How was the origin of Christianity giving me an indication that the God in the Bible was the real God?
But wait, how much did I know about the historical background around the time when Jesus was dead? I could not just trust the bible, could I?
Please be reminded that I am describing my thoughts when I was a teenager. I had no internet to research through lots of information. I did not know any biblical or historical scholars around me at that time. I just tried to be as reasonable as possible when I thought about these problems.
Firstly, Jesus was a historical figure. The year on the calendar told me how many years after Jesus’s death was today. If Jesus was not historical, then million and millions of people had been fooled. That was highly unlikely.
Secondly, I accepted the following descriptions from the bible as fairly believable facts: that Jesus had some followers, and that Jesus was killed under the Roman authority.
Jesus should have some followers. Otherwise, who wrote down his teachings, and who spread the Christian faith from more than two thousand years ago? It seemed to me that it was fairly reasonable to assume that Jesus had some followers.
Was Jesus killed under the Roman authority? I did not find straightforward reasons outside the bible to support this assumption. However, neither could I find anything to suspect that assumption. If I took away the parts about miracles in the sections of the Bible that described Jesus’ life, the story of Jesus’ life was fairly reasonable and consistent.
Who was Jesus according to the gospels, which are the sections of the bible that specifically describe Jesus’ life? To the teenage me who could not really believe in miracles, I had the following conclusion. He was obviously an incredibly intelligent person with very high moral value. He bluntly accused the hypocrisy of upper-class Jews, who out of jealousy convinced the Roman authority to execute Jesus.
Thirdly, Jesus’ disciples started a huge movement to spread the “news” that Jesus came back to life after his execution. These disciples gave the teenage me the strongest reason for the existence of the God in the Bible.
