and on the third day
Fellow Winnipegger the old bill has won me over twice this week, first with a post about the nature of time, quantum mechanics and all those sci-fi things you know I dig so much.
Then, he touched on something I’ve been thinking, too — that all this media hype spinning around The Da Vinci Code and The Jesus Papers and “did Jesus really die?” theories and controversies is pretty tired. He’s right; it does come up every decade or so. Century after century, for that matter.
We are walking in the fields of myth and meaning, here, not fact. Even if we could use positivistic data to prove/deny Jesus death and resurrection, we’d achieve little. The fundamental issue is not the death and resurrection of Jesus in ancient Judea, but the death and resurrection in our lives today.
My thinking these days is along the lines that faith in Jesus is not dependent on the historical facts. I think the evangelical obsession with providing “proof” and “evidence” (a la Lee Strobel et al) is a mistake. It’s so strange that this religion that talks about a “personal relationship” with the ghost of a dead guy takes historical fact so seriously and places it so centrally in doctrine.
I think it’s absolutely possible to have faith in Jesus and the Christian God without reading the Bible as an incontrovertible record of historical events, specifically as they’re laid out in the gospels. I don’t know if I have that faith, but I believe it’s possible. (See? Belief! Right there!)