Why Believe? E-Book

Neil Shenvi

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Chemist and Christian Apologist Neil Shenvi Explores the Evidence for Christianity For centuries, skeptics have disputed the claims of Christianity—such as belief in an eternal God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ—arguing that they simply cannot be accepted by reasonable individuals. Furthermore, efforts to demonstrate the evidence and rational basis for Christianity through apologetics are often deemed too simplistic to be taken seriously in intellectual circles. Apologist and theoretical chemist Neil Shenvi engages some of the best contemporary arguments against Christianity, presenting compelling evidence for the identity of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels, his death and resurrection, the existence of God, and the unique message of the gospel. Why Believe? calls readers from all backgrounds not only to accept Christianity as true, but also to entrust their lives to Christ and worship him alone. - Accessible without Being Simplistic: Ideal for intellectuals and academics, as well as high school and college students - Well-Researched: Interacts with skeptical arguments against Christianity and God's existence - Biblical: Grounded in Scripture and centered on the claims of the gospel 

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“I love this book in terms of both content and tone. Neil Shenvi has thought deeply about these issues and provides a reasoned case for Christianity. He also responds to some of the most common objections with clarity and precision. I hope Why Believe? gets the wide readership it deserves.”

Sean McDowell, Associate Professor of Christian Apologetics, Biola University; author, Evidence That Demands a Verdict

“Shenvi’s interaction with critics of Christianity is instructive for those of us supporting Christian faith. This is a worthy book for your apologetical library and a great resource for moving forward in a society that constantly challenges us.”

George Yancey, Professor of Sociology, Baylor University

“What an outstanding work! Pound for pound this is the best apologetics book I’ve ever read. Shenvi has done a great service to both the church and the broader culture. Christians will find an excellent resource for both the strengthening and the defense of their faith. Non-Christians will have an accessible pathway to understanding the Christian faith that will challenge their beliefs and presuppositions while engaging their minds.”

Pat Sawyer, Faculty, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; coauthor, Disney as Doorway to Apologetic Dialogue (forthcoming)

“This book provides a clear and cogent exposition of arguments for the authenticity of Christianity in the light of modern historical and scientific evidence. Shenvi brings a coherent, impassioned, and well-reasoned perspective to a number of challenging topics. His approach is appropriate for anyone—Christian or not—who wishes to know more about why Christians believe what they believe.”

Troy Van Voorhis, Professor of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Neil is one of our generation’s most engaging and forward thinkers. His insights are forged not in sterile halls of academia but through vibrant discussions with students, thinkers, and leaders in today’s halls of influence. This is an excellent resource for thorough, sound answers to today’s most difficult questions, not yesterday’s. I’ve had the privilege of serving as Neil’s pastor now for nearly a decade, and I can attest that he not only teaches the truth of the gospel but lives out its grace.”

J. D. Greear, Pastor, The Summit Church, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; author, Just Ask and What Are You Going to Do with Your Life?

Why Believe?

Why Believe?

A Reasoned Approach to Christianity

Neil Shenvi

Why Believe? A Reasoned Approach to Christianity

Copyright © 2022 by Neil Shenvi

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Spencer Fuller, Faceout Studios

First printing 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7938-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7941-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7939-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7940-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shenvi, Neil, 1979– author.

Title: Why believe? : a reasoned approach to Christianity / Neil Shenvi.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021046658 (print) | LCCN 2021046659 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433579387 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433579394 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433579400 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781433579417 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Apologetics. | Faith and reason.

Classification: LCC BT1103 .S5335 2022 (print) | LCC BT1103 (ebook) | DDC 297.2/9—dc23/eng/20211001

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046658

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046659

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-04-25 10:42:38 AM

Contents

List of Illustrations

1  Introduction

Should We Avoid Religious Truth Claims for the Sake of Peace?

Are All Religions True?

Is All Religious Truth Subjective?

Can We Just Ignore Religion?

2  The Trilemma

Liar, Lunatic, or Lord

The Historical Reliability of the Gospels

Jesus’s Claims

Objections to the Trilemma

A Final Suggestion

3  The Resurrection

The Significance of the Resurrection

Evidence for the Resurrection

Naturalistic Explanations

Seeking the Best Explanation

Objections to the Resurrection

In Conclusion

4  God and Revelation (Part 1): Nature

Why Is Mathematics So Successful?

What Caused the Universe?

Why Is There Something rather than Nothing?

Why Is the Universe Finely Tuned for Life?

Objections to a Theistic View of the Universe

Evidence and Worship

5  God and Revelation (Part 2): The Moral Law

How Can Objective Moral Values and Duties Exist?

Why Should We Seek the Truth?

Revelation and Scripture

Evidence and Commitment

6  Arguments against God

The Problem of Evil

Evolution

The Hiddenness of God

7  The Gospel (Part 1): The Uniqueness of Christianity

Christianity on Sin and Salvation

Buddhism on Sin and Salvation

Hinduism on Sin and Salvation

Islam on Sin and Salvation

Judaism on Sin and Salvation

Problems and Solutions

8  The Gospel (Part 2): Christianity and Sin

Are We Radically Morally Corrupt?

