Why Christianity — VacantTomb

Who Was Jesus?

The first four sections of this Foundation have established, through cosmological, philosophical, and experiential arguments, that a personal, rational, morally serious God exists and created the universe; that human beings are oriented toward a relationship with that God that their current condition does not provide; and that the longing they experience points toward something real. The question that now follows naturally is: has this God spoken? Has he entered history? Has he revealed himself in a way that can be examined?

Christians say yes — and they say it in a specific, datable, verifiable way. Not through a private mystical revelation available only to initiates. Not through a book delivered to a single person in a cave. Not through philosophical inference alone. But through a person — a specific man who lived in a specific place, said specific things to specific people, was executed by a specific Roman official, and was subsequently reported alive by specific named witnesses.

The person is Jesus of Nazareth. And before we examine the evidence for his resurrection in Section 08, we must first reckon with what he said and what he claimed — because those claims are themselves evidence of extraordinary significance.

The historical existence of Jesus is not in dispute

Before examining what Jesus claimed, it is worth establishing that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person. This should not need saying — almost no serious historian doubts it — but the "Jesus mythicism" position (the view that Jesus never existed) has gained some popular traction online, and it deserves a direct response.

The historical evidence for the existence of Jesus is stronger than for the vast majority of figures in ancient history. It comes from multiple independent sources, both Christian and non-Christian:

Tacitus (Annals 15.44, written ~116 AD): "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus." Tacitus was a Roman senator and official historian who regarded Christianity as a "destructive superstition." He had no motive to confirm the historicity of Jesus.

Josephus (Antiquities 18.3.3, written ~93 AD): Even in the disputed Testimonium Flavianum — which contains later Christian additions — the core historical elements are accepted by virtually all scholars as authentic: that Jesus lived, attracted followers, was crucified under Pilate, and that his followers reported seeing him alive after his death.

Josephus again (Antiquities 20.9.1): An undisputed passage refers to "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James." This reference is accepted as authentic even by scholars who are skeptical of the Testimonium.

Pliny the Younger (Letters 10.96, written ~112 AD): A Roman governor's letter to the Emperor Trajan describing Christians in Bithynia who "sing hymns to Christ as to a god."

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 43a): References a "Yeshu" who was "hanged on the eve of Passover" — consistent with the Gospel account.

The historical Jesus is one of the most thoroughly attested persons in the ancient world. He certainly existed. The mythicist view is not held by a single qualified scholar in the relevant fields — not by New Testament scholars, not by classicists, not by ancient historians. It is not a view that holds up to scrutiny.
Bart EhrmanSkeptic— Did Jesus Exist?, 2012

Ehrman is one of the most prominent skeptics of traditional Christianity. His position on the historicity of Jesus is not driven by faith — it is driven by the evidence, and the evidence is overwhelming.

What Jesus actually claimed about himself

With the historical existence of Jesus established, the central question becomes: what did he claim? The answer from the primary sources is unambiguous — and it is the answer that makes Christianity irreconcilable with the comfortable position that Jesus was merely a great moral teacher.

The claim of mere moral greatness is not available as a coherent reading of the Gospels. Jesus did not merely teach about God — he claimed to be uniquely identified with God. He did not merely forgive people on God's behalf — he claimed the personal authority to forgive sins against God. He did not merely point to the truth — he claimed to be the truth. The specific claims he made, examined carefully, are the claims of divinity — and they were understood as such by everyone who heard them, friend and enemy alike.

The claim to forgive sins. In Mark 2:1–12, a paralyzed man is brought to Jesus. Jesus says to him: "Son, your sins are forgiven." The scribes sitting nearby respond immediately: "Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?" (Mark 2:7). This is the correct theological response to what Jesus just said. In Jewish theology, sins are committed against God — therefore only God has the standing to forgive them. When Jesus forgives sins, he is either committing blasphemy — claiming authority that belongs only to God — or he is exercising divine authority as God. There is no middle ground. Jesus did not correct the scribes. He did not say "I'm speaking metaphorically" or "I mean God is forgiving him through me." He proceeded to heal the man as a demonstration that he had the authority to do what he had just said — the authority to forgive sins.

