The End of Christianity
Add comment February 26th, 2007
The cat is out of the bag. The tomb and remains of Jesus and his wife and son have been found in a burial cave in Jerusalem. That’s the end of historical Christianity, or so film director James Cameron (of Titanic fame) would have us believe. You can read about it here.
Of course, just because a man who loves to tell a good story and who is in control of cameras and editing teams and a marketing budget says so doesn’t make it so. But it does raise an interesting and very helpful question: What would it take in the way of negative evidence for you to abandon the Christian faith as historically unreliable?
In fact, if the historical Christian faith is not falsifiable (ie, if there is no foundational claim that it makes that if proven unquestionably false would cause its proponents to walk away from it as demonstrably false), then Christianity is not the true worldview at all. A non-falsifiable claim cannot be a true claim.
The apostle Paul clearly saw the historical event of the physical death, burial and bodily resurrection as the falsifiable sine-qua-non, the absolute bottom-line of Christianity (see 1 Corinthians 15). In short, he said that if these things did not actually, really, historically happen, then Christianity was to be thrown away as a worthless tale. Worse yet, he said that the holy God still exists, but His wrath at rebellious and sinful man was not atoned for, not propitiated by the death of the Son… not put away, and there would be no forgiveness of sins and mankind would wallow in utter hopelesness in the face of the well deserved Divine judgment to come.
Paul wasn’t afraid to say it, and neither should we. Christianity, since it makes unique historical claims, must be falsifiable! If incontrovertible and unassailable proof was discovered and validated* that the Jesus of Nazareth of the Bible did not in fact rise from the dead and ascend into heaven, but rather remained in a grave as ordinary men do, then we must walk away from Christianity as a pious fraud.
So far, no one, including Cameron, has even come close. What has been discovered (or should we say, uncovered) is that the unbelieving mind and heart will grasp at any straw, however unreasonable, to unseat God from His throne and authority over “autonomous” man.
*Just because some archaeologists or other specialists might assert such a thing would not make it so. The level and quality of the proof would have to be clearly and obviously incontrovertible, be well vetted over time, and persuasive to a broad range of conservative scholars in order to be persuasive.