Sin in the World

Sin in Our Hearts

9  The Gospel (Part 3): Christianity and Salvation

Sin as Transgression

Sin as Slavery

The Gospel of Grace

Objections to the Christian View of Salvation

10  Conclusions

What’s Missing from This Book

The View from Somewhere

The Logic of Repentance

By Grace through Faith

The Good News of the Kingdom

The Step of Faith

Acknowledgments

General Index

Scripture Index

Illustrations

Figures

Figure 1  New Testament manuscripts versus Iliad manuscripts

Figure 2  The incidence of geographical place-names in Mark and other texts

Figure 3  Historical evidence for Jesus’s resurrection and competing explanations

Figure 4  Different models of the relationship between God and science

Figure 5  Instrumental good versus intrinsic good

Tables

Table 1  Frequency of names in the Gospels and Acts versus Jewish ossuaries

Table 2  Major views of creation, design, and evolution

Table 3  Prothero’s assessment of the fundamental human problem and its solution as described by various world religions

1

Introduction

What does this babbler wish to say?

Acts 17:18

“Why believe that Christianity is true?” It’s the kind of question that fuels late-night arguments in college common rooms, awkward silences at holiday dinners, and Internet comment threads that make you vow to never again read Internet comment threads. When discussion wanders into the area of religion, otherwise calm and sensible people seem to lose their ability to think rationally or to use lowercase letters.

Even worse, human history is filled with religious violence, leading many people to believe that assertions of religious truth inevitably produce bloodshed. When Gandhi was asked in an interview why people should avoid urging others to change their religion, he responded, “Proselytization will mean no peace in the world.”1 Those who hold this view often argue that religious truth claims should be discouraged for pragmatic reasons. While private religious beliefs are acceptable, we should not publicly insist that they are objectively true. How can we truly love and accept other people while claiming that their deeply held beliefs are wrong?

Other people are apathetic toward religion. Why should they bother with the claims of Christianity if they can live happy, compassionate, spiritual lives without it? And what if we see Christianity as outdated and irrelevant? It may have served some purpose in the past, but it has nothing of interest to say to scientific, modern people. It provides dubious solutions to problems that no one cares about. Worse, it turns people into mindless, dull automatons or angry moralists. Should we really take it seriously?

Setting aside practical concerns, there are also philosophical objections to the claim that one particular religion is true. For example, some people believe that all religions are essentially the same. If that’s the case, there’s no need to ask whether Christianity is true, because Christianity is true along with every other religion. Others insist that religious beliefs are personal, subjective preferences. Arguing that your religion is objectively true for everyone is as silly as arguing that your favorite brand of mayonnaise ought to be everyone’s favorite.

Growing up in a very loving but not particularly religious home, I had many of these same objections. Although I believed in God, I couldn’t accept the idea that one particular religion was uniquely true. When I arrived at college as a freshman, I might have called myself a Christian in some vague cultural sense, but only because Jesus’s moral example was more familiar to me than that of any other religious figure. I certainly wasn’t some crazy fundamentalist who memorized Bible verses, attended church each week, went to prayer meetings, walked around humming worship music, and wrote books about how Christianity is true. Since, apparently, I do all those things today (minus the worship music), what changed? A few things come to mind.

During my second year in college, a Christian group on campus set up a table in front of our dining hall. I had planned to pass by with an air of smug superiority, but my disdain turned into disbelief when I realized that they were passing out free books: the Bible (naturally) and two titles by C. S. Lewis, whom I recognized as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, a series I had loved as a child. After verifying that I wasn’t being asked to sign up for anything, I ignored the Bible, snatched up Lewis’s works, and disappeared into the dining hall, not realizing that I’d woefully underestimated God’s subtlety.

The two books were Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. I found Mere Christianity moderately interesting, but The Screwtape Letters was riveting. The novel took the form of a series of letters written from a senior demon in hell to his inexperienced and incompetent protégé on earth, containing instructions for the successful tempting of a human “patient.” Although it was an interesting premise and was suffused with Lewis’s characteristic humor and creativity, what floored me was its insight into my own life. When Screwtape described the patient’s pride, his sense of superiority, his posturing, his insincerity, and the fears and temptations he struggled to hide, he was describing me. I read the book and reread it and re-reread it and asked, How can Lewis know what’s going on in my head?

The next incident that challenged my ideas about Christianity was meeting my future wife, Christina. As chemistry majors, we had crossed paths on occasion, but I knew her primarily as the student who had received the highest grade in our much-dreaded sophomore-level organic chemistry course—as a freshman. She was brilliant. What surprised me, though, was how little she seemed to care whether other people thought she was brilliant. Of course, I pretended not to care about whether other people thought I was brilliant. But I did care. Immensely.

