Why Christianity?

Jesus Knocking at the Door

“If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain … we are even found to be misrepresenting God.”

1 Corinthians 15:14–15

Suppose the case for God succeeds. A further question remains, and it is the one that decides everything practical: why Christianity, among all the religions of the world? Most of them are not in competition on the same ground. They offer a way of life, a metaphysics, a discipline. Christianity does that too, but it also does something unusual and dangerous: it stakes itself on a claim about something that either happened or did not happen, in a particular week, under a Roman governor whose name we know.

The epigraph above is not a critic’s objection. It is Paul, writing to his own converts about twenty-five years after the crucifixion, and conceding in advance the terms on which the whole thing can be refuted. If the resurrection did not occur, he says, then the preaching is empty, the faith is empty, and the apostles are liars about God. No other major religion has volunteered a condition like that.

This page therefore treats the resurrection as a historical question rather than a devotional one, and works so far as possible from evidence that critical scholars concede — including scholars who do not believe a word of the conclusion. What has to be explained is not primarily an empty tomb. It is why a scattered group of frightened followers, whose movement had just ended in the public execution of its leader, began within a very few years to announce in that same city that they had seen him alive, and went on saying it under conditions that offered them nothing.

Let’s look at what is actually agreed, and then at the explanations on offer, and ask …

  • If the story grew as a legend, how did it reach its final form inside the lifetime of the people who could contradict it?
  • And what account of grief and wishful thinking explains the conversion of a brother who had not believed, and of an enemy on his way to arrest them?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

Grant for the sake of argument that God exists. Nothing yet follows about Christianity, and the skeptic sees no reason to single it out. Its central claim is the one hardest to credit, its evidence is a handful of ancient partisan documents, and the pattern it follows — a founder, a death, a vindication, a movement — is one the ancient world produced repeatedly. To accept this resurrection while dismissing every other is to apply a standard that has not been justified.

What They Affirm

The prior probability could hardly be lower. Every human being who has ever died has stayed dead; the uniformity here is not approximate. Whatever the testimony amounts to, it is being weighed against the most thoroughly confirmed generalization we possess, and ordinary standards of evidence require far more for far less.1

The motif is older than the story. Dying and rising gods were a commonplace of the ancient Mediterranean — Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and the mysteries of Mithras, which shared with Christianity a sacred meal and a promise of new life. A Jewish sect preaching a risen savior in the first century was not inventing a form. It was filling in a familiar one.2

Grief produces visions. Bereavement hallucinations are well documented and common; widows regularly report seeing and speaking with a dead spouse. Devoted followers whose leader had been executed, in a state of shock and expectation, are exactly the population in which such experiences occur — and one charismatic report will spread through a group primed to receive it.3

The documents are late, partisan and inconsistent. The Gospels were written decades afterward by unnamed authors who were not present, and they disagree about who came to the tomb, how many figures were there, and where the appearances happened. The resurrection narratives grow more elaborate the later the source: Mark, the earliest, originally ended without a single appearance at all.

Martyrdom proves sincerity, not truth. That the apostles suffered shows they believed what they said, which nobody disputes. People die for false beliefs constantly and in every religion; the 9/11 hijackers were sincere. Sincerity establishes that a person was not lying. It establishes nothing whatever about whether he was right.

And every faith has its founding wonder. Islam has the Qur’an and the night journey; the Latter-day Saints have eleven signed witnesses to the golden plates, several of whom never recanted. If early, sincere, costly testimony settles the matter, it settles it for several incompatible religions at once. The Christian applies to his own founding story a credulity he withholds from all the others.4

Endnotes
  1. The Humean form of the objection is set out on the companion page Can We Rationally Believe in Miracles?; for its application to the resurrection specifically, see Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014), ch. 5. ↩
  2. The parallels were popularized by James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890–1915), and by the history-of-religions school; they recur throughout modern popular skepticism. ↩
  3. Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (Fortress, 1994), argues for visionary experiences arising from grief and guilt, particularly in Peter and Paul. ↩
  4. On the witnesses to the golden plates and their persistence, see Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005). The parallel is pressed against Christian apologists by Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity (Temple University Press, 1991). ↩

Catholic View

The Christian case is that this is a historical question and should be settled by historical means. It does not begin from the trustworthiness of Scripture, since that would be circular against someone who denies it. It begins from a small set of facts that the large majority of critical scholars accept, including scholars who regard the conclusion as impossible — and asks which explanation accounts for all of them rather than some.

