Why Christianity Is True

Christianity is not first and foremost an ethical system comparable to Stoicism, nor one path of wisdom among others. Its heart is a dated event: Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean Jew, crucified at Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate around 30–33, confessed as risen by his disciples. Saint Paul already sums up this faith in a formula received, not invented by him: Christ died, he was buried, he was raised on the third day, then he appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, to more than five hundred brethren, to James and to Paul.^[1]

This structure makes Christianity verifiable in a unique way. If the tomb is not empty, if the appearances are only a late legend, if Jesus never existed, the Christian faith collapses. Paul acknowledges this without evasion: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile" (1 Cor 15:17). A religion that accepts being refuted by a historical fact already enters the domain of reason.

The first step is minimal: did Jesus exist? On this point, inquiries converge instead of contradicting one another. J. P. Meier proposes a deliberately austere method: retain only what a panel of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and agnostic historians could establish in common (A Marginal Jew, vol. 1, 1991)^[2]. G. Habermas, sifting the scholarly literature published since 1975, notes that the death of Jesus by crucifixion and the appearances experienced by the disciples and by Paul are admitted by virtually all specialists, sceptics included, while the empty tomb is admitted by about 75% of them^[3]. The Gospels are not the only sources. Flavius Josephus mentions James, "the brother of Jesus called Christ" (Jewish Antiquities, XX, 200, a passage held to be authentic); his longer passage on Jesus himself (Jewish Antiquities, XVIII, 63–64, the so-called Testimonium flavianum), of partly disputed authenticity, is presented with its critical status in Did Jesus Really Exist?; Tacitus reports that Christ was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius; Pliny the Younger describes Christians singing to Christ as to a god in the early second century.^[4][5]

These sources are precious because they do not come from within the Christian faith. Josephus is a Romanized Jewish historian; Tacitus is a Roman senator hostile to Christians; Pliny writes as a governor concerned with public order. They do not prove the divinity of Jesus, but they close the door to the mythicist thesis: Jesus is not a symbol fabricated late.

The internal dossier is even older. Paul's letters date from the 50s, about twenty years after the death of Jesus. The P52 fragment of the Gospel of John (P. Rylands III 457, kept at the John Rylands Library in Manchester: a few verses of John 18) shows that the Johannine text was already circulating very early, far from its probable place of composition. Its palaeographical dating remains debated: first half of the second century according to the editio princeps of C. H. Roberts — a dating maintained by the custodial library —, second century for the INTF (the Münster institute that catalogues the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament), 125–175 proposed by P. Orsini and W. Clarysse, while B. Nongbri has shown the fragility of a narrow dating.^[6][7] For an ancient figure, this documentary interval remains exceptionally short, though no firm date can be asserted.

The central argument is not: "Christians believe that Jesus is risen." It is more precise: several facts, admitted far beyond the circle of believers, demand an explanation — this is the so-called "minimal facts" method of Habermas and Licona, and the "historical bedrock" of N. T. Wright, for whom the empty tomb and the appearances are the data that every hypothesis must explain^[8][9]. Jesus was truly crucified — a fact held to be certain even by avowed sceptics such as G. Lüdemann, B. Ehrman and J. D. Crossan^[10]; his disciples very early proclaimed that they had seen him alive; Paul, a persecutor, was converted; James, a sceptical relative of Jesus, became head of the Church of Jerusalem; Christianity was born in Jerusalem, in the very place where the body could have been produced had the tomb still been occupied.

The theft of the body — already reported as the counter-explanation spread by the authorities in Matthew 28:13–15, and taken up, according to certain late recensions of the medieval polemical narrative Toledot Yeshu, in the episode where a gardener, Yehudah, moves the body to rebury it in his garden (the so-called Wagenseil group)^[11] — presupposes duped guards and an accessible tomb; but it explains neither the conversion of Paul, a persecutor with no connection to the tomb, nor that of James, nor a proclamation launched in Jerusalem itself, where exhibiting a body would have closed the matter.

Hallucination — defended notably by G. Lüdemann, who sees in it visionary experiences of Peter and then of Paul^[12] — takes the appearance narratives seriously; but individual, unshareable bereavement visions poorly explain collective appearances and the conversion of a hostile persecutor — and above all not the empty tomb, which visions do not empty.

The late legend — in the line of D. F. Strauss, who read the Gospel narratives as myths (Das Leben Jesu, 1835–1836) — runs up against chronology: the creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 is dated to within a few years of the events even by a sceptic such as G. Lüdemann^[13]. Too early for a legend.

Apparent death — popularized by H. J. Schonfield (The Passover Plot, 1965) — presupposes survival of Roman crucifixion, of the lance thrust and of the sealed tomb, then a convalescent passing himself off as gloriously risen: neither medicine nor disciples ready for martyrdom follow. Strauss himself, though critical of the miraculous in the Gospels, already judged this hypothesis incapable of explaining the disciples' Easter faith^[14].