Most of my identity, maybe all my identity, was wrapped up in being better than other people: better at academics, better at music, better at sports. At a place like Princeton, it was impossible to pretend that I was the best at nearly anything, even taking into account my prodigious talent for self-deception. So I had a backup plan. When I met someone who was undeniably better than me in every category, I fell back on my spirituality, which was my last resort when all else failed. No matter how smart, athletic, or talented the competition was, I could cling to the idea that I was a good, moral, spiritual person.

In contrast, Christina really didn’t seem to think about herself very much. Here was a woman who was beautiful, funny, intelligent, and successful but who didn’t seem to regard these things as the essence of her identity. She was also an evangelical Christian. But I can work around that, I thought to myself.

The final check to my beliefs occurred during our first few months of graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. I was convinced that Christina and I could compromise on the whole “Jesus thing.” To show her how open-minded I was, I went to church with her. Unfortunately for me, the pastor of her church had a PhD from Cambridge. My quantum physics professor, a renowned cosmologist, sang in the choir. I was surrounded by undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and professors who were convinced that Jesus was the Son of God and had risen from the dead. That was a problem.

I had always assumed that Christianity could not possibly be accepted by thoughtful, intelligent people, at least not by people as thoughtful and intelligent as me. Surely, Christianity was for well-meaning and sometimes not-so-well-meaning people with substandard educations and a streak of intellectual fear bordering on dishonesty. This stereotype functioned as an implicit and impenetrable bulwark against Christian claims. But suddenly, my defenses began to crumble. I was forced to consider the message of Christianity without dismissing it out of hand.

I’ll say a bit more in the final chapter about how I took the final step from uncomfortable uncertainty to belief. At this point, what’s most interesting to me about these events was how little they had to do with what we normally think of as evidence. Why? Probably because I had never rejected Christianity on the basis of evidence in the first place. My beliefs about morality, religion, and God were largely the unreflective product of ideas I had picked up from my peers, my friends, my parents, books, television, and movies. I had never questioned my assumptions about the nature of religious truth or engaged with opposing views. What C. S. Lewis, my future wife, and my church in Berkeley provided was not new evidence but the realization that some of my reasons for ignoring Christianity were highly dubious.

Christianity was not dry, archaic, boring, and irrelevant; it offered a compelling assessment of my own most pressing problems. It did not turn people into lifeless automatons, angry moralists, or raving lunatics; it animated the life of the person whom I loved and admired the most. And it was not an opiate for the uneducated masses; it could thrive in the most rigorous academic environments. Shouldn’t I try to figure out whether it was true?

What about the other questions I posed at the beginning of this chapter: Shouldn’t we avoid religious truth claims for the sake of peace? Aren’t all religions equally true? Can religious claims really be classified as “true” or “false”? And why do we even need religion? Even if we acknowledge that Christianity might, like many religions, include interesting spiritual ideas, and even if we recognize that there are kind and intelligent Christians just as there are kind and intelligent atheists, Muslims, and Hindus, aren’t there still good reasons to ignore or deny the claim that Christianity is uniquely true? Let’s consider each of those objections in turn.

Should We Avoid Religious Truth Claims for the Sake of Peace?

Most people, minus a few cartoon supervillains and a handful of real-life tyrants, prefer peace to war. But history shows us that competing religious truth claims create tensions that can rapidly turn into armed conflict. In his book God Is Not Great, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens devoted an entire chapter to the history of religious violence.2 Seeing the potential for sectarian strife, many people conclude that religious truth claims should be eliminated entirely. One appeal of this approach is that it appears to be pragmatic. No judgment is being passed on whether there is one true religion. Perhaps there is; perhaps there isn’t. The argument is only that we should refrain from making public claims about religious truth in order to promote human flourishing.

In response, we need to note that religion ranks far below other factors as the primary cause of war. In his Huffington Post article “Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?” Rabbi Alan Lurie notes that of the 1,763 wars listed in the Encyclopedia of Wars, “only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare.”3 The death toll of the bloodiest religious conflicts like the Crusades is dwarfed by deaths from secular conflicts like World War I or from ideological killings like those occurring during the “Great Leap Forward” in China. Even if we recognize that attributing wars to “religious” or “nonreligious” causes can be challenging, we ought to acknowledge that human beings are capable of massacring each other with or without religious motivations.

More importantly, while the assertion that religious claims should be avoided for practical reasons sounds neutral, it actually conceals a deep commitment to a particular ideological claim: namely, that the key to long-term peace and human flourishing is not found in one particular religion. Are we sure that this claim is true? After all, if some particular religion is uniquely true, then its truth could have massive implications for human flourishing. For example, if Buddhism is true, then pursuing our desires for temporal happiness will inevitably lead to a cycle of endless frustration and suffering. To discourage Buddhists from sharing this truth with others would then be seriously detrimental to human flourishing. Other religions, like Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism, also make claims that, if true, would radically change how we understand human flourishing and the best way to achieve it. To insist that we can or should ignore religious truth for the sake of human flourishing is to implicitly insist that none of these religions is true.

