The Jesus Inquest

Introduction

This book is a debate between two characters, X and Y.

X presents the non-Christian view. Where there are many non-Christian positions, he presents all those he thinks are arguable, plus some others which are too popular to be ignored. Because he has to argue many different positions, he cannot always be internally consistent, but he tries.

Y follows, presenting the Christian view. Normally he uses exactly the headings that X has used. But sometimes that doesn't work. Sometimes he adds headings of his own.

X and Y don't disagree on everything. Sometimes they agree on a lot. Much of the first chapter (on the basic sources), consists of a statement of their agreed position. In other chapters there is sometimes an introduction which indicates what if any common ground there is.

Chapter 1: Does all this matter?

The fact that you’ve opened this book suggests that you think that the resurrection business might matter. X and Y certainly think that it does. If tomorrow's paper says that the bones of Jesus have been found, Y will be in despair.

X thinks that the resurrection is the most monstrous hoax ever perpetrated, or the most ridiculous fairy story ever to have been believed. Also that the consequences of belief in that hoax or that fairy story have been catastrophic. He points (rather predictably, thinks Y), to the long history of anti-semitism; to the Crusades; to the Inquisition; to the hideous theocracy of Calvin’s Geneva; to the agony of the Catholics under Elizabeth and to the agony of the Protestants under Mary; to the sectarian hatred of Belfast; to the “God Hates Fags” website; to the sheer, life-denying joylessness of much of Christian culture. “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,”, wrote Swinburne. “The world has grown grey with thy breath”. Or red, X would add. And X regrets that with that addition, Swinburne was, for much of the western world up to now, absolutely right. And he is still right about some of it – notably a big part of the US, whose belief in the resurrection of a Jewish medicine-man, nailed to a piece of wood in the first century, seems apparently and bizarrely to suggest to them that there is a moral mandate to bomb the living daylights out of a distant part of Mesopotamia. X regrets too that the Pale Galilean seems to have engendered in the world such a taste for repression, bigotry and faction that when his stranglehold is released, others, even more sinister than him, move in unopposed to take over from him.

Y agrees with much of this. He can offer no defence for the obscenities committed in the name of the itinerant Jew he worships. He agrees that if the Jew didn’t rise, then Christianity is a disgusting lie. St. Paul, after all, said that if the Easter story isn’t true then Christians are to be pitied more than anyone else. Not only pitied, Y might add, but denounced for their gullibility and their distinct genocidal tendencies. But Y also says, (and X agrees), that if the Jew did rise, then the world changed dramatically on that first Easter Sunday.

Both X and Y agree, then, that this is a worthwhile debate. Whether Jesus rose or not isn’t affected by the brutality or chauvinism or downright tediousness of his followers through the ages. It’s a matter of mere history: the fact or fallacy of the resurrection is in the same class of alleged facts as the contention that the Battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, or that I caught the 0856 train this morning. And so it is subject to the same sort of historical enquiry.

There is one caveat, though. We know that battles are sometimes fought, and that people sometimes do catch trains. We don’t know that men who are dead and buried sometimes rise. In fact it is the Christian contention that they don’t. The Christians say that it only happened once. If it happened more than once – if it was merely extremely rare instead of wholly unique – Christianity would have been shown to be simply wrong. We should then turn the cathedrals into bingo halls and the mission stations into brothels.

All this must have an effect on the way we approach the evidence. It must mean that we should prefer natural explanations over supernatural ones. Put another way, the burden of proving this wholly extraordinary event must be on the shoulders of the Christians. But it also means that X won’t be so stupid as to say: “This didn’t happen because these sort of things don’t happen.” If that’s the starting point, it is also the ending point. Discussion is doomed. This might sound obvious, but it has often dogged academic discourse. Here is Gerd Ludemann dismissing the Ascension:

“As a rule in such a case we did not ask the historical question. In this particular case let me hasten to add that any historical element behind this scene and/or behind Acts 1: 9-11 must be ruled out because there is no such heaven to which Jesus may have been carried…..”

You can’t begin to debate with an opponent like that.

There is a lot of ground to cover. We need to go deep into the characters of the people at the centre of the drama; we need to know quite a lot about first century Jewish burial practices, and about the controversies that dogged the early Church. We need to know a bit of Greek and some archaeology. We need to know whether that difficult, turbulent man Paul was a poet, a theologian, a soap-box orator or a psychotic. But first we need to know something about the basic documents.