Did Jesus Really Exist?Sýnishorn

When people make up stories, it’s usually to impress people. When we lie, we’re trying to glorify ourselves, not embarrass ourselves. In crime shows, a common twist we see is when the prime suspect had an alibi all along but were too embarrassed to admit what they were doing on the night of the crime! Yesterday we talked about how true stories have undesigned coincidences. Today we’ll take a look at the embarrassing details that we find in true stories.

The Gospels have a few moments that might have made the leaders of the early church cringe. Peter denies Jesus three times, acting like a coward. James and John get rebuked for asking Jesus to smite some Samaritans. The resurrection accounts have some details that some people in the first century might have wanted to brush over.

In the ancient world, proving guilt or innocence usually relied on eyewitness testimony. Biblical laws required more than one witness for a charge to be established. Paul gives us a pretty big list of witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus. He begins with ‘Cephas’ (one of Peter’s nicknames) and finishes with himself, ‘last of all’. But he doesn’t say that Cephas was the first witness. He doesn’t mention who the first witness was. This could be because in a patriarchal society, female witnesses were seen as less reliable. In later Jewish writing, about 140-190 years after Paul was writing his letters, there’s a law that ‘the oath of testimony is practised with regard to men but not with regard to women, with regard to non-relatives of the litigants but not with regard to relatives, with regard to those fit to testify but not with regard to those unfit to testify.’ Mishna Shevuot 4:1.

The Gospel writers tell us that the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection were women. Modern readers wouldn’t find that embarrassing, but many ancients apparently did. Why would the Gospel writers shoot themselves in the foot by making up such controversial witnesses?

Sometimes the truth is inconvenient. When our case might seem less persuasive, we might feel tempted to prop it up with arguments we know are weak and hollow, rather than face a truth that makes such great claims on our lives. As you examine your heart, is there anything preventing you from trusting the evidence about Jesus? Will you keep investigating Jesus, even if it leads to personal sacrifices?

Thanks for completing this plan with us. Keep an eye out for the other plans in this series: Who Was Jesus?, What About Suffering? , Is There An Afterlife? , and What Is the Purpose of My Life? . If you want to hear more thoughts about those questions, check out the Discover Jesus podcast .