Proving Jesus

 

Religious dogma, due to its spiritual nature, can not be proven. However, I once had an evangelical preacher tell me (and a group of Christian friends) that he could definitively prove that Jesus was the one true savior. Whenever you hear a fantastical claim like this, there’s almost always the same flaw in the logic. Don’t worry, I’m not going to prove or disprove the divinity of Jesus here, and neither is the evangelical preacher. 

Full disclosure, I do not believe in anything supernatural, which, I suppose, makes me a nonreligious person. I’ve read the entire New Testament and much of the Old, and consider myself to have Christian values, the ones found in the New Testament, such as, “judge not others,” “love your neighbor as yourself,” “love your enemies, pray for your persecutors,” etc. 

The preacher’s logic went something like this: Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). The only way Jesus could say this, the preacher reasoned, is if Jesus were a liar, insane, or the one true savior. He then asked if we thought Jesus was a liar or insane. No one wanted to go down that path! No one. We all liked the teachings of Jesus and didn’t want to give the impression that we didn’t. Hearing no argument to the contrary, the preacher concluded that Jesus was the one true savior, the only other possible explanation. 

Do you see the flaw in his logic? You could, of course, argue that Jesus fits into one or both of the first two categories, or that there’s a fourth category, but that won’t be necessary. The problem is with the original assumption, that these are the exact words of Jesus. We don’t know that. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary. Most scholars believe that the book of John was written somewhere between 500 and 600 years after the death of Jesus. In the book The Five Gospels by Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, the authors present all of the quotes attributed to Jesus and rate their authenticity based on analyses by leading biblical scholars. This particular quote rates quite low in authenticity, being that it is inconsistent with the teachings and tone of Jesus. He tended to be more humble, making his teachings about how to live a good life rather than being all about himself. Jesus could, therefore, in theory, be sane, truthful, and not the one true savior. The flaw in the logic was all the way at the beginning, with the initial assumption. 

Having found no solid clues suggesting that the dig instructions were backwards, I started to doubt the original assumptions made by Zinn, Abrams, and myself. Approaching the problem like a bug in a computer program, I went back to the beginning and verified all assumptions. In order to count right to left, I first had to figure out the correct row. A handful of rows could be used for this purpose. I counted down from the top in the middle of the wall, as this is the only place where you can count enough rows—nine rows, right?