How to kill Christianity

Gandhi is famous for saying, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." This comment is unsurprising to anyone who has spent some time with enough Christians. Not a few people have even suggested, as did Nietzsche, that Christianity itself is a public menace to be stamped out. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that the eradication hasn't yet succeeded. For the secret to destroying Christianity is amazingly simple -- just find the body.

That is, the dead body of Jesus. A hundred years ago Professor Rudolf Bultmann became famous for saying that, "if the bones of the dead Jesus were discovered tomorrow in a Palestinian tomb, all the essentials of Christianity would remain unchanged." By "essentials" Bultmann meant things like "being nice," "serving others," and things of that sort. But for the majority of Christians who have ever lived, the essential has been the empty tomb on Easter Sunday. They follow an early Christian pastor, Paul, who wrote to a community he helped start, "If Christ has not been raised [from the dead], your faith is futile and you are still in your sins."

For Bultmann, Jesus was simply a role model for his own self-help plan. But for Paul, Jesus was not just an example to be followed -- he was a solution to a problem, "being in your sins." It is a problem not only for the person, but for God. God's problem is that he loves sinners. He loves people enough to create them from nothing, but hates their pride, greed, hurtful remarks, and selfishness -- their sin. God can't stand it, can't be around it.

The problem is when people in sin come together. When a person does what she knows to be wrong, that sin "sticks" to her. She can't shake it. She's guilty. If what goes around comes around, then when the going comes around she should, by all rights, get it. And we'd expect God to give it. That's justice. God can't just ignore the guilt. We expect good governments not to ignore human rights abuses; how could God ignore them? For that's what sins are -- human rights abuses, whether the harm is to others or oneself. How can God not ignore sin and yet also not destroy the very people he wants to love?

The military often faces an analogous problem. The tyrant or the terrorist will often station in a hospital, or surround himself with civilians. He makes himself inextricable from the innocent. He seeks to exploit the fact that the leaders of the military, while they want to punish their enemies, don't want to target innocent civilians. Last year, those who opposed the Iraq war suggested bringing some beloved world figure, such as the Dalai Lama, into Baghdad. The thought was that the desire to preserve the life of Dalai Lama would override the intention to bring war upon Saddam.

The Christian solution to God's problem is somewhat similar to this idea. While the Dalai Lama may be innocent relative to the U.S. government, no one is innocent relative to God because no one has ever not done anything wrong. But if God were a man he would not have to sin be punished. He, the God-man, would be innocent relative to God. Since it would be unjust to punish the innocent, God could cancel the debt of punishment due to the guilty if they 'hid' so closely with the God-man that they became inextricable from him. The justice of preserving the innocent would override the justice of punishing the guilty.

God could rescue his beloved people from his own justice without himself being unjust, if he were to make an invasion into humanity and call them to himself, as a God-man. Christianity says that God did exactly that, and the man God became was Jesus of Nazareth. The evidence for that claim is that Jesus raised himself from the dead, and never died again. Other people claimed to get raised from the dead, but always by someone else (whether shamans or emergency room docs), and they always die a second time. The resurrection is not an ideal or a wish to Christians, but an event occurring in real space and time that proves God's rescue mission. If you find the body of Jesus, that shows he was not God. And if he was not God, then there's no rescue mission. And so Christianity dies. The whole faith rests on one historical fact: whether Jesus rose.

That fact has proved very hard to disprove. The records of the New Testament, whatever you think of them theologically, are at least reliable as historical documents. The Gospels were written by first or second-hand witnesses, within the lifetimes of nearly everyone who saw Jesus die in Jerusalem. They record that Jesus was placed in a tomb belonging to a well-known member of the Jewish community, sealed with a Roman seal, and guarded by a squad of Roman soldiers at the request of the Jewish leaders.

On Sunday the Roman guards had split, the seal was broken, the two-ton stone placed in front of the tomb was rolled away, and the tomb was empty. This is the news that the women took straight to Jerusalem. Anyone who didn't believe could go to the tomb himself, produce the body, and put an end to the question. And many certainly wanted to. But no body was ever brought forward.

Was it a cover-up? Did the disciples steal the body and then lie? It's difficult to see how they could have. Roman soldiers were the ancient world's marines. They would not have been sleeping on the job. Breaking a Roman seal was akin to a federal offense, and the penalty was death by crucifixion. The disciples, who immediately after Jesus' arrest all proved themselves cowards, would not have had the courage to attempt such a thing.

Even if they had, humans can't cover things up for long. We're really bad at it. But the disciples went to their deaths without ever recanting what they saw. And they weren't the only ones. Paul, in a letter, mentions that the risen Jesus appeared to over 500 people at one time, most of whom were still alive to testify.

This is just a cursory summary of the evidence that Jesus really did rise from the grave, and that the initial message of the Christians, the message that soon came to convert the entire Roman Empire, was no hoax or hallucination. This limited article can only give hints and pique interest. It's much more fun to check out the fuller arguments for yourself. Put the central fact of Christianity to the test. Find out for yourself if it is true or false. "Check out The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel or "Who Moved the Stone?" By Frank Morison are good books to get you started. Why believe (or disbelieve) something blindly?

Jack Grimes is a senior majoring in Philosophy and Political Science. He can be reached at grimes@tuftsdaily.com.