Two honest difficulties deserve better than silence. The divergences between the Easter narratives — order of visits, number of angels, places of the appearances — concern secondary details, with a stable common core: the tomb found empty in the morning by women, then appearances in Jerusalem and in Galilee. Testimonies agreeing on everything would arouse suspicion of collusion; independent accounts diverge at the edges and converge at the centre. As for the silence of contemporaries, it reflects the state of the sources on Judea in the 30s: few preserved writings, no court historian attached to a Galilean preacher executed as a criminal. The two external witnesses that remain — Josephus and Tacitus — confirm the framework: execution under Pilate, a movement persisting after the death of its founder.^[15][16]

A frequent objection claims that Jesus became God at the Council of Nicaea, in 325. Historically, this is untenable. Nicaea dogmatically formulates a faith already present in the first-century texts. Paul applies divine titles and functions to Jesus: "Lord" (Kyrios), object of worship — and the Letter to the Colossians, whose direct attribution to Paul is disputed by part of scholarship, presents him as mediator of creation, the one in whom dwells "all the fullness of deity" (Col 1:16; 2:9).^[17][18]

The hymn of Philippians 2:6–11 is decisive: Paul probably takes up there a liturgical tradition older than his letter. Jesus is presented in it as being in divine condition, abasing himself even to the cross, then receiving the Name before which every knee shall bow. Yet this language takes up Isaiah 45, where universal worship belongs to God alone.

This high Christology — that is, the affirmation that Jesus shares the divine identity itself, and not merely an exceptional mission — is difficult to explain by a slow evolution. The first disciples were strict monotheistic Jews. They had no natural cultural disposition to include a crucified man in the divine identity of YHWH, unless a shattering event had compelled them to do so. That is exactly the explanatory role of the resurrection.

The Christian faith also depends on the reliability of its texts. Yet the New Testament is, materially, the best-attested body of ancient texts: thousands of Greek manuscripts, Latin, Syriac and Coptic versions, patristic quotations. Variants exist, as in every hand-transmitted text, but they do not destroy the central message: death, resurrection, divine identity of Jesus, birth of the Church.^[19]

Two questions must be distinguished. Textual criticism — the science that compares manuscripts to recover the ancient text — asks: do we have access to the ancient text with sufficient fidelity? The answer is yes, at a level far superior to most ancient works. The theological question then asks: is this text inspired? That is a conclusion of faith, but it rests on a robust historical transmission, not on an obscure chain.

The philosophical and scientific arguments for God — contingency, the beginning of the universe, fine-tuning, the moral law, consciousness — establish at best an intelligent and transcendent Creator. They are not yet enough to name Jesus Christ. But they change the framework of the inquiry: if God exists, miracle is no longer impossible in principle; it becomes a question of evidence.

Christianity then affirms something more precise than theism: the Creator has spoken, has entered into a covenant, and has made himself visible in Christ. The resurrection becomes the public seal of this revelation. It moves from "there probably exists a God" to "God has acted here."

Not all religions make the same type of claim. Buddhism proposes a path of liberation from suffering — the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path transmitted by the Buddha, who presents himself neither as God nor as risen: its strength is practical, verifiable through inner experience. Islam affirms a revelation received by Muhammad in the seventh century: God is one (tawhid), and Jesus (ʿĪsā), born of a virgin, is a prophet — not crucified ("it only appeared so to them", Qur'an 4:157) and not Son of God (Qur'an 19:30–35). Judaism, in its rabbinic reading, awaits a visible messianic fulfilment — universal peace, ingathering, the Temple — to which a crucified man does not correspond, since the Law says "cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" (Dt 21:23). Christianity, for its part, rests on a public event: the Messiah has come, he was crucified, he is risen.

This difference does not dispense with examining the other religions — and everything they carry of partial wisdom remains receivable. It only fixes the decisive point, and it is a question of fact, not of preference. With Islam, the divergence concerns a public and decidable event: the crucifixion under Pilate, attested by Tacitus and Josephus, and implausible as an invention for Jews who saw in it a curse — a text Paul turns around in Galatians 3:13. With Judaism, the debate concerns the reading of the same Scriptures: the first Christians, strict monotheistic Jews, included Jesus in the divine identity only by appealing to an event that, in their eyes, validated the passages of the Suffering Servant (Is 53) and of the righteous one raised up (Ps 22; Ps 16). With Buddhism, there is no frontal contradiction on a fact, but an additional claim: a path of wisdom, however admirable, says nothing of an empty tomb one Easter morning. If Jesus is truly risen and if he truly claimed divine authority, then no position reducing him to a mere prophet, sage or moral master can be fully true on this decisive point. Christ leaves that option closed.

Christianity is rationally credible because several independent lines converge: God is not an absurd hypothesis; Jesus of Nazareth is historically attested; his crucifixion is admitted even by sceptics^[20]; the proclamation of his resurrection is very ancient; the competing hypotheses poorly explain the whole; the divinity of Jesus has been confessed from the origins; the texts transmitting this dossier are exceptionally solid.

The Christian conclusion is therefore not: "believe without looking." It is rather: look to the end. If Jesus is risen, then he is not merely one spiritual master among others. He is the Lord, and Christianity is the true answer to the question of God.

• The Existence of God — the preliminary rational arguments.
• Did Jesus Really Exist? — the ancient sources.
• The Resurrection of Jesus — the historical heart of Christianity.
• The Divinity of Jesus — why Jesus is not merely a prophet.
• The Bible — canon, manuscripts and transmission.
• Why Catholicism Is the True Religion — from Jesus to the Church.