20. Progress: Do we really know more than they did?

We don’t give our ancestors much credit. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “progress,” of thinking that because things are different now—computers and flying machines and combustion engines and gene splicing—that we are actually smarter than people in the first century, and that they were dumber than us.

It’s easy to think that they were really gullible, and we are the really sophisticated ones (so say the people who are killing themselves with processed foods while our ancestors ate what they grew, or while we choke the earth with carbon emissions while they walked or rode horses, and so on).

While not as technologically “advanced” I really want to believe that the people in the 1st century weren’t so dumb that they would accept any fact at face value, versus our supposed scientific skepticism. If even just because of population growth, there are more people NOW on earth who believe in gods and devils than there were then. We just get to do it online.

I say all that to say that I think the people of the 1st century were able to see some basic, practical truths, such as the fact that people don’t generally come back to life after they die.

How much did they know?

When it comes to the more incredible parts of the stories of the Bible, such as the miracles—particularly the crowning achievement, the resurrection—it is easy to say that the people in the 1st century were pre-scientific, and more easily manipulated by superstitious ideas.

Other than the superstitions themselves that endure, do we have any other evidence that those people were any less smart than us, or more superstitious?

They had some awareness of scientific principles, at least enough to get through life. They knew that if you hit a nail with a hammer, it would go into the wood.

They knew somehow how to stack blocks on top of one another to create pyramids.

They knew how to make fire, to transform food from one chemical composition to another over the heat.

They knew how to make bread rise (and to prevent bread from rising.)

They knew how babies were made.

And I have to believe that they knew that dead people don’t come back to life on Earth.

Believing the unbelievable

If there wasn’t something incredible that happened back then—some experience that moved those first apostles to believe that they had seen Jesus, how would they have gotten someone to believe it?

It’s one thing to raise a child from infancy to believe that a man 2,000 years ago came back from the dead, and only have them really start questioning it once they grow into their own understanding.

It’s quite another thing to stand on a street corner or in a temple and preach to a crowd of adults—farmers, shepherds, agrarian people who knew about life and death—that someone they had recently known and heard about has risen from the dead—and not get thrown out of town or locked up as crazy.

Unless there was something to it that rang true.

Once the Roman authorities got wind of this seditious story, they were willing to torture and kill people for telling it. They would kill you just for saying Jesus is Lord instead of Caesar. So why would these apostles go around, making up the story of this resurrection, risking their own bodies and their own lives, liable to be arrested or beaten or worse, to tell a story that they made up?

And this in a culture that even if it were looking for a Messiah who came as a suffering servant rather than a conquering king, never anticipated that he would raise from the dead. Jesus could have just been an inspiring martyr—like John the Baptist before him—and started a totally respectable religion that way.

The resurrection was not really necessary for the apostles to have accomplished what they wanted.

What else would motivate them to make this up, unless they believed it was true?

The Christian conspiracy?

Maybe it was a plot, maybe it was a mass delusion (has anyone ever produced evidence of mass delusions actually happening, particularly on this scale?), maybe they all made it up. Maybe it was a total conspiracy to make up this whole Jesus-as-savior thing.

Charles Colson, one of the participants in Nixon’s Watergate scandal who later changed his life and became a minister, said that Watergate was the reason he didn’t believe the resurrection couldn’t be a conspiracy. Even for something as little as a hotel break-in, nobody could keep their mouths shut.

How could the conspirators back in Jesus’ day have all kept quiet about something as big as the very salvation of the world, particularly when the other side of the equation was death at the hands of the Romans, either by crucifixion or worse—being dipped in tar, hung on a pole, and lit on fire as a ceremonial torch to light Caesar’s lawn for a party?

I for one, believe something spectacular happened back there in 1st century Palestine, although I am still learning what it was and what it meant, for those around Jesus and for those of us 2,000 years or so down the line.

What I do know is that there was a community of believers then who were willing to believe what Paul said about Jesus, and then to accept the various Gospel accounts as part of that tradition. There are also bits and pieces of creeds from the time that already contained elements of the theology we still use today—the death of Christ at the hands of Pilate, as well as his resurrection on the third day.

We know that while it seems arbitrary that a committee were the ones who selected which Gospels and other books would be included in the canon, that the criteria for inclusion included the fact that the books were already in use by active Christians.

We know that many, many people, including the earliest tellers of this story, were willing to die painful, terrible deaths in order to share this story and maintain its truth.

And we know that once Emperor Constantine became convinced that Christianity was true—for good or evil, depending on how one sees the explosion of Christendom across the globe—Christianity survived to become the largest religion in the world and to become the defining cultural foundation for Western society.

True or not, there was something burning at the center of this story that set the world on fire—and still smolders at the edges of modernity.

It was now my job, for myself at least, to figure out what I thought was true. I had a pretty good sense that the earliest Christians thought they were right.

Now it was up to me to look back and figure out if I agreed.