The claim to the divine name. In John 8:56–59, Jesus is in a dispute with the Pharisees about his identity. He says: "Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad." The Pharisees respond incredulously: "You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?" Jesus replies: "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." The crowd immediately picks up stones to throw at him. Why? Not because Jesus claimed to be older than Abraham — that would be merely eccentric. They picked up stones because "I am" (ego eimi in Greek, ani hu in Hebrew) is the divine name — the name God gave himself when Moses asked who was speaking from the burning bush (Exodus 3:14: "I AM WHO I AM"). Jesus was not saying "I existed before Abraham" — he was using the divine name in the first person. The crowd understood this as blasphemy. Their response was not confusion — it was the theologically correct response to someone claiming to be God.

The claim to judge all humanity. In Matthew 25:31–46, Jesus describes himself as the Son of Man who will sit on his throne, gather all the nations before him, and separate them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. He — not God, not angels, but he — will say to some "Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you" and to others "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire." This is not a prophet delivering God's message. This is a person claiming to be the judge of all humanity at the end of history — a role that, in Jewish theology, belongs exclusively to God.

The claim to equality with the Father. In John 10:30, Jesus says: "I and the Father are one." The crowd's response: "The Jews picked up stones again to stone him." When Jesus asks why, they reply: "Because you, being a man, make yourself God." (John 10:33). Again — they understood the claim. There is no ambiguity in the historical record about what Jesus was claiming. The only debate is whether the claim was true.

The claim to exclusive access to God. In John 14:6, Jesus says: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." This is not the statement of a teacher pointing to a path. It is the claim to be the path — not one approach to God among many, but the only approach. No prophet before or after Jesus made this claim in this form. Prophets say: "Thus says the Lord." Jesus says: "I am."

The claim of acceptance of worship. In John 20:24–29, Thomas — a disciple who was not present for the first resurrection appearance — refuses to believe unless he can see and touch the wounds. When Jesus appears and offers to let Thomas touch him, Thomas responds: "My Lord and my God!" Jesus does not rebuke Thomas. He does not say "Don't say that — I'm not God." He says: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." He accepts the worship and uses the moment to make a statement about faith.

Compare this to how other figures in the New Testament respond to worship. In Acts 14:14–15, when the crowd in Lystra tries to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods, they tear their clothes and cry out: "Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you." In Revelation 22:8–9, when John falls at the feet of the angel to worship him, the angel immediately says: "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you." Every being in the New Testament who receives worship and is not God immediately refuses it. Jesus accepts it.

The quadrilemma: four options and why three collapse

C.S. Lewis formulated the logical options in the famous trilemma: Lord, Liar, or Lunatic. Scholars have since added a fourth: Legend. Each option deserves full treatment, because each represents a genuine attempt to account for Jesus without accepting his claims.

Option 1 — Liar

Objection

Jesus knew he was not God and deliberately deceived his followers for reasons of personal power, influence, or some other motivation.

Response

The liar hypothesis requires reconciling the content of Jesus's moral teaching with the character of a calculating deceiver. Jesus taught: love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; forgive seventy times seven; the greatest must be the servant of all; blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful. His entire ethical teaching is oriented toward self-giving, honesty, and the renunciation of power. The psychological profile of a man whose inner orientation is genuine love for others, combined with the profile of a man who is systematically deceiving those same others about his own identity for personal gain, is not coherent. These are not the attributes of the same person.

More decisively: liars do not maintain their deceptions when the cost becomes lethal. In Gethsemane, Jesus prayed for the cup to pass from him — he experienced genuine human fear and anguish at what was coming. In the trial before Pilate, he was given every opportunity to recant, moderate his claims, or simply say nothing. He did not. He went to crucifixion maintaining his identity. A deceiver who knows the game is over — who knows that confessing his deception would save his life — does not go to the cross for the deception. Liars make poor martyrs. The consistency of Jesus's claims through to his death, maintained at enormous personal cost, is incompatible with deliberate deception.

Option 2 — Lunatic

Objection

Jesus sincerely believed he was God but was wrong — a sincere but deluded megalomaniac, a tragic figure whose followers mistook madness for divinity.

Response

The psychological portrait of Jesus in the Gospels does not support delusional diagnosis. Grandiose delusion — the belief that one is God, a special messenger, or a world-historical figure — presents with characteristic features: fragmented thought, inability to engage coherently with challengers, escalating isolation from reality as the delusion hardens, emotional instability, and a self-referential quality in which the person interprets all events through the lens of their special status.

