This is the seventy-eighth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.
See Mel Lawrenz’s book, How to Study the Bible: A Practical Guide.
Was the Jesus story a fabrication?
Luke says he “carefully investigated” the whole story so that he could provide “an orderly account.” The early believers in Jesus knew that their message would seem implausible to people. Jesus was not the kind of Messiah anybody was expecting. The idea of miraculous healings fit into the category of magicians’ tricks. And this thing about the empty tomb, and a coming back to life was over the top.
Was the Jesus story a fabrication? Fancy? Fact? We might stop and consider this: if you and some co-conspirators wanted to fabricate a spiritual story and even a new religion, is this the kind of thing you’d come up with? Would you invent a belief system which insulted people’s sensitivities by calling them sinners, by propping up a Messiah who had no wealth, no army, no fame, who did not with bared teeth battle the evil empire? Would you pass on teachings that sometimes were straightforward and clear (like “you can’t serve both God and money”) and other times were enigmatic (“to find your life you must lose it”).
And would you stay committed to that story and that faith months and years later when the founder was nowhere to be seen (now “resurrected” and “ascended”), when the only organization left behind was a random group of former fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, and political terrorists (Simon the Zealot)–not really an organization at all, but an association of people on the run? Would you stay committed to a fiction after the leader was crucified, and his two most influential followers (Peter and Paul) were themselves imprisoned and executed in the years that followed?
If you really wanted to invent a religion, wouldn’t it be one that was easy to follow and offered wealth and health and good feeling all the time (which, sadly, is the way Christian faith is sometimes refashioned, which gives people a temporary rush of hope but always leads to a crash, like a person getting on the roller coaster of heroin). All invented religion is toxic, and invented gods are at best phantoms we dreamed up or, at worst, the Devil in disguise.
Luke wanted to “carefully investigate” and provide “an orderly account” precisely because he knew the implausibility of the Jesus narrative, and the possibility that, with the passing decades the fresh information about what really happened would get corrupted by abridgment and augmentation.
Here are some indisputable facts:
- Followers of Jesus who lived in his era and in all the centuries since have been so certain that Jesus Christ is God’s Son, the Savior, Lord of all and risen from the dead, that they have staked their lives on it. Jesus’ earliest followers were willing to be put to death for their faith, and it just doesn’t make sense that they would do that for a story that they themselves knew they fabricated.
- As Frank Morison concluded in his classic book Who Moved the Stone?, there is no more plausible explanation for the empty tomb of Jesus but that he really did rise from the dead. His enemies would have no motive for removing the body, and if they had, they could have produced it to quell the quickly spreading word of a resurrection. He could not have fainted away on the cross and then revived in the tomb, rolling back the stone covering it. Jesus’ disciples, whose whole reason for following Jesus was a search for the truth, would not have stolen the body and then made up a story about a resurrection.
- Across the centuries whole civilizations and the institutions of civilization have been shaped by the message and values of Jesus: truth, justice, mercy, the value and dignity of the individual. Hospitals and schools have been invented out of a Christian milieu. Some of the most dramatic humanitarian responses to human need in the face of disaster have come through Christian communities, like the vast network of churches which were the best first-responders and long-term healers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
- Countless millions of people have lived their lives at a higher moral and spiritual plane because of their faith in Christ, notwithstanding the reality that all-too-often disreputable people (including religious leaders) misbehave while polishing themselves with the name of Jesus. God should not be blamed for people who misuse his name. But in the mainstream, people live on a higher plane when they come under the truth and forgiving grace of Christ.
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Mel Lawrenz (@MelLawrenz) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s minister at large. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel is the author of 18 books, including How to Understand the Bible—A Simple Guide and Spiritual Influence: the Hidden Power Behind Leadership (Zondervan, 2012). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay.
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