about Jewish culture. "At the time of Jesus, the Jews had been persecuted for seven hundred years by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and now by the Greeks and the Romans," Moreland explained. "Many Jews had been scattered and lived as captives in these other nations. "However, we still see Jews today, while we don't see Hittites, Perizzites, Ammonites, Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, and other people who had been living in that time. Why? Because these people got captured by other nations, intermarried, and lost their national identity. "Why didn't that happen to the Jews? Because the things that made the Jews, Jews-the social structures that gave them their national identity-were unbelievably important to them. The Jews would pass these structures down to their children, celebrate them in synagogue meetings every Sabbath, and reinforce them with their rituals, because they knew if they didn't, there soon would be no Jews left. They would be assimilated into the cultures that captured them. And there's another reason why these social institutions were so important: they believed these institutions were entrusted to them by God. They believed that to abandon these institutions would be to risk their souls being damned to hell after death. Now a rabbi named Jesus appears from a lower-class region. He teaches for three years, gathers a following of lower- and middle-class people, gets in trouble with the authorities, and gets crucified along with thirty thousand other Jewish men who are executed during this time period. But five weeks after he's crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion. And get this: they're willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such importance both sociologically and theologically." "So the implication is that something big was going on," I said. Moreland exclaimed, "Something very big was going on!" Revolutionizing Jewish Life I invited Moreland to go through these five social structures and explain how the followers of Jesus had changed or abandoned them. "First," he said, "they had been taught ever since the time of Abraham and Moses that they needed to offer an animal sacrifice on a yearly basis to atone for their sins. God would transfer their sins to that animal, and their sins would be forgiven so they could be in right standing with him. But all of a sudden, after the death of this Nazarene carpenter, these Jewish people no longer offer sacrifices. Second, Jews emphasized obeying the laws that God had entrusted to them through Moses. In their view, this is what separated them from pagan nations. Yet within a short time after Jesus' death, Jews were beginning to say that you don't become an upstanding member of their community merely by keeping Moses' laws. Third, Jews scrupulously kept the Sabbath by not doing anything except religious devotion every Saturday. This is how they would earn right standing with God, guarantee the salvation of their family, and be in right standing with the nation. However, after the death of this Nazarene carpenter, this fifteen-hundred-year tradition is abruptly changed. These Christians worship on Sunday-why? Because that's when Jesus rose from the dead. Fourth, they believed in monotheism-only one God. While Christians teach a form of monotheism, they say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God. This is radically different from what the Jews believed. They would have considered it the height of heresy to say someone could be God and man at the same time. Yet Jews begin to worship Jesus as God within the first decade of the Christian religion. And fifth, these Christians pictured the Messiah as someone who suffered and died for the sins of the world, whereas Jews had been trained to believe that the Messiah was going to be a political leader who would destroy the Roman armies." With that context established, Moreland went in for the rhetorical kill, drilling me with his intense and unwavering gaze. "Lee," he said, "how can you possibly explain why in a short period of time not just one Jew but an entire community of at least ten thousand Jews were willing to give up these five key practices that had served them sociologically and theologically for so many centuries? My explanation is simple: they had seen Jesus risen from the dead." While Moreland's point was extremely impressive, I saw a problem in people understanding it today. I told him that it's very difficult for twentieth-century Americans to appreciate the radical nature of this transformation. "These days people are fluid in their faith," I said. "They bounce back and forth between Christianity and New Age beliefs. They dabble in Buddhism, they mix and match and create their own spirituality. For them, making the kind of changes you mentioned wouldn't seem like a big deal." Moreland nodded. He had apparently heard this objection before. "I'd ask a person like that, 'What's your most cherished belief? That your parents were good people? That murder is immoral? Think about how radical something must be to get you to change or give up that belief you treasure so much. Now we're starting to get close.' "Keep in mind that this is an entire community of people who are abandoning treasured beliefs that have been passed on for centuries and that they believed were from God himself. They were doing it even though they were jeopardizing their own well-being, and they also believed they were risking the damnation of their souls to hell if they were wrong. What's more, they were not doing this because they had come upon better ideas. They were very content with the old traditions. They gave them up because they had seen miracles that they could not explain and that forced them to see the world another way." - We're Western individualists who like technological and sociological change," I observed. "Traditions don't mean as much to us." "I'll grant that," Moreland replied. "But these people did value tradition. They lived in a period in which the older something was, the better. In fact, for them the farther back they could trace an idea, the more likely it was to be true. So to come up with new ideas was opposite of the way we are today. "Believe me," he concluded, "these changes to the Jewish social structures were not just minor adjustments that were casually made - they were absolutely monumental. This was nothing short of a social earthquake! And earthquakes don't happen without a cause."