What Is Granted

The Gospels were written decades after the events, by authors whose identities are attached by tradition rather than by the text. They differ in detail, including in the resurrection narratives, and Mark’s ending at 16:8 is almost certainly the original. The prior probability of a resurrection is as low as a prior gets, and saying so is not a concession dragged from a believer — it is the reason the event would mean anything if it happened. And sincerity is not truth: the argument below does not rest on the apostles having died bravely.

Starting From What Is Conceded

Four items are accepted across the critical spectrum. Jesus of Nazareth was executed by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. His followers had experiences shortly afterward which they were convinced were appearances of him alive. Paul, an active persecutor of the movement, was converted by what he believed was such an appearance. And James, a brother who during Jesus’s lifetime did not believe in him, became a leader of the Jerusalem church and died for it.

The empty tomb is less unanimous but still commands a substantial majority, partly because the burial by Joseph of Arimathea — a member of the council that condemned Jesus — is an odd detail to invent, and partly because a movement preaching a risen body in Jerusalem could have been ended by producing one.

The Timeline Will Not Support a Legend

The legend theory needs time, and the evidence does not give it any. In his first letter to Corinth, Paul quotes a formula he says he received and passed on: that Christ died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred at once, then to James, then to all the apostles. The vocabulary is not Paul’s ordinary Greek, and the structure is that of a memorized creed — a formula already in circulation when he learned it.

Critical scholars date that creed remarkably early. Gerd Lüdemann, who thinks the resurrection did not happen, places its formation within a few years of the crucifixion, and others put it earlier still. That is not enough time for legendary development, and the point does not depend on Christian assumptions. The Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White, examining how fast legend accumulates around figures in the classical sources, concluded that even two full generations is too short to erase a hard historical core. Here we have a fixed, public, list-of-witnesses claim inside a handful of years, in the city where it could be checked.

Notice also what the formula does. It names witnesses, several of them still alive, and says how many. That is not the grammar of myth. It is the grammar of a man inviting his readers to go and ask.

The Dying-and-Rising Parallels Do Not Fit

The comparison sounds strong until the sources are read. Osiris is not raised to life in this world; he is reassembled and reigns over the dead, which is the opposite of what the disciples claimed. Adonis and Attis belong to vegetation cycles — they die and return with the seasons, endlessly, which is a myth about the year rather than a report about last spring. The clearest Mithraic parallels postdate Christianity, so the borrowing, if any, runs the wrong way.

The category itself has largely collapsed in the scholarship, and the collapse was not the work of apologists. What the New Testament claims is different in kind: not a seasonal deity in illo tempore but a named man, executed on a datable Friday under a named official, raised bodily and once, within history and never repeated. First-century Jews had a doctrine of resurrection, and it was of everyone together at the end of the age. One man raised in the middle of history was not the expected thing. It was an embarrassment they had to explain.

Hallucination Explains Part of the Evidence

Grief visions are real, and if the evidence were only that Peter had an overwhelming experience, the explanation would be a good one. The difficulty is the rest of the list. Hallucinations are private events; they are not shared, and a group of people do not have the same one. The appearances are reported in varied settings, indoors and outdoors, to individuals and to groups, over a period of time, ending rather than fading.

More seriously, the theory has to explain the two conversions it cannot use. Grief hallucinations occur in the bereaved who long for the dead. Paul was not grieving; he was on the road to arrest Christians, and had every professional and religious motive to want the movement false. James had not believed in his brother during his lifetime, which the Gospels admit against their own interest. A theory built on the psychology of devoted mourners does not reach an enemy and a skeptic, and those are the two cases where the evidence is strongest.

What Martyrdom Does Show

The skeptic is right that dying for a belief does not make it true, and the Christian should stop claiming that it does. What it does establish is narrower and still worth something: these particular people were not knowingly lying.

The distinction is the one the comparison to modern martyrs misses. A man who dies for a doctrine he was taught shows that he trusts his teachers. The apostles were in a different position: they were claiming to report what they had personally seen. A person may sincerely die for a falsehood he received. He does not knowingly die for a story he made up himself, having gained nothing by it. So the deliberate-fraud theory, which was the earliest explanation offered and is still the popular one, is the least likely of the alternatives.

Why This Religion and Not Another

Which brings the page back to its title. The difference is not that Christians are more certain than other believers, or better people; they are demonstrably neither. It is that Christianity has made itself checkable in a way the others have not chosen to. Paul states the falsification condition himself: if Christ was not raised, the preaching is empty and the apostles are liars about God (1 Cor. 15:14–15).

