The evidences that we have discussed over the past few weeks for God’s existence and the Bible’s divine origin are important, but in the end, the truth claims of Christianity stand or fall on the basis of Jesus’s own claims and identity.  This week, I want to examine those claims directly.  If Jesus was God incarnate, and if he was really raised from the dead, Christianity is true.  If Jesus was never raised and if he was not the Son of God, the claims of orthodox Christianity are false.  So, in the end, our examination of Christian evidences comes down to this question: Who was Jesus?  This is such an important question that I would encourage you to ask it directly to any skeptic with whom you talk.

 

Lord, Liar, Lunatic, or Legend?

In the 1940s, C.S. Lewis famously posed the “trilemma”: If Jesus claimed to be the Son of God and divinity in the flesh, he was either lying, he was crazy, or he was the Lord he claimed to be.  For decades, Christian apologists have been repeating the “Lord, liar, or lunatic” trilemma, because it has a lot of persuasive power.  The high value of Jesus’s moral teaching, and the exemplary nature of his life, would imply that he was probably not a liar and certainly not a lunatic.  Therefore, he must have been Lord, right?

But in recent decades a number of skeptics have pointed out that Lewis’s trilemma assumes the truth of the gospel narratives, which is an assumption that most critical biblical scholars are not willing to grant.  There is a fourth “L” that can be added to the trilemma, they say: “legend.”  Jesus’s claims were either made up by early Christians or highly exaggerated, they say.  Jesus himself might have been a good moral teacher and perhaps even an itinerant healer or prophet, but later Christians turned him into the Son of God.  How should we deal with the claim that the Jesus in which the church has believed for centuries is mostly a legend?

First, I think that we can quickly dismiss one minority view that has gained a following in some atheist circles: the claim that Jesus never existed.  Jesus’s existence was accepted as fact not only by all four gospel writers, but also by Paul and the other early Christians.  Paul was a skeptic before he was a Christian, and if Jesus had never existed, he surely would have been aware of the claim.  In the late 1^st and early 2^nd centuries, several Jewish and Roman writers (e.g., Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius) briefly mentioned Jesus’s life, treating him as a historical figure whose existence was never in doubt.  There is thus a lot of ancient historical evidence for Jesus’s life.  But perhaps the most powerful argument in favor of Jesus’s existence is this: If Jesus had never existed, how did Christianity get started, and why did people claim that they were following a man named Jesus who had been crucified?  This is so hard to explain that very few historians, outside of a small number of atheists, have seriously doubted Jesus’s existence.  Even the agnostic Bart Ehrman, who has written several books casting doubts on the biblical manuscripts and the claims of Christianity, has argued in favor of Jesus’s historical existence; the evidence for it is simply overwhelming.  There is no other nonpolitical or non-military figure from the ancient world about whom we have more historical testimony than Jesus of Nazareth.

But while most critics accept the historical existence of Jesus, they argue that the claims that he was divine were a later invention.  They usually say that the belief in Jesus’s divinity gradually developed over the course of the first century, primarily in a Gentile context.

What are the problems with this idea?

• The earliest epistles present Jesus as Lord, and do not assume that the idea was controversial. See, for example, Romans 1:1-7.
• The Pauline epistles, which were written about 25-35 years after Jesus’s crucifixion, and the earliest gospels (which were written within 40 years of the crucifixion) accept this view. That’s not enough time for a legend to develop.  Many people who heard these letters and gospels read in their churches would have seen Jesus or talked with someone who did, and they would not have been likely to believe a claim that was so shocking as the claim that a teacher they had followed was really God in the flesh – unless, of course, that was what he himself had claimed.
• The idea of Jesus’s full divinity and humanity are deeply embedded in the gospel narratives; they are not external ideas that are overlaid on an existing story. For example, in Mark 2, Jesus forgives a man’s sins, which his audience recognized was a prerogative that belonged to God alone.  In Matthew 7, he claimed to be a cosmic judge, and said that people would be judged for eternity based on how they responded to his teaching.  There are many other examples of this, but these illustrate an important principle: Even in the earliest gospel accounts, and in the sections that people usually cite when they claim that Jesus was a “good moral teacher,” Jesus is behaving as someone more than simply human.

What did Jesus claim about himself?  Among other things, he claimed:

• That he was the promised Messiah (Mt. 16:16-17).
• That he would be the ransom for the world (Mk 10:45).
• That he was the source of divine law (Mt. 5-7).
• That he could forgive sins (Mk. 2:5).
• That God was his Father (Mt. 16:17).
• That he was lord of the Sabbath (Mk. 2:28).
• That he would judge the world as the Son of Man (Mt. 7:21-27).
• That he was the king of the kingdom of God (Lk. 22:69).

Notice that I didn’t list any scriptures from the gospel of John, which contain some of the most direct statements about Jesus’s divinity.  The reason that I restricted this list to the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) is that skeptics often claim that the Synoptics present a picture of Jesus as more human and less divine than John does, and that this represents an earlier Christian view of Jesus.  But in fact, the early gospels are fully Trinitarian (as the accounts of Jesus’s baptism show), and they picture Jesus as fully divine.

If these early testimonies do not reflect Jesus’s actual words, we have to ask the question why there was a uniform Christian belief (even among monotheistic Jewish Christians) that the crucified Jesus was God in the flesh.  This was a deeply countercultural claim.

In fact, I would encourage any skeptic to consider these questions:

• Why did people continue to follow Jesus after he died?
• Why did the early Christians feel the need to consider Jesus God if he had never said that he was? (Consider John the Baptist as an alternative case.  John’s disciples never made this claim about him).
• If someone had made up a story about Jesus being God, would it have been this story? (Consider the apocryphal gospels, which were written in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries, and which depict Jesus using his power to slay his enemies or to reveal secret knowledge to his disciples – which was very different from the picture of Jesus’s humility and service presented in the canonical gospels).
• Why would monotheistic Jews, of all people, have invented a story of Jesus’s divinity?

