Maybe at this point, you have browsed through a few of the other articles on this site, and have noticed that I have tried to address a number of the most common reasons that people give for rejecting Christianity.  But even if those objections are addressed satisfactorily, that still doesn’t give people a reason to believe.  We can’t build a case for Christianity merely by negating objections; we also have to make a positive case for faith in Christ.  In this essay, I want to briefly outline what I consider the most compelling arguments for belief.

I believe that the most compelling arguments for the claims of Christianity are:

• The character of Jesus.
• The fact that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus as Lord and claimed that he presented himself as the divine Son of God, with the authority of God.
• The centrality of Jesus’s resurrection in the message that the earliest Christians proclaimed.
• The unified message of the Bible.
• The character of God, as presented in the Bible.
• The Bible’s consistent message about human sin, human equality, and the divine gift of redemption through God’s sovereign grace – all of which are countercultural declarations that no other religion or philosophy has suggested.

 

The Character of Jesus

If you are wondering whether Christianity is true, I would encourage you to start by considering the character of Jesus, as presented in the four gospels.  (The apocryphal gospels, which were written more than a century later, contain little genuine information about the historical Jesus – which means that if we want to learn about the historical Jesus, we need to go to the four canonical gospels).

For centuries, many skeptics who have read the gospels have been impressed with the high ethical quality of Jesus’s life.  This was certainly true of Thomas Jefferson and many eighteenth-century deists.  Jefferson could never bring himself to believe in Jesus’s miracles or divinity, but he admired Jesus as the world’s greatest ethical teacher.  I think that if you read the gospels carefully, you, like Jefferson, will likely be impressed with Jesus’s teaching and example, but you will also notice that the biblical Jesus was a complex figure.  He was not simply a kind-hearted man who went about healing people and urging them to love one another; he was also someone who issued stern rebukes and occasionally became angry, but who always submitted himself completely to the will of his Heavenly Father.  In many ways, Jesus might seem like a paradox or an enigma.  On the one hand, he was the most selfless person imaginable, as he put others’ needs before his own, yet he also seemed possessed of remarkable self-assurance, teaching with authority in a way that none of the other religious teachers of his day did, and boldly daring his enemies to convict him of sin.  The more that you reflect on Jesus’s life, the stranger – and yet more beautiful – that life will seem.

But then, if you read the Psalms, along with other passages of the Old Testament, you will find that Jesus’s life perfectly embodied the ethical qualities that the Hebrew Bible said was true of the ideal follower of God.  And even more strikingly, if you read the Hebrew prophets, you will find that Jesus’s words and actions reflected the qualities of God as demonstrated in God’s dealings with his covenant people.  In other words, Jesus perfectly embodied the qualities of the Old Testament God and the Old Testament ideal human.  Jesus showed righteous anger at injustice, just as the God of the Old Testament did.  Jesus warned of a coming judgment for those who refused to repent, just as God did repeatedly in the Old Testament.  Jesus wept over his friends and gave his life in love for others, just as God poured out his heart in love for his people in some of the prophetic books of the Old Testament.  (See, for instance, the book of Hosea, among others).  In short, the gospels portray Jesus as the perfect embodiment of the qualities of both God and the ideal human.

I find it difficult to imagine how any group of people could have made up such a story.  No other human in either historical writing or fiction has been convincingly portrayed in quite the same way as Jesus was – that is, as the perfect embodiment of the qualities of both God and ideal humanity.  If you doubt that, try to think of another person, in either history or fiction, who would be a comparable figure to Jesus.  People who have tried this exercise have usually suggested figures that are a far cry from Jesus of Nazareth.  They have suggested the names of great religious or philosophical teachers, such as Siddhartha Gautama, or they have suggested the names of miracle-workers of Jesus’s own time, such as Apollonius of Tyana.  But none of those people came even remotely close to matching the complexity of Jesus’s character.  None of them perfectly embodied the complex qualities of divinity, especially as portrayed in such a rich and variegated source as the Hebrew Bible.  None of them exemplified the full range of human attributes in their perfect form.  While some of these other figures might have given teachings that inspired millions, none of them lived a life that had the same compelling influence on people from all walks of life, geographic regions, and time periods as Jesus’s life has had.  Jesus was a unique figure, and that uniqueness must be explained.  This may not be sufficient reason alone to accept the claims of Christianity, but it is a useful starting point.

All of the other great religions of the world are based on a set of teachings or practices that were either revealed by a great teacher (such as Mohammad, Moses, or the Buddha) or that developed gradually over time.  Christianity stands alone in being based not on a philosophy, a set of teachings, or a body of religious practices, but instead on a historical person – a person who was both God and man, sacrifice and Savior.  Regardless of whether Christianity’s claims are true or not, one has to admit that Christianity is unique in this regard.  No other group of people ever came up with a religion that was quite like this.