In the end, we are led back to our original question: Are any religious claims objectively true? We should discourage public discussion of religion only if we are certain that the answer to this question is no. If it’s possible that some religious claims are objectively true, then we must be open to religious debate, just as we’re open to scientific, economic, philosophical, or political debate.

Since an appeal to religious violence can’t sidestep questions of religious truth, we next turn to philosophical objections to religious truth.

Are All Religions True?

When asked whether Christianity is true, many people respond with eager affirmation: “Sure, Christianity is true because all religions are true!” This belief is often illustrated by the parable of the blind men and the elephant: Five blind men are walking through the jungle and stumble upon an elephant. Each of them takes hold of a different part of the animal. The first blind man grabs his tusk and says, “An elephant is hard and pointed, like a spear.” The second blind man grasps the elephant’s ear and says: “No! An elephant is soft and flat, like a fan.” The third blind man, who is holding the elephant’s tail, says: “No, you’re both wrong. The elephant is long, thin, and flexible, like a rope.” All five continue arguing until a wise man comes and tells them that they are all holding an elephant. Their statements are all true, but each of them has only a portion of the truth. The moral of this parable is that religious truth is too nuanced and complex to be contained within any one religious tradition. All religions are true, but none of them is exclusively true.

The most serious problem with this form of religious inclusivism is that it doesn’t take seriously the claims made by actual adherents of different religions. For example, I occasionally have friendly conversations with conservative Muslims about the comparative reliability of the Qur’an and the Bible. We are willing to listen to one another, to correct each other’s misunderstandings, and to engage in civil, courteous discussion. Throughout this process, we are both trying to better understand what the other person believes. While our dialogue leads us to conclude that we fundamentally disagree on many issues, we can still do so with mutual respect.

In contrast, religious inclusivism must deny the reality of religious disagreement because it accepts as axiomatic the idea that different religions agree on all essential issues. No matter how much a Christian insists that the deity of Jesus is foundational to Christianity, and no matter how much a Muslim insists that the deity of Jesus is incompatible with Islam, an inclusivist has no choice but to insist that both the Christian and Muslim are mistaken in thinking they hold mutually exclusive views. Although I sympathize with the desire to avoid discord, I can’t help but think that honest, loving disagreement is preferable to the insistence that we understand others’ religious beliefs better than they do.

A similar point is made by a story that I call the parable of the blind men and the five inanimate objects.4 Five blind men are walking through a museum and stumble across five inanimate objects: a spear, a fan, a rope, a wall, and a tree. While they argue, a wise man enters the museum and tells them that they are all holding an elephant. A problem arises when we try to determine which parable is the correct illustration of spiritual reality, the first version or the second? The inclusivist can know that the original version of the parable is the correct one only if he is speaking from a position of special religious knowledge that all exclusivists lack. In other words, he would have to say to all religious exclusivists, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu: “You are all wrong about the exclusive nature of spiritual reality. My inclusive view of spiritual reality is the correct one.” When push comes to shove, inclusivism turns out to be just as exclusive as other religious positions.5

Is All Religious Truth Subjective?

If religious inclusivism can’t avoid the problem of exclusive claims, is there another way to avoid religious conflict? Yes, there is. Rather than arguing that all religions are objectively true, we can instead argue that all religions are subjectively true. In other words, there is no one religion that is objectively true for all people, but each person’s religion is subjectively true for them. Like religious inclusivism, a belief in religious subjectivism precludes the possibility of conflict between religious claims. No one thinks that my subjective belief that In-N-Out Burger is the best fast-food restaurant in America conflicts with someone else’s subjective belief that Five Guys is better.6These are subjective opinions, not objective truth claims.

The difficulty with the view that all religions are subjectively true is that some religions really do make objective truth claims. For example, Christians believe that Jesus Christ was physically raised from the dead. To put it as plainly as possible, the Christian claim is that Jesus’s dead body was restored to life on the third day after he was crucified, leaving his tomb empty. There seems to be no way to understand this statement except as an objective claim about historical reality. It may hypothetically be false or it may be true. But it would be nonsensical to say that the statement “the tomb was empty” is true for me, but the statement “the tomb contained Jesus’s decomposing corpse” is true for you.7

The same objectivity is a necessary element of all the biggest religious questions. Does God exist? Did he create the universe out of nothing? Did Moses receive the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai? Did the Buddha attain enlightenment under the bodhi tree? Did the angel Gabriel visit Muhammad? Did Jesus rise from the dead? Are we reincarnated in different bodies after we die? Will there be a final judgment? While the conflict-averse among us (myself included) might prefer all of these questions to be mere matters of opinion, they are inescapably propositions about objective reality that are either true or false.

