Lately, Christians have been challenging me on the intellectual case for Christ and the evidence
for the resurrection. For most/all Christians it hinges on the resurrection, so I find that it’s best to concentrate on that as opposed to water-to-wine or heal-the-blind events, so let me sum it up the evidence/proof as proposed. (unfairly I’m sure they’ll say).
The disciples claim to have seen him alive, and later died for this… ‘people don’t do that’. 513 (or whatever) saw him alive after the resurrection.
Before I get to the main point of this, let me give my simplistic and probably ignorant assessment of that. The disciples saw him alive? Says who? Would they have any reason to exaggerate ? Is it possible they were traumatised? There are plenty of metaphors in the NT, are you sure it wasn’t a metaphorical resurrection they were convinced about, but over the decades and translations it was written as physical fact… because for them, the ‘visitation’ they had was as good as physical. Possible?
Of that 500+ people who apparently saw him… if im not wrong 500 of them were at one meeting, mentioned in Colossians (?). Now, are we sure it wasn’t 501, or 499, are we sure it wasn’t actually 300 or 50? And of those 500 how many where 100% convinced that it was him? Do we have at least letters of confirmation from them all? Or do we just believe this because 50 or so years later St Paul wrote it in a letter to encourage an early church?
Now as I said, im not too much with the smarts! Maybe it’s just that I don’t get it. But the hundreds of thousands of god-fearing child-loving charitable reasonable people at the time in Israel weren’t exactly falling over themselves to believe the resurrection. They quite reasonably said… well, ok if he really is risen again then can we see him? Is he going to come to Jerusalem again to say hi to Pilot and the Pharisees? OH THEY OF LITTLE FAITH!!
It could well be, that im not smart enough to understand the evidence, I admit this. Problem is, how smart does one have to be to be a Christian? Is Jesus only for the really smart people who understand why the evidence is good enough and should be believed? If not, then are we saying that we should teach our children to accept certain things on less than empathic evidence? Not only that but they should accept ‘unlikely’ things like resurrections on less than emphatic evidence?
I think I know where that leads… and it’s nowhere good.
Quite to the contrary, it seems to me that the smarter you are (or at least the more willing you are to ask the smart questions) the harder it becomes to believe in Jesus. I say this for two reasons. One: I think the evidence just isn’t there. Two: There are few Christians out there prepared to educate other Christians about intellectual issues. When I was a religion major at a Christian school what I found most frightening was that religion majors are not the cream of the crop. If God is in the business of “calling” people, he seems to have a funny idea of what it takes to be a good leader. When I was planning on going into the ministry, I was frightened and infuriated that so many religion majors bragged about ways in which they circumvented reading the Theology textbook, or how proud students were when they found ridiculous ways of making seeming bible contradictions seem cohesive.
*shrug*