History
Jesus, the resurrection, and the reliability of the gospels — as historical questions.
The Christian faith has, alone among the major religions, staked its entire claim on a historical event that the earliest believers said you could check. Not a private vision. Not a teaching that is true regardless of what happened. A specific event, in a specific city, in a specific decade, that the first Christians said either happened or didn’t.
This is, I think, the strangest feature of Christianity from a comparative-religion standpoint, and also the most important. It means that the standard tools of historical inquiry — sources, dates, multiple attestation, criteria for authenticity, the principle of embarrassment, the question of what is the best explanation of the data — actually apply.
The pieces in this section are written as historical arguments, not devotional ones. They are the case I would make to a sceptical historian, in the language a sceptical historian would use.
The shape of the argument:
- The minimal facts — a small set of conclusions about Jesus that essentially all historians of the period agree on, regardless of their personal beliefs.
- The creed Paul quotes — a fragment of liturgy embedded in 1 Corinthians 15 that pushes the earliest resurrection claim to within a few years of the crucifixion, before the legends had time to grow.
- Who wrote the gospels — what we can and cannot say about authorship and dating, honestly.
- The empty tomb — the case that the tomb was, in fact, empty, and what the alternatives look like.
A piece on the alternative explanations — swoon, theft, hallucination, legend — is in progress.