I plan things for a living. I assess evidence, weigh claims, and draw conclusions, usually for organisations that will spend real money based on what I tell them. It is a trade that teaches you a particular discipline: you do not get to decide the answer first and assemble the evidence afterwards. So, when I finally sat down with the Gospels as an adult sceptic, I read them the only way I know how to read anything. As material to be assessed.
Here is the problem the Gospels hand you, and it is sharper than I expected. Jesus of Nazareth made claims about Himself that no merely wise teacher makes. Read the texts and the claims are unavoidable. That leaves a limited set of options, and I found I could count them on three fingers. He was lying. He was deluded. Or He was telling the truth.
I considered the first option carefully, because it was the one my old self would have reached for. Liars, when their deception starts costing them their lives, tend to recant. They find another way out. Jesus was given repeated opportunities to step back from His claims, before Pilate, before the religious authorities, in the garden on the night of His arrest when He could simply have walked away. He did not. He died on those claims. And in the years that followed, thousands of His followers died on those claims too, without recanting. People do not go to their deaths for a thing they know to be a lie. The mathematics of the first option do not work.
The second option I took just as seriously. But a deluded man does not produce what Jesus produced. He does not generate a coherent, morally serious, internally consistent body of teaching of the kind the Gospels record. He does not attract the calibre of followers, the depth of devotion, the transformation in the people around Him that the historical record attests. I had been listening to the Sermon on the Mount and the parables for weeks by this point, watching Him cut through to the exact thing each person most needed to hear. Madness and genius occasionally coexist, but that quality of wisdom is not consistent with a disordered mind. The second option does not work either.
Which left the third. I did not like it. It was not the conclusion I would have chosen, and there is no version of this story where I strolled comfortably towards it. What arrived when I accepted it was closer to collision than to peace: everything I had just worked out slamming into everything I had believed for thirty-six years. But my trade had taught me one more thing that turned out to matter here. Discomfort with a conclusion is not evidence against it.
I know what a sceptic says next, because I said it myself. The texts are late, embellished, unreliable, the whole exercise is built on sand. I chased those objections down too, and what I found repeatedly was that my confidence in them had been inherited rather than earned. I had absorbed a settled verdict from writers I admired without ever auditing the case myself. In my professional life, accepting a verdict without reviewing the evidence is called negligence. I had been doing it for decades and calling it rationality.
I am not asking you to accept my conclusion. The opposite: I am asking you to distrust it, and to check it, the way I had to. Read the source material. Sit with the three options and try to make the first two work. If you can, you will have done more honest reasoning than most people ever bother with, and you will have earned your position. And if you cannot, you will be where I found myself, in my own living room, facing the one option left standing and realising that the evidence had led somewhere I never intended to go.
I followed it anyway. That is the whole discipline, in the end. Follow the evidence, especially when you do not like where it is going. It is how I work. It turned out to be how I came to believe.