Moreland pointed to the emergence of the sacraments of Communion and baptism in the early church as more circumstantial evidence that the Resurrection is true. But I had some doubts. "Isn't it only natural that religions would create their own rituals and practices?" I asked. "All religions have them. So how does that prove anything about the Resurrection?" "Ah, but let's consider Communion for a moment," he replied. "What's odd is that these early followers of Jesus didn't get together to celebrate his teachings or how wonderful he was. They came together regularly to have a celebration meal for one reason: to remember that Jesus had been publicly slaughtered in a grotesque and humiliating way. "Think about this in modern terms. If a group of people loved John F. Kennedy, they might meet regularly to remember his confrontation with Russia, his promotion of civil rights, and his charismatic personality. But they're not going to celebrate the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him! "However, that's analogous to what these early Christians did. How do you explain that? I explain it this way: they realized that Jesus' slaying was a necessary step to a much greater victory. His murder wasn't the last word-the last word was that he had conquered death for all of us by rising from the dead. They celebrated his execution because they were convinced that they had seen him alive from the tomb." "What about baptism?" I asked. "The early church adopted a form of baptism from their Jewish upbringing, called proselyte baptism. When Gentiles wanted to take upon themselves the laws of Moses, the Jews would baptize those Gentiles in the authority of the God of Israel. But in the New Testament, people were baptized in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit-which meant they had elevated Jesus to the full status of God. "Not only that, but baptism was a celebration of the death of Jesus, just as Communion was. By going under the water, you're celebrating his death, and by being brought out of the water, you're celebrating the fact that Jesus was raised to newness of life." I interrupted by saying, "You're assuming that these sacraments weren't merely adapted from the so-called mystery religions." "And for good reasons," Moreland replied. "First, there's no hard evidence that any mystery religion believed in gods dying and rising, until after the New Testament period. So if there was any borrowing, they borrowed from Christianity. "Second, the practice of baptism came from Jewish customs, and the Jews were very much against allowing Gentile or Greek ideas to affect their worship. And third, these two sacraments can be dated back to the very earliest Christian community-too early for the influence of any other religions to creep into their understanding of what Jesus' death meant."
Moreland prefaced this final point by saying, "When a major cultural shift takes place, historians always look for events that can explain it." "Yes, that makes sense," I said. "OK, then let's think about the start of the Christian church. There's no question it began shortly after the death of Jesus and spread so rapidly that within a period of maybe twenty years it had even reached Caesar's palace in Rome. Not only that, but this movement triumphed over a number of competing ideologies and eventually overwhelmed the entire Roman empire. Now, if you were a Martian looking down on the first century, would you think Christianity or the Roman Empire would survive? You probably wouldn't put money on a ragtag group of people whose primary message was that a crucified carpenter from an obscure village had triumphed over the grave. Yet it was so successful that today we name our children Peter and Paul and our dogs Caesar and Nero! "I like the way C. F. D. Moule, the Cambridge New Testament scholar, put it: 'If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?'" While this wasn't Moreland's strongest point, since other religious movements have popped up and spread too, circumstantial evidence doesn't rely solely on the strength of one fact. Rather it's the cumulative weight of several facts that together tip the scales toward a conclusion. And to Moreland, the conclusion is clear. "Look," he said, "if someone wants to consider this circumstantial evidence and reach the verdict that Jesus did not rise from the dead-fair enough. But they've got to offer an alternative explanation that is plausible for all five of these facts. "Remember, there's no doubt these facts are true; what's in question is how to explain them. And I've never seen a better explanation than the Resurrection." I mentally played back the tape of the circumstantial evidence: the willingness of the disciples to die for what they experienced; the revolutionized lives of skeptics like James and Saul; the radical changes in social structures cherished by Jews for centuries; the sudden appearance of Communion and baptism;