Part 2: An Invitation to Talk

Hi again. This post is written to seekers of God who are looking for reasons to back up their emerging faith.

It's also written to skeptics who peer into the Christian camp and seem to see only blind faith. My hope is to offer a small but reasonable argument that will put the question of the historical Jesus into perspective.

Thanks for entrusting a minute or two of your time to me.

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It seems to me there are only two main possibilities* to explain Jesus Christ, the Son of God:

1. His 1st-century followers invented him.         Or:

2. He was the real thing.

A possible explanation for the "invention" of the Son of God is that he began as a specially enlightened man, and that his followers gradually elevated him to god-status as they looked back on his life.

After all, it's common for legends and myths to begin circulating and gaining momentum after the death of an illustrious figure. People want something to be true so badly that they make it so.

Heck, just look at Elvis. He's been "sighted" thousands of times, posthumously.

And in the case of Jesus, perhaps other ancient myths of dying and rising gods provided background fodder for the creation of the Christ-myth.

It all sounds plausible at first -- until, that is, we remember who was doing the inventing: 1st-century Palestinian Jews. They were strict monotheists -- that is, they believed in one God, the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh.

The one thing this group of Jews would never do is create another God (Jesus Christ) alongside Yahweh. There could not be two gods in Israel, at least not this Israel.

Christian historians make the case that 1st-century Palestinian Jews did not invent the Son of God, but rather discovered him in their midst, much to their surprise. **

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If you are naturally skeptical toward the idea of Jesus being the Son of God, I understand. There's a lot at stake here. You don't want to act rashly. You don't want to believe in a fairy-tale.

Yet, I hope you'll consider the unlikelihood of Palestinian Jews of the time period inventing a "second god."



*There may be other remote possibilities as well: that Jesus was an extra-terrestrial being, a mass hallucination, an apparition -- all minor viewpoints.

** For a more extended treatment of 1st-century Jewish monotheism, see Eddy/Boyd, The Jesus Legend, ch 2.