What the Gospels record is the opposite on every point. Jesus's debates with the Pharisees, Sadducees, and scribes — the finest legal and theological minds of his day — show a person of extraordinary coherence, precision, and mental agility. His responses to attempts to trap him ("Should we pay taxes to Caesar?", "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?") are masterpieces of incisive thinking. His parables are psychologically sophisticated narratives that have been studied for two thousand years without exhaustion. His composure under the extreme pressure of his trial and crucifixion — the composure that caused Pilate to marvel (Mark 15:5) — is entirely inconsistent with the fragmenting self-reference of delusional breakdown.

C.S. Lewis: "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell."

A man who is a lunatic does not produce the Sermon on the Mount.

Option 3 — Legend

Objection

Jesus was a real person and a genuine moral teacher, but the divine claims were invented by later followers — gradually, over generations — as the movement grew and needed a more impressive founder.

Response

This is the most sophisticated modern option, and it deserves the most serious treatment. The legend hypothesis requires a window of time — decades or generations — between the historical Jesus and the developed divine claims, during which legendary inflation could have occurred. The problem is that no such window exists in the documentary evidence.

The earliest document we possess that describes the status of Jesus is not a Gospel — it is a letter of Paul. Philippians 2:6–11 contains what scholars widely recognize as a pre-Pauline hymn — material Paul is citing rather than composing. This hymn describes Jesus as "existing in the form of God," "equal with God," who "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" and became obedient to death, after which "God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name." This is the highest possible Christology — full divine identity, voluntary incarnation, exaltation after death. And it is in a text that most scholars date to within 20 years of the crucifixion, citing material that predates even that.

The 1 Corinthians 15 creed — examined in detail in Section 08 — dates to within 2–8 years of the crucifixion. It already presupposes a community that received, transmitted, and believed in the resurrection as a historical event. Mark, the earliest Gospel, already records Jesus forgiving sins, claiming the divine name, and accepting worship. There is no stage in the documentary record at which Jesus is merely a human teacher whose divine claims have not yet appeared.

Moreover, the legend hypothesis faces an anthropological problem: legendary inflation of this kind — the transformation of a merely human teacher into a divine figure — simply does not happen in the way the hypothesis requires, especially within the cultural context of first-century Jewish monotheism. Judaism had the most stringent monotheism in the ancient world. The oneness of God was not a theological position — it was the defining identity marker of the Jewish people. For a group of first-century Jewish monotheists to have invented the claim that a specific human being was God incarnate, and to have done so within years of his death — in a culture that had no existing category for such a claim — is anthropologically implausible to the point of impossibility. The legend hypothesis requires these people to have done something that their entire cultural formation made psychologically inconceivable.

Option 4 — Lord

If he was not lying, was not deluded, and the divine claims were not later inventions, the fourth option is that he was who he claimed to be. This is the option that accounts for all the evidence — the content of the claims, the coherence of the person making them, the earliness of the documents, the implausibility of the alternatives.

Key Point

The legend option is the most sophisticated and the most popular in academic settings. Its fatal weakness is timing. The divine identity of Jesus appears in the earliest documents we possess — within years of the crucifixion, in a culture that had no existing template for a divine Messiah. There is no pre-divine Jesus in the historical record. There never was.

The uniqueness of the incarnation among world religions

The claim of the incarnation — that God became a specific human being in history — is not merely a Christian claim among many comparable religious claims. It is unique in a way that deserves explicit attention.

Islam holds that God (Allah) is absolutely transcendent and cannot be diminished by union with anything finite. The idea that God became human is, in Islamic theology, the worst possible blasphemy (shirk — associating partners with God). But this objection inadvertently concedes something significant: on the Islamic account, the incarnation is impossible because it would require God to limit himself. On the Christian account, God's willingness and ability to enter his own creation without ceasing to be God is not a limitation — it is the supreme expression of divine power and love. The Islamic God cannot become human. The Christian God chose to.

