That which is really true can withstand the scrutiny of historical, philosophical, and rational inquiry. The very essence of truth is that it is true regardless of culture or context.
God calls us to follow Him with our hearts and minds. We may start out with the faith of our parents, but we must make it our own. Usually this is very hard work. Every religion is based on claims that must be tested in light of history, philosophy, science, and theology. They all make claims that can and should be compared and contrasted. They make claims that can’t all be true. For instance, the Koran states that Jesus was not crucified (Sura 4:157–58). The Bible obviously states that not only was He was crucified; He was also raised from the dead. As we will discuss thoroughly in this book, the overwhelming evidence accepted by historians is that Jesus was crucified at the hands of the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate. It doesn’t just come down to who can shout the loudest to determine the truth or falsity of the critical statements that the different religions and philosophies make.
We can, and must, be able to make these kinds of clear distinctions between competing claims for truth. The hope from the very beginning of the initial God’s Not Dead project was to help people fulfill 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be prepared . . . to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”
A couple of years ago, I took my youngest son, Charlie, on a wilderness journey that was advertised as taking you beyond your comfort zone. He kept telling me, “But I like my comfort zone. Why would I want to get out of it?” There were series of daunting challenges, including a white-water rafting trip. Thankfully, we had a guide on this trip across a series of rapids. Listening to that voice of experience about when to lean left or right, when to paddle, or when to lift our oars out of the water, allowed us to miss a host of dangerous rocks that could have upended us or injured us severely. The people who have injured their faith or lost it altogether because of listening to the wrong voices are too many to count. I am grateful for the mentors I’ve had that have helped me navigate through the skeptical challenges to the truth of the Christian faith. My hope is to help readers avoid the things that cause a shipwrecking of their trust in God. This starts with accepting a fact that is indeed beyond dispute: Jesus really did exist.
FAITH OR HISTORY?
The fact of Jesus’ existence brings the discussion about Him out of the realm of just religious faith into the arena of historical investigation. If someone is intellectually honest, he should at least examine the evidence for His life as he would any other person who lived, such as Socrates, Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon. The evidence for His life shouldn’t be dismissed ahead of time because of the awareness of an extraordinary conclusion, one that might be ominously waiting at the end of the search.
When it comes to Jesus Christ, there has definitely been a higher standard, unreasonably high at times, for establishing the facts surrounding His life, works, and words. The specific criteria used by many modern scholars to verify the authenticity of Jesus have been so demanding that if they were applied to ancient history, most of what is currently accepted would dissolve into oblivion. For instance, imagine asserting, as skeptics do for the biblical records, that we could only know about ancient Rome from what we learn from non-Roman sources. In contrast, scholars who use trusted approaches fairly and consistently recognize that Christian beliefs about Jesus are solidly guarded in historical fact. As stated in Reinventing Jesus, “If you are skeptical of the Jesus of the Bible, we hope you’ll discover that a step toward him doesn't require leaving your brain behind. If you embrace the biblical Christ but think faith isn’t concerned with matters of the mind, we want you to see that belief in the Incarnation—God entering the time-space world as a man two millennia ago—compels you to take history seriously.”8
Historians use reliable criteria to establish the probability that an event happened in the past. For instance, claims are more likely true if they are reported by multiple, independent sources. By this standard, our knowledge about Jesus is superior to that about virtually every other ancient historical figure. Scholars have discovered more literary sources for the historical Jesus within the first hundred years after His life than all of the primary literary sources for Socrates, which, incidentally, are in far less agreement with each other than the Gospels.9
When the historical process is arbitrary and inconsistent, the past becomes something that people with an agenda can manipulate like a fictional story. This type of mind-set leads to the dismissal of the miraculous accounts given by Jesus’ followers in the Gospels. Those accounts are replaced with historical profiles of what someone living at the time of Jesus would have probably been like. Others go so far as claiming that the followers of Jesus merely borrowed from the mythology of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians. The reasoning? The miracles didn’t happen because miracles can’t happen. We’re going to break this down in detail in a later chapter. Pop culture has seized on these unfounded speculations and broadcast them as fact.
Comedian and cultural commentator Bill Maher spews this palaver to the delight of his adoring audiences. Others simply repeat this again and again as if it is part of the creedal orthodoxy of a new skeptical religion. And make no mistake: atheism is a religion. It is a set of beliefs about the nature of the world and about us as humans, and those beliefs have dramatic implications for how we should live and how society should function. At the heart of this anti-theistic system is the necessity to dismiss the supernatural, especially the supernatural birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
LIAR, LUNATIC, OR LORD?
In an earlier generation the former atheist and legendary author and philosopher C. S. Lewis posed his famous trilemma. He said based on the claims of Jesus in the Gospels about being the Son of God, that He was either a lunatic (because He thought He was God), a liar (because He knew this wasn’t true), or He was indeed Lord.
