In a previous essay, I began laying out a framework for reasonable faith in the proposition of miracles, with a particular focus on the Resurrection. In 2007, Rev. Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, penned an essay in First Things based on a speech he had previously given:
I’d like to start with a proposition. Here it is: To be a Christian is to believe in history.
All the great world religions have sacred books … What those sacred texts have in common is that they’re essentially wisdom literature. They’re collections of noble teachings aimed at helping believers live ethically and find the right path to peace or happiness or enlightenment.
All this ensures that we can never reduce the Incarnation to an abstract concept, a metaphor, or a pretty idea. It ensures that we can never regard Jesus Christ as some kind of ideal archetype or mythical figure. He was truly a man and truly God. … There’s something else, too. We believe that this historical event, which happened more than 2,000 years ago, represents a personal intervention by God “for us men and for our salvation.” God entered history for you and me, for all humanity.
These are extraordinary claims. To be a Christian means believing that you are part of a vast historical project.
The Archbishop’s article is extraordinary; I encourage you to read it. It cuts straight to the heart of the Christian faith: the assertion and conviction that it is not merely a belief system or a framework for morality and wise living but rather a radical and historical event in time. Christianity claims, outrageously, that the eternal God of the universe stepped into time, and the events resulting from this intervention are verifiable in history, not merely believed in the intellect.
The essay appropriately stresses this history as detailed in Scripture. But it may be argued — and has been argued — that the Scriptures are a hopelessly biased and distorted record, if indeed they are a record at all, of the events detailed in their pages. Filled with fantastic myths and implausible events written by zealots, they portray not history but fantasy. If indeed a man named Jesus existed — and some doubt even this simple premise — we surely know little or nothing of him. Hence, the distinction has grown between the “Jesus of history,” of whom we know precious little, and the “Christ of faith” — the spiritual apparition created by zealous followers and true believers, perhaps morally and ethically beneficial, but surely not based in history and fact.
These are the presuppositions — almost always unspoken — when one hears about the “historical Jesus” today: the assumption that the divine did not intervene in history and that the biblical record is replete with myth, hyperbole, and fabrication. Therefore the Gospel record — especially as it relates to miracles or other supernatural events such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection — is not to be believed. The moral teachings of Jesus, assuming he existed, may be a reasonably accurate synopsis of his teachings as a moral agent. However, anything implying the supernatural basis of his doctrines must be dismissed.
This is invariably the media’s perspective, manifested in the characteristic Time or Newsweek cover story at Christmas or Easter, supported by theological skeptics such as the Jesus Seminar. Consider this from the opening statement of the Jesus Seminar in 1985, a most enlightening summary of the Seminar’s preconditions and assumptions:
… we are having increasing difficulty these days in accepting the biblical account of the creation and of the apocalyptic conclusion in anything like a literal sense. The difficulty just mentioned is connected with a second feature: we now know that narrative accounts of ourselves, our nation, the Western tradition, and the history of the world, are fictions …
Our dilemma is becoming acute: just as the beginning of the created world is receding in geological time before our very eyes, so the future no longer presents itself as naive imminence … To put the matter bluntly, we are having as much trouble with the middle, the messiah, as we are with the terminal points (creation and Armageddon). What we need is a new fiction that takes as its starting point the central event in the Judeo-Christian drama and reconciles that middle with a new story that reaches beyond old beginnings and endings. In sum, we need a new narrative of Jesus, a new gospel, if you will, that places Jesus differently in the grand scheme, the epic story.
Not any fiction will do. The fiction of the superiority of the Aryan race led to the extermination of six million Jews. The fiction of American superiority prompted the massacre of thousands of Native Americans and the Vietnam War. The fiction of Revelation keeps many common folk in bondage to ignorance and fear.
We require a new, liberating fiction, one that squares with the best knowledge we can now accumulate and one that transcends self-serving ideologies. [Emphasis mine]
Therefore we have two competing worldviews on the historical veracity of Christianity: one based on the events and evidence of history, integrated through the window of faith, verifiable in measurable ways by the tools of the historian, and the view of postmodernism, which sees all such “facts” as mere cultural constructs, narratives fomented by the lust for power, to be deconstructed through the eye of skepticism, thus creating a new narrative apropos to our times to free us from the patriarchal tyranny of religious ignorance.
These are the poles, stark outlines sketched against the canvas of history. Positions are charted between these extremes by those who are cozy in compromise, for whom intellectual sloth seems more virtue than vice. But at its core, this division comes down to the essence of reason: does truth matter? Is the historical record reliable, and does it actually point to truth in the area of the Christian faith?
For those willing to set aside prejudice and judge for themselves, I plan to briefly lay out this history. To my eye, it is compelling — not as a few definitive proofs, but as a complex mosaic whose lines run in tandem to a single vanishing point at the center of history. As G.K. Chesterton summarizes it in his remarkable work Orthodoxy,
If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, “For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.” I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts.
Hence, we must pursue the truth about the existence and life of Jesus Christ through the evidence of history, archaeology, and literature.
Next: We will begin detailing some of these facts, by examining the Jesus of the Pagans.