In the end, I don’t think that either religious inclusivism or religious relativism can deliver on the promise of circumventing all religious conflicts. No matter how much we want to avoid the anger that often comes with exclusive religious claims, we shouldn’t pretend that religious differences don’t exist. A better approach is to acknowledge that while we may hold different and incompatible religious ideas, we are united in our common humanity. Certainly for Christians, Jesus’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves demands that we treat them with love and kindness, whether or not we agree with them.8

Can We Just Ignore Religion?

Even if religious claims are objectively true or false, do we really need to bother with them? What if we’re not interested in whether one particular religion is true? What if we find that we can live lives of happiness and spirituality without organized religion of any kind? Let me suggest two reasons that we can’t avoid looking into the truth claims of religion in general and of Christianity in particular: the tragedy of human existence and the magnitude of the claims involved.

First, for hundreds of millions of people all over the world, life is an unmitigated horror. From some of our own inner cities to the slums of South America to war-ravaged villages in Africa, life for many people is a tragic succession of misery, hunger, loss, and pain. Even in the wealthiest, most isolated communities in America, tragedy forces its way into almost everyone’s experience. Most of us will live to see our parents and our friends die. If we personally manage to escape heartbreak, we will almost certainly see others struggle their way through miscarriages, affairs, divorces, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. I know these reflections are not pleasant. I know we would rather think positive, encouraging thoughts. But this is the world we live in.

Am I claiming that the tragedy of human existence is evidence that God exists? No. Instead, I am claiming that the tragedy of human existence absolutely and finally strips us of any claimed right to apathy. Anyone who has honestly and seriously thought about death; who has seen premature infants in the neonatal ward struggling to breathe; who has seen malnourished, barefooted children playing next to open sewers; or who has watched his or her elderly mother slowly drift into dementia can no longer shrug off religion as a matter of indifference.

Second, the claims of Christianity merit our attention, given their magnitude. Some truth claims are not very important. If someone asserts that there are exactly 135 rocks in my garden or that Nicholas Cage owns a first-edition copy of A Tale of Two Cities, it makes little difference to me whether he is right or not. However, the truth of Christianity is a matter of great importance. If Christianity is true, then God exists, we owe him our obedience, we will face his judgment at death, and we have no hope for salvation apart from Jesus Christ. Yet it is not at all uncommon to hear people say, “Christianity might be true or it might not be, but it doesn’t really matter to me.”9 This stance is irrational.

If your doctor told you that you had stage-4 stomach cancer, imagine her surprise if you declared: “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. I don’t really care either way.” Given what’s at stake, apathy is not an option. The doctor would rightly respond: “Either you don’t truly understand what cancer is, or you do understand and are extremely confident that you don’t have it. You can’t possibly understand the gravity of this claim and not care about it.” In the same way, we can reject Christianity as false and then ignore it. Or we can embrace it as true and drastically change our lives in response to it. What we cannot do is shrug our shoulders, yawn, and feign indifference. As C. S. Lewis said: “Christianity . . . , if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”10

I offer this book to both Christians and non-Christians who are interested in Christianity. It is by no means exhaustive. Each chapter could be expanded into an entire book or an entire series of books. For those who would like to explore particular issues in greater depth, the works cited throughout should prove helpful.

The truth of Christianity touches on issues as diverse as ancient history, textual criticism, metaethics, epistemology, and cosmology. No one can claim expertise in all those areas, and I am certainly no exception.11 However, I have done my best to read broadly, paying special attention to non-Christian scholars and writers, not because I think that Christians can’t do good scholarship but because I want to listen closely to voices that my own theological biases tempt me to discount. I have also tried to present counterarguments to my own claims as evenhandedly and charitably as possible, but where I have failed to do so, I hope that readers will extend grace.

This book is organized around four distinct arguments for the truth of Christianity. Although the chapters follow an overarching logical structure, each can be read more or less independently of the others. Chapter 2 deals with the question of Jesus’s identity, chapter 3 with his resurrection, chapters 4–6 with the existence of God, and chapters 7–9 with the central message of Christianity. Readers who are interested in a particular question or who view a particular issue as an insurmountable obstacle to the Christian faith are encouraged to skip to the relevant section. For example, someone who believes that questions of Jesus’s identity are wholly irrelevant since God does not exist might want to begin with chapter 4, while someone who wrestles with the problem of evil might want to start with chapter 6. Similarly, if a particular subsection is confusing (or boring), it can often be set aside without affecting the overall point being made.

One final word about content: while each of the arguments in the book is distinct, all of them point back in one way or another to Jesus himself, because Jesus is the center of Christianity. To see Christianity merely as a collection of rules or a political platform or even a set of religious values and practices is to miss it entirely. Christianity is ultimately about a person: Jesus Christ. I understand that this kind of statement might be easily dismissed as a product of my own twenty-first-century American theology, but doing so would be a mistake. If you were to line up Christian traditions and great theologians across all cultures and all of church history, they would affirm that the beating heart of Christianity is the declaration that “Jesus is Lord”; that is, he is our King, our God, and our Savior. Amid our discussion of reason and evidence and arguments, let’s remember that this is not a bare intellectual exercise. Jesus is a real Savior for people desperately in need of rescue. Jesus is a real Savior for people like us.

