The greatest manhunt in history ended in failure when the Romans and the Jewish leaders could not find the body of Jesus. The greatest manhunt in my history was when Jesus used best reason and experience to bring me to Himself.
I grew up in the Church. I had a great childhood with parents who encouraged me to think, challenge, and questions everything. The difficulty was not intellectual, but moral. Fortunately, even if I did not wish to follow Jesus, He refused to let me go. The evidence that He is alive and the historical records are true was too compelling . . . even though that seemed deeply sad to me.
My heart wanted to reject Christian morality and Christian morality was based on the truth of the story of Jesus. If Jesus was alive, then those that recorded that life and what Jesus said testified to something explosive. All the rigor of a secular philosophy degree combined with my Christian education nagged at my mind.
My work in ancient philosophy taught me how skeptical people in the ancient world could be. Even those open to divine action and revelation, like Plato, were well aware of frauds, impostures, and scams. Like most modern people, the ancients did believe in miracles, but they did not think them common. People could rise from the dead, but they almost never did.
Jewish people were particularly sensible about testing the evidence. They were not sitting about waiting for someone to rise from the dead. When witnesses claimed Jesus did rise from the dead, the response was not incredulity, but “show me.” Before returning to Heaven, Jesus spent weeks letting people see that He was risen. Finally, He went on with His business!
The ancient world (like today) had plenty of narrow minded people who ruled out miracles or refused to see them even when there was good evidence. Plenty of powerful people in the establishment wanted to squash the new sect of Jesus followers. They would have turned up all the contrary evidence they could find. They could claim the disciples stole the body (or something else), but they could not come up with a body.
The Gospels read like ancient history, more like Herodotus than Homer. I read ancient mythology for a living and the Gospels are not myth if by “myth” you mean fantastic stories about the gods like we find in Ovid. I have bad news: the Gospels read nothing like Ovid.
Try it yourself.
There were, of course, many other reasons to think Jesus rose from the dead. The next thing about being a philosopher is that I knew the objections to those reasons and the objections to those objections . . . discussion without end. This isn’t unusual, any big claim leads to hard questions and arguments. Accepting that Jesus is alive is explosive. My best reason kept leading me back, with feelings of dread, to the truth: Jesus is alive.
Of course, you might “reason” your way to anything, but when combined with experience of the truth of Jesus, the evidence becomes compelling.
I had an experience with Jesus. Critics could say “it was just in my head,” but then so are all my experiences. Jesus had changed my life. He spoke in a way that did not “sound” like my voice. I knew many people I trusted, from blue collar workers to philosophers, who claimed transformed lives by an encounter with Jesus.
I remember sitting, surrounded by skeptical books and realizing: “Jesus is real. He is here.” I gave up. This turned out to be the beginning of joy . . . though I did not think it would be!
This post is part of a roundtable conversation on the new movie RISEN, opening in theaters February 19, 2016. Click here to watch a movie trailer — and for more conversation on the new film about the manhunt that changed the course of history!
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