This challenge by Lewis was to help people not get stuck with the position that Jesus was merely a good man and not the Messiah that He claimed and demonstrated Himself to be. Therefore, He was a liar or a lunatic and would be disqualified for being the person we should consider as the ultimate representation of the invisible God.
Bart Erhman, a former evangelical believer turned agnostic who teaches at the University of North Carolina, tells of how he added the word legend to the list of options that Lewis proposed when considering the true identity of Jesus. He asked, “What if Jesus didn’t claim to be the Son of God?” That would mean that the stories about Christ’s miracles and His resurrection from the dead were simply legends, constructed by His followers, long after His death. This notion is echoed by popular writers who dismiss the claim of Jesus being the Christ and relegate Him to being a Jewish zealot who died trying to lead an insurrection against the Romans. Writers, such as Reza Aslan, the sociologist mentioned in the introduction, who turned from the Christian faith back to his original faith of Islam, claim Jesus was an illiterate peasant who never said most of what the Gospels say He said or did the things they say He did. Very little of what Aslan says is original thought however. He simply restates the writings of skeptics before him, such as S. G. F. Brandon, John Dominic Crossan, and Marcus Borg. Aslan ignores the Gospels and opts instead for writings, not about Jesus but about the type of people from His times and from those who might have lived in His town. He asserts, “For better or worse, the only access one can have to the real Jesus comes not from the stories that were told about him after his death, but rather from the smattering of facts we can gather from his life as part of a large Jewish family of woodworkers/builders struggling to survive in the small Galilean village of Nazareth.”10
That’s like saying we can get a better picture of Abraham Lincoln from studying what the people were like in the region of the United States that were his contemporaries rather than studying the accounts of his life from those who knew him best. It is deeply irresponsible to dismiss the testimony as biased from people who believed in Jesus and accept the perceptions of those who didn’t believe in Him as more credible.
The growing body of literature making these types of claims, and the rise of Internet skeptics that proclaim this type of writing as “scholarly” and “authoritative,” have evoked a renewed effort to set the record straight. That’s why the title of this work, Man, Myth, Messiah, offers a different trilemma for a different generation.
THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS
The roots of this culture of skepticism can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period, commonly referred to as the Age of Enlightenment, could better be described as the age of skepticism. The mind-set of this era is summed up by an earlier French mathematician and philosopher named René Descartes. He started with doubt in order to come to a place of confidence about what he could know for sure. “In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.”11
This perspective left him with the foundation of reality being his own thoughts (albeit doubts) about the fact of his own existence. The seeds that Descartes planted grew over the next century into the Enlightenment era, which heralded that “reason replaced revelation” in terms of the source of the culture’s epistemology—that is, how we know what we know.
This philosophical trend blossomed in the nineteenth century with the release of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. The theory of evolution by means of natural selection that he described replaced in the minds of skeptics the belief that life needed a designer to account for the “appearance of design in nature.” This alternative story radically altered how people would view our origins and by extension our destiny, value, and understanding of ultimate reality. For if there were no need for a supernatural Creator to explain life, then why not dismiss Him altogether?
It should be no surprise that skepticism about the historical Jesus would rise in the same period. If you don’t believe in God, or dismiss Him as an impersonal Deity who isn’t concerned with the affairs of humans, then you wouldn’t believe that He had a Son who was sent to pay for the sins of the world. These doubts about the wonder-working Jesus of Nazareth would be given full expression with liberal theologian David Strauss. His writings cemented a vision of Jesus that would strip away all of the supposed miracles and thus any claim to being the Son of God who died and rose again.
Jesus’ identity was further downgraded in 1906 by the book The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer. He argued that Jesus was not even the great moral instructor envisioned by liberal scholars but simply a well-meaning teacher who was mistaken about the imminent end of the world. Schweitzer also denied most of the New Testament’s significant claims about Jesus’ life, teachings, and miracles.
The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb.
This image has not been destroyed from outside; it has fallen to pieces.12
The influence of such scholars is still being felt today. In the twentieth century skeptical theologians and historians continued to build on previous revisions of Jesus and remake Him into everything from an illiterate peasant leading a revolt against Rome to a New Age guru promoting esoteric Eastern mysticism. In the 1980s and ’90s, the Jesus Seminar was formed by “a self-selected group of like-minded scholars” as a modern-day tribunal to vote on which words from Scripture they thought Jesus said and which ones were fabricated by later Christians.13 As you might guess, little remained after their sweeping edits of the Gospels outside some of Jesus’ ethical teachings. This effort was reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson, who literally cut out the passages from the Gospels that contained anything supernatural and left only the ethical teachings of Jesus in his own version of the Bible. In the end, most New Testament scholars recognized that the seminar by no means represented the majority of experts in the field but solely the opinion of an extreme faction, many of whom were driven by the desire to discredit historical Christianity.