1  Quoted in Arvind Sharma, “Hinduism: Adherent Essay,” in Handbook of Religion: A Christian Engagement with Traditions, Teachings, and Practices, ed. Terry C. Muck, Harold A. Netland, and Gerald R. McDermott (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014), 77–78.

2  Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), 15–36.

3  Alan Lurie, “Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?,” Huffington Post, April 10, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-religion-the-cause-of-_b_1400766.

4  See Harold A. Netland and Keith E. Johnson, “Why Is Religious Pluralism Fun—and Dangerous?,” in Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), 63–64.

5  See also, Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Penguin, 2008), 8–14.

6  Bad example. In-N-Out Burger is objectively ten thousand times better than Five Guys.

7Quantum mechanics does not provide some bizarre loophole to this assertion through the infamous Schrödinger’s cat paradox. The contents of Jesus’s tomb would have been “measured” long ago due to exchange of information with the environment.

8  See Professor Timothy C. Tennant’s excellent discussion of interfaith dialogue and the problems of relativism and subjectivism in chap. 1 of Tennent, Christianity at the Religious Roundtable: Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 9–33.

9  See, for example, Jonathan Rauch, “Let It Be,” The Atlantic, May 2003, http://www.theatlantic.com.

10  C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 101.

11  For those interested, I have a PhD and quite a bit of research experience in the field of theoretical chemistry. Certainly an interesting subject, but not one with immediate relevance to the truth of Christianity!

2

The Trilemma

But who do you say that I am?

Mark 8:29

Jesus of Nazareth was born two thousand years ago in a tiny village in a remote province of the Roman Empire among an oppressed and despised ethnic group. His family was poor, he was not formally educated, and he probably worked as a manual laborer. In his early thirties, he began preaching in the local synagogues. He was known for associating with social and religious outcasts and for befriending those on the margins of society. His public ministry lasted for only a few years before he was arrested by the government, tried for treason, and executed.

Two thousand years later, approximately one-third of the world professes to believe that he is God incarnate. The Western calendar divides all of history by the year he was born.1 His teaching is so deeply embedded in our culture that we barely notice it. Phrases like “being a Good Samaritan” and “going the extra mile” have entered our popular lexicon from Jesus’s teaching as paradigms of goodness and compassion. Even prominent atheists like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or philosopher Daniel Dennett have a difficult time finding fault with Jesus. Dawkins writes that “[Jesus’s] Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His ‘turn the other cheek’ anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by two thousand years.”2 Daniel Dennett, in an interview with The Beast, said: “I think that, actually, Jesus makes a fine hero. . . . In fact, we had some discussion of forming a group called Atheists for Jesus.”3

Upon reflection, the contrast between the obscurity of Jesus’s life and his civilization-shaping impact on history is astonishing. When the passage of time has swept kings, emperors, cities, and even entire nations into oblivion, why is a homeless Galilean rabbi still remembered? That’s the question we’ll consider in this chapter.

Liar, Lunatic, or Lord

During World War II, Oxford professor C. S. Lewis gave a series of radio lectures that were later collected into the book Mere Christianity. Commenting on the identity of Jesus, he writes:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. 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 a 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.4

Lewis is arguing that we cannot pat Jesus on the head and dismiss him as a “good moral teacher.” Jesus claimed to be the Son of God and the Savior of the world. No mere man who made such claims could be considered either good or moral. If Jesus’s claims were false and he knew they were false, then he was a tremendous liar. If his claims were false and he sincerely believed they were true, then he was a lunatic. But if his claims were true, then he is the Lord of all humanity. This is the trilemma: liar, lunatic, or Lord. Lewis insisted that we must honestly consider the person of Jesus we find in the Bible and make a decision about his identity.

However, one major obstacle to any engagement with Jesus is skepticism about the Bible. Lewis assumed that most of his hearers believed the Bible to be generally reliable. While that belief may have been common in mid-twentieth-century England when Lewis was writing, it is certainly not widespread today. Most people view the Bible as an incoherent mixture of fairy tales, moral parables, and legends—a cross between Aesop’s Fables and The Lord of the Rings. Such skepticism is found not only in the culture at large but, to some extent, among academics as well.

