Before you think Christianity was made up consider this…
If you think Christianity was made up, ask yourself the following questions,
A. Why would a doctrine of God dying on a cross be invented?
Picture this, a dark and devious group of men sitting around the dimly lit room in the Council of Nicaea with Constantine at the head of the table (as popular atheist folklore of the origin of Christianity goes). There is literally Carte Blanche, these people can invent any kind of God they want, why would they invent the idea of God dying a brutally horrific death on the cross? According to historian Cicero, the word “cross” should not even be mentioned in polite company. The apostle Paul aptly captures the absurdity of the cross to his contemporaries outside the faith, Jews and Gentile alike,
“For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness…”
(1 Corinthians 1:22–23)
Of interest here are the Greek words used to convey this sentiment. The Greek for stumbling block is the word “skandalon” and the Greek for foolishness is the word “Moria” from the root word “Moros”. In essence the cross was absolutely scandalous to Jews and utterly moronic to the Gentile Greeks. Why in the world would this kind of thing be made up?
“Hey, Our Messiah who we worship as God was brutally scourged by the Romans and crucified on the cross! care to worship Him with us?”
It is interesting that one of the earliest archaeological evidence for Jesus being worshipped as God is the c.200AD Alexamenos Graffito which depicts a man on his knees praying to a man with the head of a donkey on a cross with the inscription, “Alexamenos prays to his God”. It is obviously a mockery of the Christian portrayal of God and gives an idea of just how ridiculous of an idea a crucified God was in the early years of Christianity.
B. Why make up a trinitarian God with a Son and Spirit who are different but somehow the same thus sparking centuries of debate?
The one doctrine that everybody has a go at is the trinity. What the actual heck? How in the world can 1+1+1=3? How is God one and three at the same time? Point is if Christianity were just some man made nonsense, this is not the concept of God that would be invented? A simple one dimensional God would suffice. However, the complexity of God apart from solving some philosophical dilemmas like how God could be love from the beginning if there was nothing to love, is an inheritance from the Hebrew scriptures and shows how faithful the New Testament writers were to the Jewish roots of the faith they preached.
C. Why invent the least reliable witnesses for the most important element of this made up religion?
In all four gospels, women were the first witnesses of the resurrection and the empty tomb. In first century Judea, women could not even bear witness in a law court as their testimony was inadmissible. Josephus writes,
“But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex…”
So why would you make the cornerstone of this made up religion the resurrection, as Paul writes,
“And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.
And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”
(1 Corinthians 15:14,17)
And then make the key witnesses to this first event people whose testimony is inadmissible in a law court?
D. Why attribute gospel authorship to less known adherents of this made up movement?
Still along the same lines as the above, why would the names of Matthew, a tax collector, John Mark, who was insignificant to the early church and Luke who by his own admission was not an eye witness to the things he wrote about, be associated with the gospels? Jesus had twelve disciples why not pick those guys as the gospel authors?
E. Why have all these “gospel contradictions” and difficult sayings of Jesus which atheists and other non-Christians whine about been left in?
If Christianity is just men making stuff up, why have the contradictions in the gospel accounts (number of women at the tomb, death of Judas, did one thief repent or did both mock? etc.) been preserved for the last two thousand years? Why was there no attempt to harmonize or standardize these texts? Why are problematic passages like Jesus saying He does not know the hour in Mark 13:32 still in the gospels today? Shouldn’t these have been smoothened out to make it consistent if these “Christian inventors in a dark room” felt free to make up whatever anyway? And what exactly would people gain for making Christianity up? What exactly would be the incentive? What would be the point?
Now think about this, could it just be that the gospels are the way they are because they record genuine history and are reporting the facts as they occurred? Could it be that the weird gospel authors are weird because those are the people who happened to actually write them? Why would they claim there were eyewitnesses to this event who were still alive and then start preaching from Jerusalem where their God was crucified and anybody there could fact check their story and get them busted if they were lying? Why would they claim the things that happened to Jesus, which they preach, were foretold by the Hebrew scriptures in the middle of a Jewish culture that was obsessed with the Hebrew scriptures and knew it like the back of their hand? It is almost like they were inviting scrutiny and investigation into their claims because they knew their accounts were true!
Have you considered that if the four gospels agreed on every single detail, not only would there be no point of having four of them but the writers would be accused of collusion?! Any good lawyer or detective will easily spot 100% agreement of multiple eyewitness testimony as a red flag! So we would expect some level of variation in detail if the eyewitnesses are independent and honest, which surprise surprise, is exactly what we find in the gospels.
Also ask yourself why the so called “lost gospels” tend to fix these errors by purporting to be written by a disciple of Jesus and by addressing time spans not covered by the authentic gospels (Infancy gospel of Thomas, Protoevangelium of James covering the birth of Mary, gospel of Philip etc.), why the gospel of Peter for example places men as the first witnesses to the tomb.
Finally, consider this. The gospels have onomastic congruence. What the heck is onomastic congruence I hear you ask? This has to do with the names first century Jews living in Palestine bore. Richard Baucham compared the popularity of Jewish names in 1st century Palestine (Judea and Samaria) to the popularity of names in the Bible. The alignment of these names is what is called Onomastic congruence. For example, the most popular male name both in first century Palestine and in the gospels is Simon, same thing happens with Mary as the most popular female name.
A deeper study was done on this by Luuk van de Weghe and Jason Wilson and the gospels’ name patterns had an 86% chance of occurring based on the first century Jewish naming patterns, the next most congruent of the analysed documents was Josephus which had a 7% chance. The apocryphal gospels of course were found to have no onomastic congruence. What is the lesson here? The gospels seem to have been written by people from the correct location writing close to the events. It is very difficult to somehow stumble on the correct naming pattern if this was not the case.
In conclusion, it is difficult to disagree with CS Lewis when he says,
“Christianity is not the sort of thing someone would have made up”
So before you write it off as yet another man made bunch of crap, you might be better off actually looking into its origin, background and message.
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