THE RESURRECTION CHANGES EVERYTHING
The claim that Jesus was resurrected, three days after His death, is not just an article of faith, but it is also a statement that can be examined historically. Philosopher Stephen Davis noted, “I do hold, however, that the meaning of the resurrection depends on the fact of the resurrection. That is, if Jesus was not really raised from the dead, then the resurrection of Jesus has no particularly interesting meaning.”14
Christianity is based on this central claim and is thus open to critical historical inquiry. In the same way that Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species sought to establish the past history of living things through the method called inference to the best explanation, we can look at this event using the same process. In fact, the apostle Paul would write that if there were no resurrection, then the Christian faith would be false (1 Corinthians 15:14). Critics have long maintained that religious claims are simply statements of faith without any evidence or substance. Claims of science, they say, are more credible because they can be proven false. Yet this is exactly what Christianity declares. There is no other religion that bases the entire weight of its credibility on a single event or miracle. As stated boldly by Michael Grant, “Christianity is the only religion which stands or falls by supposed historical happenings.”15
It was this conviction that compelled a small group of Christ followers out of the shadows of fear and unbelief onto the center stage of history. It became the source of a supernatural power and wisdom that would confound their opponents. Ultimately, it would overwhelm an empire, not by military prowess but by heart-piercing truth and relentless love. The world had not witnessed anything like it before or since. Historian Will Durant concludes:
There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fiery tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has ever known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.16
It was the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead that evoked a dedication and sacrifice by His followers to obey His commands. At the top of the list was the command to love their enemies. It is highly unlikely that His followers would have been faithful to those words had Jesus’ life ended permanently at the cross. In fact, New Testament scholar N. T. Wright points out that none of the many self-proclaimed messiahs of the ancient world continued to have a following or influence once they died.
One might add, for good measure, the followers not only of John the Baptist but of Judas the Galilean, Simon, Athronges, Eleazar ben Deinaus and Alexander, Menahem, Simon bar Giora, and Bar-Kochba himself. Faced with the defeat of their leader, followers of such figures would either be rounded up or melt away into the undergrowth. The other possibility was to latch onto a new leader. In the case of the apparent dynasty that ended up being known as the Sicarii, when one leader was killed, they simply chose another from the same family. In not one case do we hear of any group, after the death of its leader, claiming that he was in any sense alive again and that, therefore, Israel’s expectation had in some strange way actually come true. History, therefore, spotlights this question: What happened to make Jesus’ followers, from the very start, articulate such a claim and work out its implications?17 For us today, the desperate need is to recover the same conviction of the truth of this event that the early disciples possessed.
MORE THAN A HISTORY LESSON
The disciples of Jesus asked the question, “Who is this?” when witnessing Him calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee with the words “Hush, be still.” The multitudes asked the same when He rode into Jerusalem a week before His crucifixion to the shouts of “Hosanna” to the King. The answer? He is the Christ—the Messiah.
This belief was certainly grounded in the evidence of the power of His words and His works. He healed the sick, fed the multitudes, walked on water, and even raised Lazarus from the dead. This was no mere man. It would be said that no man spoke the way He spoke (John 7:46). In spite of having this front-row seat to observe the most amazing three years in human history, the disciples of Jesus still grappled with doubt. If they struggled with doubt, having actually seen the miracles unfold before their very eyes, what chance do we have to believe these things two thousand years removed from the original events? This question underscores a key reality when it comes to a relationship with God: there is more to faith than just believing a correct version of history. While the death and resurrection of Jesus are events that can be judged historically, what still remains is an invitation into a relationship that requires a step of faith (trust).
Jesus told Peter after his startling revelation that He was the Christ, “Blessed are you Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but my Father in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). As the other disciples, Peter had seen the evidence of who Jesus was firsthand. They all saw the same miracles and heard the same words, but they were not able to come to the same conclusion. Something more was needed. The reason lies in the fact that God is not an object to be studied or a force to be measured, but He is personal and, therefore, relational. As in any personal relationship, you cannot force someone to talk to you, much less to give you any deep personal information about himself. Think about your own life. People may know you exist, but that does not mean they can force you to tell them any of your thoughts, feelings, or preferences. In essence, you do not enter into any relationship with someone else without being invited. So it is with God. His Spirit communicates to our hearts the meaning of these facts and then offers us an invitation in the form of promises made. If we believe His words, we will accept His invitation.
