Q. Questions such as?
A. Such as if the Gospels lie, who invented the lie and for what reason? Was it the apostles? What did they get out of the lie? Martyrdom - hardly an attractive temptation. A liar always has some selfish motive. These guys were killed with swords like Matthew, dragged by horses through the streets until dead like Mark, hanged like Luke, boiled in oil and exiled like John, crucified upside down like Peter, thrown from a pinnacle and beaten with clubs like James, whipped to death like Nathaniel, crucified on an X-shaped cross like Andrew, stabbed with spears like Thomas, killed with arrows like Jude, stoned and beheaded like Matthias or tortured and beheaded like Paul!
And it didn't stop there. If we argue and say these guys were really brainwashed by Jesus, this level of witnessing has continued for 2000 years, across the 5 continents, to women and men and children, old and young, learned and illiterate, black and white... Why would thousands suffer torture and death for this lie if they knew it was a lie? All the enemies of Christianity needed to do to destroy this new religion from the beginning was to produce one confession from one of Jesus' disciples that it was all a lie, a hoax. They used many forms of torture and bribery. They never succeeded.
Third, what force sent Christians to the lion's den with hymns on their lips? What lie ever transformed the world like that? What lie ever gave millions a moral fortitude and peace and joy like that? Christianity conquered the world mainly through force of sanctity and love. Saints, not theologians, converted the world. You can fake theology, but you cannot fake sanctity. Saints are not liars, and liars are not saints.
Fourth, if it was not a deliberate lie but a hallucination or a myth sincerely mistaken for the literal truth, then who were the naive fools who first believed it? There isn't another idea a Jew would be less likely to believe. Imagine this: the transcendent God who for millennia had strictly forbidden his chosen people to confuse him with a creature as the pagans did - this Creator God became a creature, a man - a crucified criminal. Hardly a myth that arises naturally in the Jewish mind!
And fifth, if it was not the Jews but the Gentiles who started the myth, where did the myth come from in the New Testament? Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, twenty-five were written by Jews.
Sixth, whether Jews or Gentiles started the myth, they could not have done so during the lifetime of those who knew the real Jesus, for it would have been publicly refuted by eyewitnesses who knew the facts. other religious founders, like Buddha and Muhammad, were indeed "divinized" by later myths, but at least two or three generations (more usually two or three centuries) had to pass before such myths could be believed. But the "myth" of Jesus' divinity goes back to the very earliest times and documents.
And lastly, why has the "myth" continued to attract the brightest minds in history? If you pit Paul of Tarsus, John the Evangelist, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, John Damscene, Origen, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Boethius, Erigena, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Bonaventura, Scotus, Ockham, Nicholas of Cusa, Cajetan, Luther, Calvin, Kepler, Ignatius of Loyola, Dante, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Berkely, Copernicus, Newton, Kierkegaard, Newman, Pasteur, Jaspers, Marcel, Galileo, Tolstoy, Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis against Machiavelli, Hobbes, Renan, Freud, Darwin, Marx, La Mettrie, Skinner, Nietzsche, Sartre, Betrand Russell, Ayer, Paine... it would hardly be a fair fight.
Aquinas argues that if the Incarnation did not really happen, then an even more unbelievable miracle happened: the conversion of the world by the biggest lie in history and the moral transformation of lives into unselfishness, detachment from worldly pleasures, and radically new heights of holiness by a mere myth.
The fundamental difficulty unbelievers have is with the data. How can they explain the data of history, a good and wise man who claimed to be God? No one has ever satisfactorily answered the simple question: if Jesus is not God, as Christians say he is, then who is he? If any answer to that question had even a specious staying power, it would have served as a mainstay of all unbelievers' arguments for all time. But hypothesis after weak hypothesis is tried, and each fares about as well as fog on a sunny morning.
Happy Sunday!
21st May 2017