All this talk of historical artifacts, especially the early ones related to Augustus, Pontius Pilate, and the ancient piece of graffiti, remind me of something strange about Christianity. It is doggedly historical, even tangible. Unlike other religions, Christianity gambles its plausibility on supposedly historical events. Christians don’t just say otherworldly things like, “God loves you,” “we all need forgiveness,” and “heaven is open to all.” None of that sort of stuff is the least bit confirmable, or falsifiable. We may mock those kinds of spiritual claims, but we can’t disconfirm them with counterevidence.
But that’s not really how Christians talk. Listen closely, and you’ll often hear them say things like, “Jesus was born during the reign of Emperor Augustus,” or, “he grew up in the Galilean village of Nazareth”, or, “he emerged from the circle of John the Baptist in the late 20s AD”, and finally, “he was executed by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.”
Statements like these aren’t immune from historical scrutiny. They touch times, places, and people we know quite a bit about. They intersect with figures like Augustus, John the Baptist, and Pilate about whom we have pretty good information. The alleged events all took place in a cultural/political melting pot – Rome, Galilee, and Judaea – for which we have thousands of archaeological remains, and hundreds of thousands of words of ancient inscriptions and written records.
When people proclaim an intangible thing like “God’s love is universal”, they are safe from scrutiny, you can’t test it. But as soon as they say “our guy was crucified by the fifth governor of Judaea,” they are stepping out of the mere spiritual realm onto public ground, secular territory, and someone is bound to want to double-check. As it turns out, an entire industry of double-checking has developed over the last 250 years. The study of Jesus is a huge sub-discipline of history today.
Adherents of other faiths don’t bear this burden. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, to take the next three largest religions, don’t risk their credibility making historical claims. Hinduism’s rituals and philosophy don’t invite any historical investigation, for the simple reason that the central Hindu Scriptures, the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita, don’t make historical pronouncements. It’s the same with Buddhism. Its central claims can’t be attacked with this-worldly evidence. How could we even begin to disprove the Buddha’s claim that, while meditating under a Bodhi tree one night in May, he’d come to know “of all there is to be known” (as the Tripitaka puts it)? What historical or empirical test could be devised to critique his teaching that the karma of this life which attaches itself to our rebirth?
The core content of Islam, too, includes nothing testable in this historical sense. The key Islamic ideas are: the oneness of God, predestination, angels, the obligation to pray and fast, and so on. Of course we can study the history of Islamic expansion as a subject of history, we can do that with Hinduism and Buddhism too, but the faith-claims themselves are beyond historical reach.
I have often imagined it would feel ‘safe’ to be a devout Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim in today’s sceptical West. It would be comforting to know that your core beliefs won’t be the subject of critical examination in a History Channel documentary, or reassessed every year like clockwork, in the opinion pieces each Diwali, Bodhi Day, or Ramadan, in the way the ‘hidden history of Jesus’ seems to turn up in the press every Christmas and Easter.
For better or worse, Christianity’s central claims are historical. The form of the New Testament documents is recognisably historical. The Gospels, for example, clearly present themselves as historical biographies of a famous life. The letters of the New Testament follow precisely the epistolary conventions of the other occasional letters we have from the period, complete with traceable itineraries and lists of greetings to concrete individuals. The core content of the New Testament is also plainly historical.
There is, of course, plenty of theological talk about ‘the kingdom of God’, of being ‘justified by faith’, or ‘entering eternal life.’ But all these things are premised on the tangible events of Jesus’ life, deeds, teaching, death by crucifixion, and resurrection, all of which come from eyewitnesses. Christianity goes out on a ‘historical limb’, and invites anyone who wishes to come and take a swing and cut the branch off. In an odd way, then, the barrage of historical criticism directed at the Bible, and the life of Jesus, in particular, isn’t just reasonable; it’s a kind of compliment. It’s a sign that critics understand well the form and content of the Christian faith.
Christianity is tangible, historical.
By John Dickson
12 Objects
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Check out episode 118: “12 Objects”
