Jesus the Key

This one is overdue. My apologies for those who checked for it and kept checking and kept checking . . .

The prerequisites for this entry are as follows:

1. The Search
2. The Search Continues
3. Whittling Down the Choices

If you read (or re-read) these in this order before continuing to the rest of this post, it will make good, logical order sense. I know that no one does it, but I have to urge that anyway.
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What we know about Jesus comes mainly from the New Testament of the Bible. Already, some of the critically minded are thinking, "Yeah, those are real objective sources." I admit that on first blush, it doesn't sound very objective. What if the sources of history were a group of documents - some letters, some accounts by historians and other manuscripts that were from different authors in different times. Would that be an objective way to uncover historical facts? That IS how the written history is determined for antiquity. That is also what makes up the New Testament of the Bible. Later, after they were written, those in authority put them together and declared them Scripture. Before that, they were just a number of independent documents.

In these documents, there are accounts of Jesus' life and many direct quotes from Him. There are also accounts and letters on the effect that Jesus had in the lives of people many years after his death.

In these accounts, Jesus was a teacher, a miracle worker, and a prophet. Jesus also proclaims his deity and by these accounts, backs that claim up. He announced that He will be killed, but asserts that He will rise from the dead. By these New Testament chronicles, He does it - a humble man from the family of a carpenter claims he is God (i.e. Son of God) and then backs up the claim. If these documents were not in the Canon of Scripture, nonbelievers may be a little more hesitant about their disdain. However, these documents are all from believers so the credibility (rightly or wrongly) comes into question.

What about the historical accounts of nonbelievers? What kind of clarity can be added to the equation? In my other blog, Psychosomatic Wit I wrote a post about Jesus and Easter called Easter, By Any Other Name:

I am reminded at this time of the year how miraculous the Christian faith really is. A fairly large group of individuals followed their spiritual leader only to watch him miserably and shamefully die. From all accounts, they and their new belief system took a large blow. This execution also killed the new religion of these men and women. They went back to their old lives with their tails between their legs.

Then, something happened. The new faith surged! There was talk of this man Jesus actually be seen – returning from the dead as He said He would and talking and teaching to His followers. Even though the tomb was empty and there was no sign of the body, that doesn’t mean he resurrected, does it? Many of the skeptics accused Jesus’ followers from bribing the soldiers guarding the tomb and stealing the body. There were all kinds of theories.

Yet, something happened that took these dejected followers from their hopeless lives and brought them back to preaching Jesus resurrected. They, by the hoards, were willingly dying for this new belief system. Non-believing historians such as the Roman Tacitis and the Jewish Josephus recorded the unlikely events of this new Christian group - that they grew from nothing and hopelessness, to zealots in the name of this Jesus who was rumored to have conquered death. The disturbing query was this: why would these people come back to this faith, preaching a resurrected Jesus if they merely stole and hid the body? Why would they willingly die for a cause they knew was a lie? They knew if they really saw Him. They knew if they really hid his body? What would they gain but death?

These were not the only nonChristian sources. Others include Suetonius, Thallus, Pliny the Younger, Lucian of Samosata, and the Babylonian Talmud. When all these non-believing sources are pieced together, they are very much compatible to the documents now contained in the New Testament.

Unlike the other religions that I looked into, Christianity stood alone in both reliability, and the number of sources available to check the reliability. An intelligent Creator who wants to commune with his creation, for me, found "the Way" and provided it for us.

Whittling Down the Choices

In the last post, I reduced all valid beliefs in God to the big three: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Of course if they all come to a dead end, that would open things up to others.

When examining Judaism, I found SOME evidence. The Jewish scriptures were kept remarkably well over the centuries. The scribes painstakingly made sure that they remained accurate generation after generation. Even when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the mid 1900's, they were found to be faithful to the book of Isaiah and Habbukuk. Still other books were hard to find verification. When comparing the Genesis story to contemporary science theory concerning the origins of the Universe, there appears to be some conflict there.

Because Christianity accepts the Jewish Bible (for lack of better term), I jumped to examining it. The basic difference between Judaism and Christianity is the figure of Jesus. I found that Jesus was the central key to comprehending the standing of all religion. It all fell on him or it was back to the drawing board. That, however, is a post all in itself.

When I examined Islam, I found it faulty and unsubstantiated. Basically, we have to have faith that the prophet Muhammad was who he said he was without any sound proof. The main thing that I found and tested this claim was examining what he said about the Bible. He claimed that the Bible was God's book, but it had been corrupted. Since there was hundreds and thousands of copies from different sources and different regions of the Earth, the evidence just doesn't support this. As I mentioned above, the Scribes were too careful and serious about their work - and they were all unbelievably consistent. Plus, finding the Dead Sea Scrolls and discovering it consistent with the other manuscripts, one has to conclude that there is just no evidence of this universal tampering that Muslims claim.

There is also some inconsistancies about the personality of God (Allah). On the Earth, people are to refrain from sex (except with the spouse), but as a reward, God can give a large number of virgins for Muslim men to have sex with? It just doesn't make sense. God prepares us HERE for a holy life in heaven. There has to be a reason God wouldn't want us to be promiscuous here. He is not merely a cosmic killjoy. Because of these major reasons (the lack of evidence of Bible corruption, the total reliance on one man's testimony, and the obvious inconsistency of the personality of Allah), I must conclude that Islam can not be trusted. I state this with no malice to my Muslim brothers and sisters, I am just following a path to its logical end.

I will look closer at Christianity and Judaism next.

The Search Continues

Discovering that there was a reason to believe in God (from the previous post), I set out to determine which god could it be? It only made sense to me, that if an intelligent being created the Universe and set the world in motion, He would want us to know Him. Everyone is built with an inclination to believe in God. Atheists call it a "god gene". They think it explains away God, but I think it supports the opposite. If I would send my sons and daughters out in the world, I certainly would like to plant a homing device on them so I could continue my fellowship with them.

So I decided to examine the giant religions. I looked at Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

Truthfully, I kind of tabled Hinduism and Buddhism. Hinduism makes way too many claims that can't be confirmed. All the mess about reincarnation just can't be substanciated. Buddhism doesn't really hold to a god, so that kind of eliminated itself. However, I do think that there are elements of both those religions that has truth to it. Just another example of the Bible's claim that God has written on the hearts of man.

Judaism and Christianity are basically the same religion with Christianity opening a new chapter on what was built by Judaism. Islam, in a sense, does the same thing with Christianity with Muhammad coming along 700 years of so after Jesus. I will address how all this stacked up to me soon.

The Search

Prerequisite: Beginnings

Somewhere around high school, I drifted from my belief in God. I wasn't the flaming atheist, but everything I thought about as it related to my life was absent of God or a god. School filled me up with Evolution which replaced Creation as fact in my life. There was also plenty of situational ethics and no absolutes. I lived a godless life without even thinking about it.

Slowly over time, I started considering the issues of God. I knew I had to make a decision in some way. I wanted God to prove Himself to me, but He wouldn't. You can't come to know God on your own terms but only on His. I took a leap of faith and believed. "Now will you show me, God?"

With "Pascal's Wager" in mind and beholding all the wonders of the world, I set out to allow God to confirm Himself to me. I found interesting tidbits such as the moon is exactly the right size and distance from the Earth to allow the Earth to sustain life. By chance? I don't think so. Shoot just believing that life came from nonlife takes more faith than to just believe in a Creator.

Getting to the point where it was becoming obvious that there is a God. How can we know who or what god is correct? An answer for another time.