 

The Crucified God

Furthermore, the particular people who were the earliest followers of Jesus were some of the least likely people in the entire world to invent a story of a crucified Savior who was both God and man, and who was worthy of worship.  The ancient Romans believed in divinized heroes, but not in divinized criminals.  Crucifixion was a shameful death in the Roman world, which is why many of the Greek and Roman elites mocked Christians’ claim that a man who died on a cross was God himself.  The earliest piece of anti-Christian graffiti that we have – the Alexamenos Graffito from c. 200 – is a lampoon of a Christian worshiping an ass on a cross, with a caption that says, “Alexamenos worships his god.”  Ancient Roman pagans would never have invented the idea that a crucified Jew was divine.

But Jews themselves would have been even less likely to come up with this idea.  The strict monotheism of the first-century Jews – a monotheism encapsulated in the Shema, a daily prayer that says, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one” – would have made it highly unlikely that any Jew would have dared to call a religious teacher “Lord” and “God.”  And yet the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus as Lord, as a quick perusal of Paul’s letters (our oldest Christian documents) will attest.  Furthermore, the oldest gospel, the book of Mark, portrays Jesus as acting with the authority of God by calming the sea and forgiving sins – actions which the gospel highlights as the work of God alone.  For more evidence of early Christians’ view of Jesus as Lord, I would recommend some of the work of University of Edinburgh New Testament professor Larry Hurtado, especially his Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.

Many skeptics have argued that since the myth of a dying and rising god was widespread in the ancient Mediterranean world, it is easy to imagine the earliest Christians inventing such a myth about their god, Jesus.  But there is a strong difference between the early Christian message and the pagan myths of a dying and rising god.  None of the ancient pagan myths of a dying and rising god featured a real historical person dying a shameful death of public execution.  For ancient Greco-Roman pagans who placed a primacy on notions of personal and familial honor, such a story was unthinkable.  The message of the cross, the apostle Paul said, was “foolishness” to the Greeks.

 

Skeptical Explanations of the Evidence

If Christianity’s claims about Jesus are false, one has to come up with an alternative theory of how Christianity could have originated.  In particular, one has to account for the origin of the story of Jesus, a story that is completely unlike every pagan myth or religious founding story ever told.

Atheists and skeptics have come up with two main counter-explanations for the story of Jesus:

• There was a widely admired, personally charismatic, Jewish itinerant teacher and healer named Jesus, who died a tragic death by crucifixion. Shortly after his death, some of his grief-stricken followers imagined that they had seen him return to life, and the story of his resurrection soon spread.  Over the course of the next few decades, as the message of Jesus moved out of Judea into the Greco-Roman Gentile world, Greeks and Romans who were used to the idea of divinized heroes began to worship Jesus as a divine “Son of God,” and eventually, they began to call him God himself.
• There never was a historical Jesus. Instead, the story of Jesus developed as a composite of pagan and Jewish mythology, and only gradually became attached to a quasi-historical figure.

Of these two explanations, the second has been widely rejected, even by skeptics, because there are multiple early attestations of a historical Jesus that are almost impossible to explain away.  Furthermore, the gospels are filled with historical and geographical details that bear all the markings of a historical, rather than mythical, text.  And finally, it is almost impossible to explain how Christianity could have originated if there was no historical Jesus.  For these reasons, even an anti-Christian skeptic (and self-proclaimed agnostic) such as Bart Ehrman has declared that the evidence firmly supports the existence of a historical Jesus.  (See Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth).

But what about the first suggested explanation?  Is it possible that the belief in Jesus’s divinity developed only gradually, over the course of several decades?  Actually, the earliest documents that we have from Christianity – some of Paul’s letters, which date to only 25-30 years after the crucifixion, along with the earliest gospel, which was written within forty years of Jesus’s death – clearly portray Jesus as a divine forgiver of sins, a cosmic judge, and a Lord who is worthy of worship.  This leads us back to the question: What prompted first-century Jews and pagans to worship a crucified man?  And what could have accounted for the astonishing character of Jesus, as presented in the gospels?

Jesus, in other words, cannot be explained away.  In my view, this is one of the strongest evidences in favor of Christianity.  When I walked away from the Christianity of my upbringing, I found that I was never able to satisfactorily explain away Jesus.  Even when I had grave doubts about the accuracy of the Bible and questioned whether the biblical God even existed, I could not deny that skeptics had no credible explanation for how the character of Jesus could have been invented or why his monotheistic followers would have worshiped him, especially after he was crucified.  Nor was it clear why they would have invented the story of the resurrection if that never occurred.  That is the subject of the next article.