In my view, the only way to account for the extraordinary claims of Jesus are to acknowledge two facts:

• Jesus really did make these claims.
• His disciples found these extraordinary claims credible because of what they saw in Jesus during his life and especially what they experienced in his resurrection.

 

The Resurrection of Jesus

From the 18^th century to the present, the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus has been a key part of Christian apologetics, and for good reason.  In the early 20^th century, a skeptic writing under the pen name Frank Morrison decided to investigate the resurrection from the viewpoint of a skeptic, and he became so convinced by the evidence in its favor that he wrote the widely popular Christian apologetic book Who Moved the Stone?  More recently, Gary Habermas has built an apologetics career around the evidence for the resurrection.  My favorite book on the resurrection, though, is N. T. Wright’s massive tome The Resurrection of the Son of God, which presents a detailed historical examination of beliefs about resurrection in first-century Jewish and Greek culture in order to show that the story of the resurrection of Jesus was deeply countercultural at the time and not likely to be a fabricated account.

Why is the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus so compelling?

• It was a universal belief among the early Christians and the foundation of their faith. Three of the most prominent eyewitnesses of the resurrection (Peter, James, and Paul) staked their lives on their belief in this claim.  Two of those people were skeptics before the resurrection.  The resurrection is the only explanation that the early disciples gave of why they worshipped a crucified man (which was considered highly embarrassing in the first century).  For this reason, even most skeptics agree that the early disciples of Jesus at least thought they encountered a resurrected Jesus.  In other words, they weren’t lying about it.
• The testimony of the resurrection was written down very soon after the crucifixion, which means there was not enough time for a legend about the resurrection to develop. 1 Corinthians 15 was written in c. AD 55 – about 25 years after the crucifixion.  It is an account written by someone who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus and who also talked with several other eyewitnesses of the resurrection some years before that.  We also have independent resurrection accounts in the four gospels that were written about 40-70 years after the crucifixion.
• The gospels mention that women were the first to see Jesus, which is not a detail that someone in the first-century Roman world would have included in a fabricated account, since women’s testimony was not considered legally valid in that culture.

So, if the resurrection story was not a legend, and if the eyewitnesses were not lying, were they hallucinating or imagining the experience?  This is unlikely, because:

• The resurrection accounts mention multiple eyewitnesses who saw the resurrected Jesus simultaneously. Hallucinations usually involve one person; they don’t involve 500 people.
• The resurrection appearances suddenly stopped almost as quickly as they started. If they had been hallucinations or visions, one would have expected them to continue.
• The disciples claimed that the tomb was empty. Visions or hallucinations alone would not have produced an empty tomb.
• As N. T. Wright demonstrates, the resurrection was counter to what either Jews or Greeks at the time would have expected. In my view, this is the most persuasive reason to believe that the resurrection accounts were not hallucinations or imagined experiences, because when people hallucinate or imagine that they are seeing a ghost, they invariably imagine something from their own experiences or cultural expectations.  Jesus’s resurrection was not like that.  None of the disciples expected Jesus to reappear in a resurrection body.  Most Jews expected a bodily resurrection, but they expected it to be at the end of time.  The idea that the resurrection would begin with the Messiah was a shocking idea.  Greeks did not believe in a resurrection of the body, and they considered the idea foolishness.

Both the resurrection and the claims of Jesus were contrary to the cultural expectations at the time, and they produced something shocking: a movement of people who claimed that their lives had been transformed by a crucified man that they believed was the Lord of all creation.  No other religion has a story remotely like this.  Most new religious movements are founded by prophets who claim to have received a revelation, but Christianity is founded on the identity of a person – a crucified man who claimed to be the Son of God and who proved that claim by rising from the dead.

 

Conclusion

In these eight lessons, we have looked at the most common objections to Christianity, and we have seen that there are a lot of things that an atheistic worldview cannot account for.  The atheist cannot explain the origin of the universe.  The atheist cannot explain the uniqueness of the Bible.  The atheist cannot explain the uniqueness of Jesus or provide a convincing alternative explanation of the resurrection and the beginning of Christianity.

Why, then, do some people find atheism convincing?  Perhaps it is because it seems to match the experience of those who adopt it as a philosophy.

What is that experience?

• They don’t think they’ve heard from God.
• They don’t think they’ve seen a miracle or encountered credible evidence for one.
• They see a world of suffering (and perhaps believe they have experienced a lot of suffering).
• They see a world of competing religious truth claims and believe they can’t all be right – so, most likely, none of them are. They have a human-centered cultural explanation for religious development.
• They see a world where science works. Christianity seems to belong to an unreal (or pre-modern) world.
• They don’t have a positive connection with Christianity that would outweigh the positive connections that they have with secular influences.
• The values that they espouse seem more compatible with a secular worldview than with a Christian one.

How do we counter this worldview?  We need to get people to see beyond themselves and their own experience, and then get them to reinterpret their experiences from the standpoint of the gospel.  We can do that by helping people identify the presuppositions that have prompted them to dismiss Christianity, and then by presenting some facts and ideas that challenge those presuppositions.  If they’re intrigued and willing to consider the evidence, we can then present some evidence in favor of Christianity’s truth claims, and can demonstrate that a gospel-centered worldview offers better explanations for the world around us than any other worldview does.  As I mentioned on the first day of class, apologetics is not a substitute for the gospel, but when the goal of our apologetics is to open the door for the gospel, it can become a very useful tool both in evangelism and in addressing the doubts that might sometimes arise in our own hearts.