The tempest in our teacup, the controversy over religious education, has stirred up anger and debate not only about the fairness of filling in a form, but also about the role and purpose of religion in children’s lives.
Inadvertently, our society has been forced into a debate for and against faith and religious life. And while the story ended well for those who argued for the value of religion class—with over 90% of parents still opting for the subject—it is clear that the number of Romanians who question whether or not faith is still a viable option for the 21st century has also increased.
And we are not alone in this situation. An article published in Christianity Today in March 2015 presented the results of the General Social Survey (GSS), which showed that from 2012 to 2015, the United States has lost 7.5 million believers. When asked what their favourite religion was, on average more than one in five Americans said “none”, just 3% fewer than those who said they were Roman Catholic—the Christian denomination with the most members in America. If the trend continues, “none” will soon become the majority group.
On 24 March 2015, the Barna Group released for the first time the results of an extensive year-long survey that sought to analyse the religious beliefs of those who had not attended worship in a Christian church in the previous six months. This category now includes almost half of the US population. According to the survey, 25% of Americans say they are atheists or agnostics, and a third of them have never attended a religious service in a church. Whereas 12 years ago, skeptics under the age of 30 made up just 18% of the population, today the figure has almost doubled to 34%[1].
Against this general backdrop, a few days before Christmas 2014, the electronic edition of the Washington Post published an intriguing article entitled “Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up.”
The author of the article was Raphael Lataster, who in September 2013 published the book There was no Jesus, there is no God—a work in which he attempted to analyse, on an exclusively scientific basis, the evidence for the (in)existence of Jesus. The conclusion of the article was easy to intuit: “There are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence—if not to think it outright improbable”.
This preoccupation is not new. There are also some Christian theologians who have adopted the method of critical interpretation of Scripture, organised in the so-called Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 by the American theologian Robert Funk, who want to discover how much of the Gospels is truth and how much is fiction. A meeting of this study group was held in Santa Rosa, California, from 18 to 21 March 2015. The theme of the first paper presented on this occasion followed the same critical tone, seeking to reveal to the audience the “real Paul” or the truth about Paul.
No wonder, in such a setting, that some question the wisdom of dividing history into “before” and “after” Christ, of funding costly Christian missions, or of submitting our lives to principles that seem rather constraining. However, the countless Christian martyrs, the millions of believers today, an entire civilisation built on the principles of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, make us think twice before abandoning faith in favour of rationalism or militant atheism.
Archaeological discoveries and historical evidence, both old and new, attest to the authenticity of Christian beliefs about Jesus, and their analysis, together with the Gospel accounts, leads many to the same conclusion as that of the American theologian Walter Wink: “Had Jesus never lived, we could not have invented Him.”[2]
Historical evidence for Jesus Christ
When we compare the data we have about Jesus of Nazareth with the data we have about other personalities of the ancient world whose existence has never been questioned, we find that “Jesus is one of the persons of ancient history concerning whom we have a significant amount of quality data. His is one of the most-mentioned and most-substantiated lives in ancient times”[3].
The first testimonies about Him come, as it happens, from the very ancient authors who were recognised as anti-Christian and who would certainly have exposed a forgery so close to their own time.
Flavius Josephus, the most renowned Jewish historian of the first century, writes in Antiquities of Judaea[4], a work dated about 93 A.D.: “There was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man… when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, as named from him, are not extinct at this day”.
Tacitus, a Roman senator considered one of the greatest historians of antiquity, wrote in his Annals[5]: “…a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus”.
Pliny the Younger, Roman magistrate and friend of the Emperor Trajan, wrote to him in 110 A.D., in Letter 97, about his treatment of the Christians of Bithynia: “Those who denied that they were or had been Christians… and also cursed Christ… these I thought should be discharged”.
We can add the references of Mara bar Serapion[6] or of Serenius Granianus, proconsul of Asia in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, or those of Lucian of Samosata, all of which refer directly or indirectly to Jesus Christ.
Another important set of testimonies is that of the early Christian writers, often called post-apostolic fathers and apologists, who felt that the elite of the Roman Empire, and especially the Caesar, needed to know the truth about the Christian faith and stop the persecution against it. It is hard to believe that anyone would dare to write such a document, addressed to the highest political forum of the time, on a matter of life and death, recounting imaginary things and inventing events which they then claimed to be authentic facts that had happened quite recently and in a well-known area.
In their arguments, many cite credible historical sources of the time which recorded events in the life of Jesus and supported their claims. Polycarp, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and Eusebius speak passionately and at the risk of their lives about Jesus Christ and His mission to a totally hostile world. It seemed to be the only matter on which Jews and Romans were in agreement—the persecution of Christians. And yet no one accused Christians of being willing to be martyred for someone who never existed.
Modern archaeological discoveries confirm the places and events described in the New Testament. These include the tomb of Caiaphas, discovered in 1990, the James Ossuary discovered in 2002, which bears the name James —”Jacob (James), son of Joseph, brother of Yeshua”—or the synagogue of Theodotus near the Gihon spring, which seems to recall Simon of Cyrene. In addition, the discovery of numerous ruins of ancient Jewish cities from the time of Jesus Christ, even if they do not refer to His name, proves that the descriptions in the Gospels of the places and times in question are correct and accurate[7]. Despite the controversy surrounding some of them, the discoveries listed above, taken together, provide an undeniable argument for the historicity of the Christian writings.
However, Josh McDowell states that “to know Jesus from history is to know Him from afar. It is only to know about Him rather than to actually know Him. Yet the historical record of His life reveals that He intensely desired that ‘all mankind’ might know Him personally”[8].
After a lifetime of archaeological study, after hundreds and thousands of unearthed testimonies, William Albright declared: “We need reawakening of faith in the God of the majestic theophany on Mount Sinai, in the God of Elijah’s vision at Horeb, in the God of the Jewish exiles in Babylonia, in the God of the Agony at Gethsemane”.[9]
A God, however, that you either accept as He is or reject. There is no middle way. That is why knowing Him remains the only viable option. And the only worthwhile one!