Cult of Personality

The historicity of Jesus is continually questioned by sceptics and opponents of the Gospels. Just today I had a very sincere student ask me questions about the reliability of the historical Jesus. Sometimes what appears at first to be logical can in fact be flawed when you take into account all the variables and evidence. “If Mary was pregnant with Jesus before she married Joseph, then couldn’t they just have made up he was the Son of God to hide the fact they were breaking their society’s laws?” This is a perfectly reasonable assumption naturalistically speaking. Mary becomes pregnant before she marries her fiancé therefore they must have been having sexual intercourse. However, if Jesus’ birth was purely natural than how do you explain his miracles or the crucifixion?

How do you explain the calming of the storm or the feeding of the five and four thousand respectively? Yes people were more religious and superstitious in general than today but that kind of power over nature cannot be manufactured. It either happened or it didn’t. People were either eye witnesses to it or they weren’t. You cannot trick five thousand people into believing you supernaturally multiplied a tiny amount of food and still had food left over after the miracle took place and people had eaten their fill; that is no mere illusion. Jesus travelled from region to region so the people whom he healed would all have been known locally. These were people who were physically handicapped whose disability would have been common knowledge. These were not people Jesus surreptitiously planted in the crowd in order to con the people into believing he was divine. Moreover, Jesus’ moral teaching on the Torah as found in the Sermon on the Mount as well as his teaching on love proves Jesus to be a man of very high moral character contrary to this notion of Jesus being a sophisticated con-man capable of deception.

Secondly, if Jesus was not truly the Son of God then why would Mary and Joseph convince their child he was somebody he was not whilst blatantly distorting the prevailing belief in Jewish society that the messiah would be a warrior king who would liberate them from political oppression to the Roman Empire? If Mary and Joseph maintained the lie in order to protect their reputations that Jesus’ birth was divine then why did Jesus go to the Cross? There was a consensus of scholarly opinion at this time that the Messiah would be a valiant, righteous warrior king after the nature of David, the warrior king of Israel who God made a covenant with promising to keep a descendant on his throne forever. But Jesus was not a warrior king, as evidenced by the unilateral rejection of Jesus’ messianic claim by the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Jewish authorities rather than embracing Jesus as their long foretold messiah saviour misconstrued his teaching as blasphemous and campaigned for his crucifixion. So Jesus did not fit the archetype of the expected messiah.

Jesus’ miracles and the cross can only be explained by Jesus’ divinity and identity as the incarnate Son of God. The Immaculate Conception explains Jesus’ ability to perform powerful miracles and his crucifixion. Jesus chose to die – he chose the path of suffering and sacrifice because he knew who he was: he was the Son of God incarnated to atone for the sins of the world. Jesus’ life was mission led; it was purposeful. Jesus led a purpose driven life that ultimately was focussed on the cross and his ministry led him directly to it.

Retrospectively, the resurrection vindicates Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God and long awaited messiah. Alongside the Immaculate Conception as the best explanation of Jesus’ extraordinary life and ministry, his resurrection after the crucifixion proves that the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels is one and the same person. If Jesus were not resurrected there would be no Christianity today. If his disciples out of grief or a stubborn refusal to embrace reality, decided to fabricate his resurrection then the Jewish authorities (with a great degree of glee) would have been able to prove them wrong as his burial tomb would have been intact with the decomposing body still inside. Notwithstanding the evidence that would undeniably have been there to counter the disciples’ claims as fraudulent, the disciples themselves had no reason to concoct the resurrection. Jesus’ ministry had been peaceful and non-militant. Jesus had not led an insurrection against the Roman authorities; he did not call his followers to arms. That was not Jesus’ cause and neither was it the cause of his disciples. Instead, the disciples were grief stricken and disillusioned. They hid themselves away behind locked doors in fear of the public. For three years they had openly and publically associated themselves with a man who had just been executed for treason and blasphemy. They were afraid and leaderless.

No, if Jesus was not raised from the dead then there is no logical explanation for the disciples’ evangelism or for further Jewish suppression of the early church. Christianity would have become a footnote in Jewish history as a personality cult of an influential travelling rabbi known as Jesus, which ended in tragedy and disgrace. The resurrection is proof of Jesus’ deity and his subsequent earthly life, Immaculate Conception included. The Gospels therefore make the most logical sense of the rise of the early church, the ubiquity of Christianity and the worship of a man who utterly redefined and transformed the Jewish perception of the Messiah.