Two thousand years after His resurrection, that invitation is still being made, and we can still respond. We can actually have just as fresh an encounter with the Lord as those who walked with Him physically on the shores of Galilee and saw Him after His resurrection. In fact, Jesus told His disciples, “It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Of course, to suggest that God communicates with humanity directly is to invite deep scorn from the ranks of the unbelieving. Granted, there has been massive abuse in the area of claiming that “God told me” something. Yet such presumption does not mean that God cannot or does not communicate with us. As powerful as the evidence and arguments are for the truth of the Christian faith, the greatest privilege available to humanity is without question a personal relationship with our Creator. As Augustine wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”18 The Scriptures talk about the love of God that “surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). Knowing about someone is one thing; knowing him personally is quite another.
Historical evidence can greatly assist people on their journey toward God, but it alone cannot bring a person fully to God. For historians cannot make claims about the ancient past with absolute certainty, only with various levels of confidence. In other words, historians rarely speak in terms of what definitely happened but with what probably happened, as seen by the following quotation: “No historians really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writing, simply in its probable truth. Notwithstanding, the inability to obtain absolute certainty does not prohibit historians from having adequate certainty.”19
Said slightly differently, absolute certainty is only possible in such realms as mathematics, but mathematics cannot directly speak to historical events by itself. However, some events are supported by so much evidence that their occurrence is of such high probability that we can, for all practice purposes, say with certainty that they actually occurred. “Mathematical calculations cannot demonstrate the existence and career of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. But converging historical evidence would make it absurd to deny that he lived and changed the political and cultural face of the Middle East,”20 comments author and historian Gerald O’Collins.
The evidence of the resurrection falls into this category. It is so compelling, as determined by the most trustworthy historical standards, that denying the event is unjustifiable, if one truly approaches the evidence objectively and openly. And there lies the challenge. No one is truly objective since all of us view the world through unconscious assumptions and biases. Biases can result from upbringing or other cultural influences. For instance, a person raised to deny the existence of the supernatural would simply dismiss the evidence for the resurrection before even examining it. Biases can also result from people living in rebellion against the true God and giving their hearts to such idols as money, power, and status. As the apostle Paul stated, “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4).
THE STEP OF TRUST
Regardless of these obstacles, we are given the invitation into a personal relationship with God. It requires a step of trust in the direction the evidence is leading. This step involves both our hearts (spirits) and minds. Remember, the greatest command God gave us was to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength (Mark 12:29–30; Deuteronomy 6:4–5). And Jesus taught, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24 NKJV).
If we worshipped God with only our minds, we would be left with merely an intellectual exercise, limited by our own intellectual abilities and capacity. In contrast, true love goes well beyond just the intellect. Anyone who is married or in love can testify of the transcendental nature of loving someone else. It is an experience that includes analysis and cognition, but that is only one dimension. We are spiritual beings, not just physical. However, the mind is still essential. The intellectual dimension acts as a judge and arbiter of the facts available to us. We need to believe in our hearts but not dismiss our minds, for it is not either/or. Such a false choice is the constant refrain of skeptics that faith and reason are irreconcilable. Yet the two are not only compatible but inseparably linked.
God has made us in such a way that we can grasp something with our hearts (spirits) even if our minds cannot fully comprehend it. How can the finite fully grasp the infinite? If there is a central message of Scripture, from beginning to end, it is trust. God gives us enough evidence in the things we can know, to trust Him in the things that we are not capable of understanding.
As a father of five children, I have spent many days teaching them to trust me. When they were learning to swim, I would ask them to jump into my arms from the side of the pool while I stood in the water. They did not understand all the reasons why I could or should be trusted when I asked them to take a “leap of faith,” but they had enough evidence to trust my words anyway and jump. I was actually asking them to take a step of trust. My request to my children is similar to the step of trust God asks of us. He calls us to believe in Him, not based on blind faith but on how He has proven Himself trustworthy both in our lives and throughout history.
SUMMARY
When it comes to the central issues of the Christian faith, the biggest dispute is usually not with the facts of history but with the presuppositions and worldviews of those who interpret those facts. As you hear and weigh the evidence about Jesus, you will be able to know with confidence that He is the Son of God. Chapters 2 through 5 will demonstrate that overwhelming evidence validates that Jesus was truly a man of history, who was crucified, dead, buried, and then rose from the dead. In addition, these chapters defend that the Gospels are reliable accounts of Jesus’ life, ministry, and teaching. Chapter 6 will dismiss the absurd notion that Jesus’ life was rooted in pagan mythology. Chapter 7 will then demonstrate that Jesus was the promised Messiah, who is the Savior of the world. Chapter 8 will continue this theme by defending the reality of Jesus’ miracles, and it will demonstrate that His followers continued to perform miracles in His name after His resurrection until this very day. Finally, chapters 9 and 10 will explain how you can come to know Jesus personally and then step into His purposes for your life.