Bart Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is probably the nation’s most well-known New Testament scholar, writes the following about the origin of the Gospels, the four biographies of Jesus found in the Bible:

You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game, “telephone.” . . . Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. . . . Imagine playing “telephone” not in a solitary living room with ten kids on a sunny afternoon in July, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across!), with thousands of participants, from different backgrounds, with different concerns, and in different contexts, some of whom have to translate the stories into different languages all over the course of decades. What would happen to the stories?5

Paula Fredriksen, a religious studies professor at Boston University, writes of the Gospels:

These are composite documents, the final products of long and creative traditions in which old material was reworked and new material interpolated. As they now stand, they are witness first of all to the faith of their individual writers and their late first-century, largely Gentile communities. Only at a distance do they relate to the people and the period they purport to describe.6

The Jesus Seminar, a high-profile group of scholars committed to research into the historical Jesus, concludes that “eighty-two percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels were not actually spoken by him,”7 and says,

The gospels are now assumed to be narratives in which the memory of Jesus is embellished by mythic elements that express the church’s faith in him, and by plausible fictions that enhance the telling of the gospel story for first-century listeners who knew about divine men and miracle workers firsthand.8

These claims, if accurate, would lead us to mistrust the Gospels’ basic historical reliability. If the Gospels are not even generally historically reliable, then we can discount most of the biblical stories about Jesus as mere fabrications of later Christian communities. We don’t need to worry about the claims of Jesus any more than we worry about the claims of Batman or Aragorn. No one lies awake at night wondering whether to surrender his or her life to Darth Vader. Fictional figures might inspire us, but they do not demand our allegiance.

Consequently, in order to restore the relevance of Lewis’s trilemma, we must make a case that the Gospels provide a generally reliable portrait of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. To do so, let’s focus on six major areas: manuscript transmission, non-Christian documentary evidence, geography, archaeology, Jewish context, and onomastics.9

The Historical Reliability of the Gospels

The Reliability of Manuscript Transmission

First, it is sometimes claimed that we can’t trust the Gospels because we only have copies of copies of copies of copies. Here, Ehrman’s analogy of a game of telephone is applied not just to the stories in the Bible but to the physical copies of the biblical manuscripts themselves. For example, the December 23, 2014, cover article of Newsweek was “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.” The article began with a section entitled “Playing Telephone with the Word of God.” In it, the author announced that “no television preacher has ever read the Bible. . . . At best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times.”10 The claim made here is that as the biblical manuscripts were copied by scribes, various accidental and deliberate errors crept in that have fundamentally changed the text we have today. We can’t know much about the historical figure of Jesus, not only because the Gospels are works of fiction but also because the texts themselves have been corrupted by the process of transmission.

While it is true that we only have “copies of copies of copies of copies” of the original New Testament documents, we are in precisely the same situation with respect to almost every other book written centuries before the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Among these documents, the New Testament11 is by far the best attested (see fig. 1). For comparison, the second-best-attested ancient document is Homer’s Iliad, for which we have only eighteen hundred manuscripts and fragments compared with over five thousand manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament in the original language.12 The New Testament fares just as well if we consider the time between the original writing of the document and the oldest extant fragment (four hundred years for the Iliad versus fifty years for the New Testament)13 or the time between the original writing of the document and the oldest complete manuscript (sixteen hundred years for the Iliad versus three hundred years for the New Testament).14

Figure 1. New Testament manuscripts versus Iliad manuscripts

It is also true that our New Testament manuscripts are not identical; they contain differences known as “variants,” where the text has been altered through the process of transmission. However, the vast majority of these variants are trivial. In his book Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman, a former evangelical Christian who is now a self-described “agnostic with atheist leanings,” affirms, “Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.”15 In the relatively small number of cases where there is genuine uncertainty about the contents of the original text, the abundance of manuscripts in our possession comes to our aid. By comparing the quality, age, and “lineage” of various manuscripts, we can usually determine the original wording with a great deal of confidence.

Despite his skepticism about the historicity of the Gospels, Ehrman himself concedes that the textual data we possess allows us to reconstruct the original documents of the New Testament with a very high degree of accuracy. The famous textual critic Bruce Metzger, who was Ehrman’s mentor, said that the variation in the manuscripts of the New Testament does not challenge any essential doctrine of the Christian faith. Reflecting on this statement, Ehrman writes:

Even though [Metzger and I] may disagree on important religious questions—he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not—we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement—maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands.16

I urge anyone who still has misgivings about the quality of our New Testament texts to consult the footnotes of a modern Bible translation, like the New International Version or the New American Standard Bible. For instance, my one-dollar English Standard Version New Testament contains textual notes whenever translators felt there was significant uncertainty about the original wording.17 A quick glance shows that textual issues are so infrequent and so minor that they have no bearing on the overall historicity of the Gospels.

While the evidence for the textual reliability of the New Testament does rebut the claim that these documents have been irreparably corrupted by transmission, it does not show that the original documents were historically reliable in the first place. A cynic could rightly observe that the existence of accurate copies of The Amazing Spiderman is not confirmation that Peter Parker was actually bitten by a radioactive spider. To answer the question of whether the texts of the New Testament reflect historical realities, we’ll have to look elsewhere. So, next, let’s ask what we can know about the life of Jesus from the works of non-Christian writers.