Judaism awaits a Messiah who will be a great human ruler — a political and military deliverer who will restore the kingdom of Israel, rebuild the temple, and establish peace. The Messiah in mainstream Jewish theology is human, not divine. The idea of a divine Messiah who suffers and dies is, from the traditional Jewish perspective, incompatible with Messianic expectation. And yet — as we examine in Section 07 — Isaiah 53 describes precisely a suffering, dying, atoning figure. The question of how Isaiah 53 relates to Jesus is not a peripheral one.

Buddhism has no personal God. The question of God's incarnation does not arise in a tradition that does not have a personal God to incarnate.

Hinduism has avatars — divine descents into the world in various forms. But avatars are cyclical, mythological, and not tied to specific datable historical events. The claim is not that a specific person named Ram lived in a specific city in a specific century and was executed by a specific ruler. Hinduism's divine descents are theological and cosmological categories, not historical events subject to the same kind of investigation as the life of Jesus.

Christianity alone claims: at a specific time (the reign of Tiberius Caesar), in a specific place (first-century Judea), a specific person (Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, executed by Pontius Pilate) was the Creator of the universe living as a human being — not as a myth, not as a symbol, not as a category, but as a man who could be met, touched, questioned, betrayed, and killed.

This is either the most important fact in the history of the universe, or the most consequential fabrication in the history of religion. It is not something that can be received with polite indifference or respectful agnosticism. Jesus himself, in the claims he made, did not permit that response. The claims he made were the kind that force a verdict.

The response to Jesus in his own time

One of the most revealing pieces of evidence about the nature of Jesus's claims is the response of his contemporaries — including his opponents.

His opponents did not say "we disagree with his interpretation of the Torah." They said "he is blaspheming" — the charge that requires claiming divine prerogatives that belong only to God. The specific charge of blasphemy is the correct response to divine claims, not to mere moral or theological heterodoxy. The Pharisees disagreed with many teachers without charging them with blasphemy. They charged Jesus with blasphemy because that is what his claims actually were.

The charge at his trial, as recorded in all four Gospels, was not sedition or political subversion. It was blasphemy: "The high priest asked him, 'Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?' And Jesus said, 'I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.' And the high priest tore his garments and said, 'What further witnesses do we need? You have heard his blasphemy.'" (Mark 14:61–64).

Tearing garments was the formal Jewish gesture in response to blasphemy — a liturgical response to the most serious possible offense against God. Caiaphas, the most theologically educated man in the room, performed this gesture because he understood exactly what Jesus had just said: he had claimed to be the Christ, the Son of God, and the divine Son of Man from Daniel 7 who would come on the clouds of heaven — three overlapping divine claims simultaneously.

The opponents of Jesus are, paradoxically, some of the strongest witnesses to the content of his claims. They heard him. They understood him. They rejected him. But their rejection was of his divine claims — not of claims to moral greatness or prophetic insight. If Jesus had merely been a moral teacher, he would not have been crucified. Rome did not crucify moral teachers. He was crucified for claiming to be the King of the Jews — a political threat — and condemned by the Sanhedrin for claiming to be God — a theological threat. Both charges followed directly from what he said about himself.

← PreviousThe Longing That Cannot Be Filled Next →The Reliability of the Documents

Who Was Jesus?

Jesus made claims no prophet makes — forgiving sins, bearing the divine name, accepting worship, claiming to judge all humanity. His contemporaries understood the claims and responded with blasphemy charges. Liar, Lunatic, and Legend all collapse under examination. One option remains.

Key claims

—Ehrman (skeptic): Jesus of Nazareth is "one of the most thoroughly attested persons in the ancient world"
—Jesus claimed to forgive sins — recognized immediately as a divine claim (Mark 2:7)
—"Before Abraham was, I am" — the divine name, Exodus 3:14, in first person (John 8:58)
—Jesus accepted worship — every other NT figure immediately refuses it
—"I am the way, the truth, and the life" — not a pointer to the path, but the path itself
—Blasphemy charge at trial confirms his divine claims were understood as such by opponents
—Philippians 2:6–11 (within 20 years of crucifixion): full divine identity already confessed
—No pre-divine Jesus exists anywhere in the documentary record

Scholars cited

Bart EhrmanSkeptic NT scholar
C.S. LewisFormer atheist
N.T. WrightNT historian

Other foundations

Why Not Islam

Why Not Atheism

I'm Struggling

✝