"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." -John 1:1
Do you ever wonder how your life might have been different if you had taken a different turn in the road? It’s part of the “what if” game. Like, “What if I had married that other fellow?” Or what if I had gone to a different school? What if my dad had been there for me growing up? But you can’t go back.
Years ago I read a Christmas story based on another version of the “what if” scenario, but this was, “What if Jesus Christ never lived?” In the story a minister had a dream. It was Christmas Eve. He was in his study, finishing preparation on his Christmas message, when a knock came at the door.
A little girl asked him to visit her dying mother. He grabbed his coat and Bible and prepared to follow her. As they went down the street, the church with its white steeple had disappeared, and when he opened his Bible to read words of comfort, it ended with the Old Testament. The world of his nightmare was one into which Jesus had not been born.
Have you ever considered the implications of “what if Jesus never really lived?“ What if men only thought up all of this? For three minutes, let’s ponder this “what if.”
First, the abundance of historical evidence would have to be explained. The life of no other person in all history is so well documented. In his massive eight volume, History of Civilization, Will Durant began his section of Jesus Christ asking, “Did Christ exist? Is the life story of the founder of Christianity the product of human sorrow, imagination, and hope—a myth comparable to the legends of Krishna, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus, and Mithras?”
He tells how Voltaire, the French atheist, considered the possibility that Christ never lived, and how Napoleon, meeting the German scholar Wieland in 1808, was not interested in his opinions about politics or war, but he did want to know if he believed in the historicity of Christ.
The earliest historical mention of Jesus Christ, outside of the documents comprising our New Testament—which incidentally are as historical as anything ever written—is found in the writings of Josephus, who, about 93 AD, wrote the following: “At that time lived Jesus, a holy man, if man he may be called, for he performed wonderful works, and taught men, and joyfully received the truth. And he was followed by many Jews and many Greeks. He was the Messiah.”
Seventeen years later, Pliny (ca. 110) wrote to Trajan, the Emperor, asking how Christians were to be treated. Five years later, the Roman historian Tacitus, described the persecution of Christians under Nero. About 125 AD, another Roman writer, Suetonius, mentions the persecution of Christians and also writes of the decree of Claudius that “the Jews should leave Rome.”
Yes, these writers—totally secular—primarily document the existence of Christians, but at the same time they affirm the impact of the life of this simple man, born in Bethlehem, who lived in Nazareth, and died at Jerusalem. But that’s simply where the story begins. History affirms that what turned cowards into brave men and women, who were willing to die for what they believed to be true, was a conviction that death could not hold Him, that Jesus Christ literally rose from the dead the third day.
When a meteor streaks across the sky, causing millions to stand in awe, and then it is gone, something observed by men and women on different continents with different cultures, captured on video tape and cameras by those who saw it, there is little question that something happened.
But the question of a little boy, “Daddy, what does it mean?” is the one which historians will never answer.
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