I still believe

This is the second in a two part series

A few years after the whole poem fiasco my uncle was singing in the little church when he had a massive heart attack and died. After that our attendance there slowly dwindled to nothing.  As my parents church attendance had been spotty, so was ours from that point forward. 

Ryk Neethling/Flikr

While my church attendance wasn't "up to par" my relationship with Jesus was doing well. I was praying and studying my bible daily. And then our kids introduced us to an online game. Over the next few years it consumed our family. All of us played, often together, and nothing was as important as playing the game.  During this time I met an atheist who was firm in his belief that there was no God. He posed some interesting questions, ones that I didn't have answers to. And so I began to wonder myself. Was I just believing this because I had been raised in it? Why did I believe that there was a "mystery man" in the sky who would protect me? 

My struggle began there. I first started investigating why I believed God existed. The best answer I could come up with at the time was "because I just know" Which, as you may realize, didn't get me very far. To me he's in the sunrise and the sunset, in the perfect elliptical orbits of the planets, the distance between the sun and the earth, the earth and the moon, the rise and fall of the tides. But to my atheist friend, all of this could be explained by science. My faith faltered, what if I was wrong? Look how far science had come in just the last 50-75 years. What if in the next 100 years they could explain so much more?  

Hubble Sweeps a Messy Star Factory - NASA

The easiest thing for me to do was to search for Jesus. Because, in my faith, Jesus is my salvation. I couldn't prove that God was real, but could I prove that Jesus existed.  Could I do it outside of the bible? Could I find evidence that Jesus was who he said he was without turning to the one book that atheists scorn so?  I wondered. 

To type out everything that I learned would take about 20 posts. But I would like to share with you a couple of things that I did discover. Jesus is mentioned in many historical documents, almost always in passing. The most notable of these are in the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, both respected historians.  Josephus said of Jesus: 

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the trut gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. 

The passages in italics are debatable. That is to say, it is likely those were added by early Christian copyists, and were not written by Josephus.  On the whole, though, this passage is believed to be authentic by many scholars.

Tacitus wrote:

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstitution, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome...Accordingly, an arrest was first made of tall who pleaded guilty: then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. 

Rather than bore you with a long list of other minor mentions I will sum up what I learned. If we threw out the New Testament (which are biographies and historic letters), and other Christian writings there are still some major points we can glean from historic references about Him.

1. Jesus was a Jewish teacher
2. Some people believed he was the Messaiah
3. He was rejected by the Jewish leaders
4. His enemies acknowledged he performed unusual feats. (healings, exorcism)
5. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius
6. Despite his death his followers believed that he was still alive.
7. His followers multiplied rapidly and spread as far as Rome. 
8. Many people worshiped him as God

Honestly with my bible background, and what I knew from that, that was enough for me.  He existed, he died in the manner that my bible says he did, and his disciples continued to worship him even when facing death. They truly believed that he was the Messaiah. And if Jesus exists, well then so does God. 

While I tried to find evidence for Jesus outside my bible, I came to one interesting conclusion. Excluding the bible is a little silly, honestly. If these books weren't religious writings they would be honored as historical documents.  

I found this site helpful in my research.