The Growth Of The Evidence For Christianity

It's sometimes suggested that the arguments for Christianity haven't developed much. There's not a lot being offered beyond the repetition of certain philosophical arguments for God's existence, historical arguments for prophecy fulfillment, historical arguments for Jesus' resurrection, and so forth.

Even if that were the case, that sort of evidence would be sufficient. And much of that older evidence often gets overlooked or underestimated (e.g., the evidence for certain Old Testament miracles, the evidence for apostolic miracles).

There's been more of an increase in the evidence for Christianity than is typically suggested. We've addressed a lot of examples in other posts: apparitions of Jesus, name statistics in the Biblical documents, the evidence for the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus, modern healings, etc. Think of all of the developments in archeology over the years, for example. Old lines of argument often have new applications. I've written about modern examples of prophecy fulfillment, for instance. The work done in contexts like intelligent design and the paranormal isn't applicable only to Christianity, but it furthers the case for Christianity as far as it goes. And there are frequent advances in those fields.

Since our culture is so secular and trivial, issues like the ones I'm citing in this post don't get discussed much. And even among Christians, few people (as a percentage) bring these things up or attempt to persuade others about them. Those aren't problems with the state of the evidence, though. They're problems with how the state of the evidence is being handled.

How much resurrection evidence should we expect to be mentioned?

When critics of Jesus' resurrection object to something like the lack of mention of the appearance to more than five hundred (1 Corinthians 15:6) in sources other than Paul or the lack of mention of the guards at the tomb in sources other than Matthew, we should ask what we ought to be expecting from these sources. The critics' assumptions about what we should expect may be wrong, and we ought to be careful to not accept false assumptions.

How difficult is it to discern the evidence for Christianity?

One of the recurring themes in Joe Rogan's program with Wesley Huff was the idea that it's so difficult to discern the truth about some of the issues they discussed, including the evidence for Christianity. Rogan repeatedly brought the subject up, but I don't think he ever put it in the form of a question.

When that kind of sentiment comes up, a good way to respond is to mention one or more counterexamples. It's not difficult to discern Jesus' prominence in history, for example, which increases the plausibility of his being a source of Divine revelation. Or you could mention the significance of hostile corroboration of Jesus' resurrection, which is something unusual and widely acknowledged (James' claim to have seen Jesus risen from the dead, Paul's claim, non-Christian corroboration of the empty tomb, etc.). Or bring up some events involved in prophecy fulfillment that are widely accepted (Jesus' death by crucifixion, the timing of the crucifixion, the Romans' destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, etc.). For further discussion of issues like these, see here, among other relevant posts in our archives.

Another point worth making is that people give a lot of time, attention, and other resources to their general education, their career, sports, music, and other things in life. Why think they don't have the resources needed to adequately discern the issues relevant to Christianity?