Corroboration from Non-Christian Authors

Second, what would happen if we burned every Bible in the world and every book ever authored by a Christian? And what if we considered only ancient sources that were composed within a century of Jesus’s death? Under these admittedly austere conditions, would we know anything at all about Jesus? Actually, yes. Although we would have few details, we could still learn the basic facts about Jesus’s life and about the movement that he founded.

Exclusively from non-Christian sources like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger, we would learn the following: There was a Jewish man named Jesus who lived in first-century Judea. He had a brother named James. He was called the Christ or Messiah by his followers. He did some kind of seemingly miraculous deeds. He was brought to the Roman authorities by the Jewish religious leaders and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The movement he founded was first checked by his execution but later reemerged and spread as far as Rome. The early Christians chanted to Jesus “as if to a God” and refused to worship other gods, even on pain of death. They met regularly, shared a communal meal, and pledged to live moral lives.18

In other words, we would have a very rough outline of Jesus’s life and the early Christian movement entirely from non-Christian authors. The same confirmation is available for many other public figures who play a role in the New Testament narratives. A recent article from the Biblical Archaeology Review documented a list of twenty-three political figures mentioned in the New Testament whose existence has been confirmed by archaeological finds, such as inscriptions or coins, or by non-Christian writers like Josephus or Tacitus. These figures include Augustus, Tiberias, Herod the Great, Salome, Philip the Tetrarch, and Pontius Pilate, all of whom are mentioned in the Gospels in the appropriate geographical and political contexts.19 To them, we could add a handful of nonpolitical religious figures such as Annas, Caiaphas, and John the Baptist, whose existence is similarly confirmed by non-Christian writers.

This corroboration of the historicity of Jesus’s life and the Gospels’ historical setting by non-Christian authors shows that comparisons to fairy tales or myths are inappropriate. The tale of Hansel and Gretel takes place “once upon a time,” not “in Bavaria during the reign of Rudolph I.” It seems impossible to argue that Jesus was a fictional creation like Grendel or Sisyphus and yet still found his way into the works of numerous non-Christian historians.

But could the Gospels be similar to legends, which often have some remote basis in history? For example, scholars argue about the degree to which the Iliad may be loosely connected to a real war between Greece and Troy. Even if the Gospels are based on the life of a real, historical figure mentioned by secular historians, and even if the Gospels are populated by other undeniably historical characters, could we still insist that they are mostly fictional elaborations of some tiny historical core?

Corroboration from Geography

To answer this charge, we turn next to geography. The biblical Gospels include dozens of geographical landmarks such as the Jordan River; the Sea of Galilee; the Mount of Olives; the hill country of Judea; villages such as Bethany, Bethphage, Bethlehem, Emmaus, and Capernaum; and regions such as Judea, Syria, and the Decapolis. From these references, we would at least have to conclude that the authors of the Gospels either were familiar with the geography and general historical setting of Jesus’s life or were relying heavily on those who were. Compared with information about major public figures like emperors or kings, knowledge of relatively minor geographical features would be much more difficult to obtain without some kind of firsthand familiarity with Palestine. Most people in the first-century Greco-Roman world had probably heard of Caesar Augustus; it’s a good bet that fewer had heard of the Mount of Olives.

It’s also interesting to contrast the geographical information we find in the biblical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) to what we find in later, extrabiblical writings such as the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel of Thomas (see fig. 2).20 These latter documents contain far fewer and more-general geographical references. Some, like the Gospel of Mary, contain no geographical references at all. The Gospel of Thomas, which many scholars regard as the most historically reliable of the extrabiblical gospels, references only three locations: Israel, Judea, and Samaria (through its mention of a “Samaritan”). The Gospel of Peter makes reference to three major locations (Israel, Judea, and Jerusalem) and one minor one (the garden of Joseph). In contrast, the Q source—a hypothetical document that most scholars believe was used by Matthew and Luke—makes reference to eleven unique geographical locations, not only major regions and cities like Judea or Jerusalem but also small villages like Chorazin and Bethsaida.21 Likewise, Mark’s Gospel uses twenty-four distinct place-names.

Figure 2. The incidence of geographical place-names in Mark and other texts

While some consideration of the length of the extant texts is pertinent (Q and Thomas are roughly the same size; Mark is three times the length of Q; Peter and Mary are a third of the length of Q), I am not primarily concerned here with whether the biblical Gospels are more reliable than the extrabiblical gospels.22 Instead, my question is whether it is plausible to suggest, as Ehrman does, that twenty-four geographical references would have emerged from a game of telephone that was played “over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across!), with thousands of participants . . . over the course of decades.”23 My suspicion is that a game of telephone involving even fifty people passing along a single sentence in a single auditorium entirely in English over the course of an hour would fail to preserve a single unfamiliar geographical place-name. If the telephone analogy were accurate, would we really expect these kinds of geographical details to have been left intact? Is it really plausible to argue that upon a tiny kernel of historical truth, the early Christian community erected an extensive legendary account of Jesus’s activities that included dozens of real historical figures along with dozens of incidental geographical details?

Corroboration from Archaeology