“Notoriously depraved Christians”

This is how Tacitus described in 109 AD the people who’ll tomorrow celebrate one of the two great dates in their calendar:

“Nero… punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’s reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judaea, where the mischief had started, but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.”

Given the religious tolerance of Rome, this is strong stuff indeed. Clearly, the Romans saw Christianity as a subversive threat, and this attitude didn’t spring from their objection to all-encompassing charity.

It’s conceivable that those Romans who didn’t know better detested not so much the Christians’ beliefs, about which they couldn’t have known much, as their clandestine meetings which were in themselves punishable offences in Rome.

But why did those meetings have to be clandestine? Possibly because the Romans sensed that a new, dangerous breed was making its historical debut, a breed to be nipped in the bud out of self-preservation.

It certainly was so to Pliny the Younger who three years later, in 112 AD, was sent to investigate the catacomb congregations. In his subsequent letter to Emperor Trajan he reported no evidence of Christian cannibalism rumoured by those who had heard about the Eucharist but hadn’t understood its meaning.

So what exactly was so “depraved” about Christians? One thing only: they refused to acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor, thereby serving an early notice that the city of man and the city of God exist in different realms. Peter founded the Roman church with no assistance from the state.

Still, we must be grateful to Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus, Suetonius and other non-Christian sources that put paid to all the doubts about the historicity of Jesus. In fact, such doubts surfaced much later, when Europeans decided they had no further use for God. As Laplace (d. 1827) put it, “I have no need of that hypothesis”.

At around that time, it wasn’t just Christ’s divinity that was doubted but his very historicity. The scarcity of contemporary accounts was highlighted by those who had an emotional need to insist that the absence of evidence was the evidence of absence.

Those critics ignored that contemporaneous pagan and Jewish writers, including those who hated Christianity, never denied the existence of Jesus. At the same time, there were 14 direct testimonies supporting the essential facts of His life.

In fact, we know a lot more about Jesus than about any other figure active in the region at the time, and no one has ever doubted their historicity. For example, neither Josephus nor any other non-Christian sources mentioned Paul.

Paul himself never mentioned John the Baptist and Philo. Josephus didn’t mention Rabbi Hillel, his influential contemporary. And even a contemporaneous account of the Bar Kochba revolt omitted his name altogether.

If there is no historical reason to doubt the existence of Jesus Christ, there is plenty of ideological animus to do so. One widely practised trick is to claim that any references to Christ in ancient sources are later interpolations.

How, for example, could Josephus have written this in his Antiquities: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles.”

Clearly, this has to be a dirty trick played by the Church. There is no way on earth that Josephus, a Jewish turncoat and faithful servant to the Flavian emperors, would have acknowledged the divinity of Jesus. Well, he didn’t. He simply repeated a view popular in Jewish circles at the time.

Many Jews, those who would have stoned for blasphemy anyone claiming Jesus was God, still believed that He was the Messiah. And the Messiah of Judaism isn’t God. He is, however, a divine man capable of being “a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure”.

Paul’s epistles are the earliest account of Jesus’s life, written as they were some 15 to 30 years after the Crucifixion. Paul offers quite a few autobiographical facts, partly to establish his bona fides. Thus we know that he was personally acquainted with Peter, John and James, Jesus’s closest disciples.

Quite apart from his own Damascene experience, Paul knew Jesus intimately from the apostles’ accounts. The biographical details he recounts and reconstructs are undoubtedly accurate, and they tally with the synoptic Gospels written a few years later.

(The exact dates are a matter of scholarly debate but, since none of the Gospels mentions the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, they were probably written before that date.)

Those accounts, especially the Gospel of Mark, show the influence of earlier Aramaic sources that didn’t survive. Some scholars believe John the Evangelist was himself the “beloved apostle”, others disagree. But it’s undeniable that all four evangelists were either eyewitnesses of Christ’s life or wrote on the basis of the testimony provided by the apostles.

You notice that so far I’ve been writing about the man Jesus, not Christ, God’s son. Yet tomorrow Christians will be celebrating not just Jesus’s birthday but the Incarnation of Our Lord.

Now the Gospels document numerous miracles, including the ultimate one, the Resurrection. Most of the miracles were witnessed by crowds of people, and many of them were still alive when the Gospels, and certainly Paul’s letters, were written. Yet, to use the legerdemain favoured by atheists, we have no records denying the authenticity of the miracles.

But we have no need for such cheap polemical shots. Instead, we can repeat what Tertullian said: Credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it’s absurd”).

In other words, you couldn’t make it up, and CS Lewis built on that argument beautifully. He pointed out that the Gospel narrative uses novelistic techniques not developed until the 18^th century.

Hence we either have to assume that hiding behind those four names were writers of the greatest genius ever, who were millennia ahead of their time, or that the evangelists reported what they had seen. Those who say that the Gospels are fairy tales, wrote our greatest fairy tale writer, aren’t familiar with the genre.

I could keep you up until next Christmas, talking about the rational reasons to take the Gospels at their word. All I’d have to do would be quote from a whole library of Christian apologetics produced by some of history’s greatest minds. Then, at a vainer moment, I could add a few deductions of my own.

Yet any such rationalisation can only ever be post-rationalisation: an intellectual structure erected on the foundation of something already felt intuitively. Proving the divinity of Christ by purely logical arguments is impossible even in theory: a higher system can understand the lower one, but not vice versa.

However, if we start from the hypothesis of which Pierre-Simon Laplace had no need, then everything clicks into place. Reason reclaims its place and fills in the blanks one after another, until few blanks remain unfilled. Man, God’s greatest creation, drifts from the haze of enigma into the sharp focus of understanding.

For, though our minds can’t fathom God, they can, thanks to His gift of reason, understand much of His world. Provided, of course, that we accept that gift with gratitude, never doubting its source.

Merry Christmas to everyone!