Dear Parishioners,

One of the reasons why some people are not open to religion is that they think that every aspect of religion is unprovable. They don’t believe because they do not see any reason to believe. Since there’s no reason to believe, they see everything that religion teaches as arbitrary or at the very least unverifiable. However, Christianity (and especially Catholicism) puts itself in a position where certain aspects of the faith can be verified. I recently read a book called “Hypotheses about Jesus” by Vittorio Messori which talks about this topic. This book looks into the criticisms of recent scholarship and how they do not hold water in the light of even more recent archeology and common sense. It is very much worth reading if you want to know some reasons we can believe the stories about Christ presented in the Gospels.

There are two points of view explained in this book: the critics and the mythologizers. The critics believe that Jesus is a real historical person whose story was later exaggerated by His followers to declare Him God. The mythologizers have the opposite point of view: they believe there was no historical Jesus and all the stories about Him were adapted from other myths and legends and later people thought they were real history. One thing you may easily notice is that these two views supposedly based on scholarship come to completely contradictory conclusions. They only agree on one point: the Gospels are unbelievable as an historical narrative. Still, just because a smart person asserts something does not make it true.

The mythologizers cannot be right because there is too much evidence for the historical Jesus. There are no major history scholars who actually support this view. The critical scholars have a different problem: they cannot explain why Jesus was declared God by His later followers. The early followers of Jesus were all devout Jewish people and within Judaism was a strong prohibition of the worship of false Gods. Not only did Jesus’s direct followers believe He was God but also many others were converted by the people who had direct contact with Him. Something had to happen to make this fact convincing to people since there is no natural way a 1st century Jewish person would believe this. For centuries before Jesus, the Jewish people were fighting encroaching paganism and Greek culture. Even some who witnessed Jesus and His miracles doubted Him. Looking at the Gospels as pure natural history provides no reason then for why the early followers of Jesus believed He was God.

This is just one of the many great arguments presented in this book and I am only explaining it briefly here. So, if you are interested, read the book. I know I have learned a lot from it.

God Bless!

Fr. Carter