I often have conversations in which my faith in the person
and work of Jesus Christ, and in the Bible is either called into question, or
treated like one of those quaint little idiosyncrasies old ladies are prone to.
I’d like to speak to that.
Today we consider religious belief a kind of random
selection made on the whim of personal preference, like choosing a flavor of
ice cream. The attitude – the meme, if you must have trendy terminology – is
that nothing non-material is real. Those in the fashionable “know” see the
atheist as the brave realist able to look life in the eye and get on with his
purposeless, short existence. But they see believers as poor weak souls L people who need to
lean on a fairytale, and who will be barely, and condescendingly tolerated.
It occurs to few that a religious belief can be based on
reality. I’m not sure most Christians even see their faith as based on fact, on
history, on ontological truth, yet it is. In fact the Judeo-Christian worldview
is the only world religion that can make that claim. Over and over again
archeological information surfaces that bears out the accuracy of the biblical
account (but that’s another post).
Because he is at the center of it all, I begin with the historical actuality
of a man named Jesus.
In fact, Jesus Christ, whose lineage can be traced back through
David (king of Israel from 1010 to 970 B.C.) to, and beyond, Abraham ( 2nd
millennium B.C.) is more thoroughly documented as having been a real person than
his contemporary Julius Caesar.
Not only do we have thousands of biblical manuscripts that attest to his
existence, but we also have dozens of contemporaneous, extra-biblical sources
that mention him – Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Thallas,
Celsus, just to name a few. Many of these historians were antagonistic toward Christus and spoke ill of him, but no
one thought he was a myth, and as they argued against the Christian claims,
they inadvertently justified the biblical accounts.
