Question # 5: Historical Evidence of Jesus

What is the atheist response to historical accounts and evidence of the life, teachings, and resurrection of Jesus?

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

I am going to use this question as a springboard to a broader discussion about the similarities and differences between Christian and secular beliefs, but to begin with, let me answer it directly.

By all accounts, Jesus was a historical figure who lived in Judea and taught a metaphysics anchored in God and an ethics anchored in love.  His teachings became so popular they threatened both the political power of the state and the religious power of the clergy, which led to his being convicted and crucified.  All that can reasonably be taken as fact.  The resurrection is another matter, and it starkly separates Christians not only from atheists, but from believers of any other religion.  In that context, I propose it is best understood as legend.

As an English professor, I take legend deeply seriously.  In the framework of The Infinite Staircase, legend belongs to the stair of narrative, and narrative I claim is the foundation for all belief systems, religious and non-religious alike.  There simply is no way to represent the human situation that is not grounded in one story or another.  All we are debating is which story to choose and how we should treat that story once we have chosen it.

In a secular worldview, the role of legend is to inspire our personality to adopt an identity beyond that supplied to us by our parents, family, and friends—to explore a new kind of me, one we might want to grow into and be.  Literature is chock-full of such opportunities, be they represented in novels, plays, films, or even songs.  Whatever the source, the experience is the same.  We open ourselves up to the fictional world of the narrative, accepting whatever conventions are part of its genre, be that adventure, science fiction, romantic comedy, or the like.  Our expectation is that we will identify with the protagonist, and when we do, we experience the narrative as if we were them.  This can become quite intimate, giving fiction access to our deepest feelings, and should they coalesce around a particularly attractive role model, it plants that model deep in our psyche.

Something analogous happens in religious conversions, albeit typically with greater intensity and more abiding consequences.  What both have in common is a psychological resonance that binds the role model to our personality, along with an underlying narrative that gives meaning and direction to our lives going forward.  What separates the two is that for religious believers, the narrative is taken to be fact, not fiction.  For non-believers, that is not the case. 

So, we have two separate spheres of belief, and yet there is an underlying surrendering of the self that is common to both, something one might call faith.  Unlike belief or knowledge, faith can never be certain.  That’s why it gets paired with hope.  What faith and hope bring to the table is a predisposition to put aside uncertainty and lean into life, putting ourselves in service to something beyond ourselves, to carry the torch for at least part of the race and at some point to pass it on.  Such faith is a way both believers and unbelievers can bring meaning into living.

That’s what I think.  What do you think?

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