No comparable claim is on offer elsewhere. A private revelation to a single founder, whether in a cave or with a set of plates, cannot be investigated by anyone who was not there. A resurrection announced in a specific city, weeks after a public execution, to a hostile authority with every motive and opportunity to end the movement by producing a body, is a claim with a neck exposed. That is either recklessness or confidence, and the movement’s survival in that city is at least evidence about which.

The Reply in Brief

The facts to be explained are agreed on by scholars who disagree about everything else: a crucifixion, a group convinced they had seen the man alive, a persecutor converted, a skeptical brother converted, and a movement proclaiming a bodily resurrection in the city where the body should have been. The legend theory founders on a creed dated within a few years of the events, naming living witnesses. The parallels dissolve when the sources are actually read. The hallucination theory explains the mourners and not the enemy. And the fraud theory requires men to die for something they knew they had invented.

None of this coerces, and it is not meant to. Historical arguments deal in what best accounts for the evidence, not in proof, and a person may weigh it and remain unconvinced. But the explanation the first witnesses gave has the unusual property of accounting for all of the evidence rather than some of it — and it is the only one of the explanations that was ever offered by anyone who was there.

The full essay sets out the minimal-facts method and why it is used, works through 1 Corinthians 15 and the dating of the creed, examines the dying-and-rising category and its collapse in the scholarship, treats the empty tomb and the women as witnesses under the criterion of embarrassment, and takes up the alternative explanations one at a time — swoon, theft, wrong tomb, hallucination and fraud — at the length each deserves.

Summary

Grant that God exists; why this religion? Because Christianity, almost uniquely, has staked itself on something that either happened or did not, in a known city under a named Roman governor — and because the explanation its first witnesses gave still accounts for the evidence better than the alternatives.

The starting point is what critics concede. The argument does not begin from the trustworthiness of Scripture, which would be circular. It begins from facts accepted across the critical spectrum: Jesus was crucified under Pilate; his followers were convinced shortly afterward that they had seen him alive; Paul, an active persecutor, was converted by what he took to be such an appearance; and James, a brother who had not believed during Jesus’s lifetime, led the Jerusalem church and died for it.

The timeline leaves no room for legend. Paul quotes a formula he says he received — died, buried, raised, appeared to Cephas, the Twelve, five hundred at once, James — in vocabulary that is not his own and in the shape of a memorized creed. Critical scholars, including Gerd Lüdemann, who thinks nothing happened, date its formation within a few years of the crucifixion. The Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White found that even two generations is too short to erase a historical core. And the formula names living witnesses and counts them, which is the grammar of an invitation to check, not of myth.

The dying-and-rising parallels dissolve on inspection. Osiris is not returned to this life but reigns over the dead. Adonis and Attis belong to the seasons — myths about the year, endlessly repeated. The clearest Mithraic parallels postdate Christianity, so any borrowing runs the wrong way. And first-century Jews expected resurrection of everyone at the end of the age; one man raised in the middle of history was not the available idea but an embarrassment requiring explanation.

Hallucination explains the mourners and not the enemy. Grief visions are real and private — groups do not share one. But Paul was not grieving; he was travelling to arrest Christians, with every motive to want the movement false. James had not believed in his brother, a detail the Gospels admit against their own interest. A theory built on the psychology of devoted mourners does not reach the two cases where the evidence is strongest.

Martyrdom shows less than apologists claim and more than skeptics allow. Dying for a belief does not make it true, and sincere people die for falsehoods constantly. But those martyrs die for what they were taught. The apostles were claiming to report what they had personally seen — and a man does not knowingly die for a story he invented himself and gained nothing by. That leaves deliberate fraud, the oldest explanation, as the weakest.

And the claim is checkable, which is the unusual thing. Paul supplies the falsification condition himself: if Christ was not raised, the preaching is empty and the apostles are liars about God (1 Cor. 15:14–15). A private revelation to a single founder cannot be investigated by anyone who was not there. A bodily resurrection announced weeks later in the city of the execution, to authorities with every motive to produce the corpse, is a claim with its neck exposed.

In short: none of this compels, and history never does. But the account given by the first witnesses explains all of the evidence rather than part of it, and it is the only explanation ever offered by anyone who was actually there.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Arguments For Christianity (.docx)