For thirty-six years I did not disbelieve Christianity because I had examined it. I disbelieved it because examining it had never occurred to me. That distinction matters more than anything else I could say here, and I want to put it first, because a great deal of Christian writing on this subject assumes the opposite. It assumes the person outside the church has weighed the evidence and rejected it, and that the rejection must therefore come from pride, or hurt, or a reluctance to change. That was not my position. My position was that there was nothing there to weigh. I had absorbed that view the way you absorb an accent, from everyone around me, without noticing I was doing it.
What broke that open was not an argument, and I am not going to dress it up into one. It was a television drama. We watched The Chosen, which sets out to prove nothing and makes no case at all, and what it left me with was a question about whether any of these people had existed and whether any of it had happened. The digging started there, from a story rather than from evidence.
The Case for Christ came later, one of several films suggested to us once we had already started, and it did something different. It put in front of me a man who had gone at the same question far harder than I had, and who had expected a different answer than the one he got. That did not begin my search. It made me a good deal less willing to abandon it.
So when I write about evidence now, I am not writing to the person who has read the arguments and found them wanting. I am writing to the person I was, who had not read them, and who would have been quite surprised to learn there were any.
Here is the thing that surprised me most. Christianity, alone among the things I had lumped together as religion, stakes itself on a claim about history. Not a claim about how to live, or how to feel, or what the universe means. A claim that a specific man, in a specific province, under a named Roman governor, was executed and then was not dead. Paul says as plainly as anyone could wish that if that did not happen, the whole thing is worthless and he is a liar for saying it. He puts his own credibility on the block.
That is a strange way to build a religion. It is also, from the point of view of anyone who likes evidence, a gift. It means you do not have to work through two thousand years of doctrine, church history, disputed ethics and awkward Old Testament passages before you can form a view. There is one question underneath all of it, and if the answer is no, you can go home. Did the tomb stay shut?
In the 2017 film The Case for Christ, that is the advice a colleague gives Lee Strobel when he sets out to demolish his wife’s new faith. Attack the resurrection and the rest collapses. I should be clear that the film is a dramatisation rather than a documentary, and Strobel has said himself that it compresses a two year investigation into a feature and uses composite characters, so it is not a source for anything. But the advice is sound, and it is the advice I would give anyone.
The story repeats. In the 1920s an English journalist and advertising man named Albert Henry Ross set out to write a short paper called Jesus - the Last Phase, intending to strip the supernatural out of the final week and leave a compelling human being who died and stayed dead. He never wrote it. What he wrote instead, under the name Frank Morison, was published by Faber in 1930 as Who Moved the Stone?, and its opening chapter is called The Book That Refused to Be Written. He is honest in that chapter about what happened to him, which is that he set out along a familiar track and came out of the wood somewhere he had not expected.
What is it that these people keep running into? Three things, and I want to state them at their real strength rather than inflated, because inflated is how they usually arrive and it is why sensible people stop listening.
The first is that the movement started in the wrong place. A story about a resurrection could be sustained almost anywhere except the city where the execution happened and the grave was known. Jerusalem was where the claim would be easiest to kill and it is where the claim began. The obvious counter is that after seven weeks a body would be past identifying, and that is a fair counter. It does not dispose of the oddity, but it blunts it, and you should know it is there.
The second is the behaviour of the people who said they saw Him. Something turned a scattered and frightened group into people who would not stop talking under pressure that gave them every reason to stop. The version of this argument you usually hear says that all the apostles were martyred and nobody dies for a lie they invented. The honest version is narrower. The traditions about how most of them died are late and cannot be leaned on. What can be leaned on is that Paul writes in his own hand, within about twenty five years of the events, about hardship he was still enduring for the claim, and that James, who did not believe his brother during his lifetime, ended up leading the church in Jerusalem and died for it. The narrower version is still difficult to explain. It just does not pretend to be more than it is.
The third is Paul himself. He was not a sympathiser who came round. He was an active persecutor who reversed his life on the basis of something he said happened to him on a road, and then spent the rest of that life being beaten and imprisoned for it. Whatever occurred, he was not looking for it and it cost him everything he had built.
I want to be careful about what those three things amount to, because this is where these articles usually overreach and lose the reader. They do not amount to proof. There is no equation here that closes, no point at which an honest person is compelled. What they amount to is that the alternative explanations have to work quite hard, and that the resurrection is not a silly answer to the question of what happened. That is a much smaller claim than the one usually made, and it is the only one I am prepared to defend, and it was more than enough to make me keep reading when I expected to have stopped after a fortnight. It took about six months from first looking to the point where I understood there was no going back, and that this was where I belonged.
Something else I want to be careful about. When you have looked at this and it has moved you, a frustration arrives almost immediately, aimed at everyone who has not looked. I have felt it. I have had to put it down, and I will probably have to put it down again. It is a poor instinct and it is factually confused, because it forgets what my own thirty six years were actually like. I was not refusing evidence. I did not know there was any. Nobody had ever put it in front of me in a way that did not sound like being sold something, and if they had, I would probably have been too embarrassed to admit I was interested. Impatience with that person is impatience with who I was, and it also does not work. Nobody has ever been argued into the kingdom by a Christian who was cross with them.
What I took from that film was not a conclusion. It was a working rule, and it is the one I still use. Stack up the evidence, follow where it goes, and write the story either way, win or lose. The whole weight of it sits in the last three words. Everybody claims to follow the evidence. Every side of every argument says it, including the side that settled the matter years ago and is now collecting support. What separates an investigation from a performance of one is whether you worked out in advance what losing would look like, and meant it.
So I should say what losing would have looked like for me. If the accounts had turned out to have been written centuries after the events rather than decades. If the first Christians had been comfortable people with nothing to lose by saying it. If Paul’s letters were later forgeries, or if the claim had started somewhere safely distant from the grave rather than in the city where the grave was. Any one of those and I would have put it down and gone back to my life. I set them out because a man who cannot tell you what would have changed his mind has not investigated anything, and I would apply that test to me as readily as to anyone.
That rule does not expire, either. I am on the other side of the question now, which means the same discipline points the other way, and I am supposed to write the story even if the evidence turns against what I have come to believe. It is not a comfortable undertaking. It is also the reason the objections stay in these articles instead of being tidied out of them.
So this is not a challenge and there is no verdict being demanded. It is a smaller offer. If you are where I was, and you have assumed there is nothing under this worth an evening of your time, that assumption is the one thing here you have almost certainly never tested. Morison started out to break it and could not. Strobel started out to break it and could not. I am not asking you to accept their conclusions, and I would think less of you if you did on my say so. I am suggesting you go and try to break it yourself, properly, with the counter-arguments in front of you as well as the arguments.
If it breaks, you will have lost a fortnight. If it does not, you will want to know why.