When I was deciding whether or not I
should be a Christian, I made sure to read about as many other religions as I
could. At first it was overwhelming to compare the teachings of faiths like
Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism to Christianity, but then I noticed they all had
one thing I could compare: a teaching about Jesus Christ.
Almost every major world religion
has a teaching about the identity of Jesus. Jews say Jesus was a human teacher,
Muslims say he was a prophet, and Hindus and Buddhists say Jesus was an
“enlightened man.” They all say basically the same thing: Jesus was a great
man, but he’s not God. If it turned out that Jesus was God, however, then even
though these religions have some good teachings, I knew they couldn’t be God’s
revelation. How could they if they failed to teach about the incredible moment
when God became man in the person of Jesus Christ?
Isn’t it amazing that even the name Jesus
Christ can cause tension and discomfort? Some people say it’s because that
name reminds people of negative experiences they had at church or of violent
Christian history. But the words “Christianity” or “Catholic Church” don’t
cause the same anxiety. I would argue that this name stirs strong feelings in
people because the name itself has power. And the name of Jesus has power
because the person who bears that name is God in human flesh and has infinite
power.
Why should we believe such an
incredible claim? Here are three reasons:
1. Jesus believed he was God and
he’s someone we can trust.
Jesus saw himself as more than a
human prophet or teacher. For example, Buddha said, “Be ye lamps unto
yourselves . . . hold fast to the truth as a refuge,”xxxvi whereas
Jesus said, “Iam the light of the world” (John 8:12). Jesus also said,
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by
me” (John 14:6).
Another clue to Jesus’ divine
identity is that Jesus acted like God. For example, he forgave sins, which is
something that only God has the authority to do (Mark 2:5-7).
In John 20:28,
Jesus’ disciple Thomas addressed him as “My Lord and my God.” Jesus did not
correct Thomas, because what Thomas said was true.
In the Hebrew Bible the name of God
was considered so sacred it couldn’t be pronounced. Even today many Jews spell
the name “God” with a hyphen (“G-d”) in order not to disrespect the name. But
in John 8:58, Jesus used that sacred, unpronounceable name of God for
himself.
He said that “before Abraham was, I
AM,” implying that he eternally existed as God before Abraham, who lived
thousands of years earlier. This act infuriated the Jewish leaders and
motivated them to kill Jesus for blasphemy. But it wasn’t blasphemous for Jesus
to use God’s name, because he is God.
At this point someone might say,
“I’ll grant that Jesus wasn’t a liar (since he was a good teacher), and
he wasn’t a lunatic (since he was a wise teacher), but maybe he was a legend.
How do we know Jesus really said he was God? What if someone added that to the
Bible in order to cover up a story about a merely human Jesus?”
This brings us to our next reason.
2. We can trust the New Testament
documents.
There currently exist over 5,500
copies of Greek New Testament manuscripts. There are also 15,000 copies written
in other languages like Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. The first complete copy of
the New Testament can be dated to within 300 years of the original documents.xxxvii Now,
compare this to one of the most famous examples of ancient Greek literature:
Homer’s Iliad. It was written in the eighth century B.C. and, although a
few fragments of the Iliad can be dated to within 500 years of Homer,
the oldest complete copy was written in the tenth century A.D., or 1,800 years
later!
Because there were so many copies of
the New Testament in the ancient world (including thousands more that didn’t
survive to the present day), no single person or group could have gathered them
all up and changed the story of Jesus. Also, unlike the biographies of people
like Alexander the Great or Buddha, which were written centuries after those
figures died, the Bible’s descriptions of Jesus were written within a few
decades of his death either by eyewitnesses or people who knew the eyewitnesses
to Jesus’ ministry.
The Biblical scholar F.F. Bruce put
it bluntly: “There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys
such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.”
3. The first Christians worshipped
Jesus as God.
The earliest Christian writings show
that they believed Jesus was the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), in
whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:8-9). Jesus had the “form of
God” and a name to which every knee shall bend (Phil. 2:5-11). The Bible even
calls Jesus “our great God and savior” (Titus 2:13).
When a second-century Roman governor
named Pliny the Younger asked Christians to worship the gods of Rome, they
refused. In a letter explaining this behavior to the Roman emperor, Pliny said
that Christians “were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it
was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god, and
bound themselves to a solemn oath.”
Remember also that the first
Christians were converts from Judaism. For over a thousand years the Jewish
people made themselves distinct from their pagan neighbors by refusing to
worship an animal or a man as God. The Jews of Jesus’ time would never have
believed Jesus was God unless his miracles, including his Resurrection from the
dead, proved it.
Since Jesus did prove he was God, we
can trust him when he says: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who
believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and
believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26)
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