A little over a year ago, on one of the world’s most popular podcasts, The Joe Rogan Experience, the host Joe Rogan asked the musician Kid Rock, “If you could go to one place, where would you go? If you had one shot, you could go back in time once and survive and come back to the future, where would you go?”
Kid Rock’s answer was simple and direct, “Jesus.”
Rogan took in the answer for a moment and then asked, “But what if there was nobody there?”
At this point, Kid Rock’s eyes alighted with excitement: “Even better! I get him all to myself, just me and Jesus!?”
Rogan then attempted to rein in the enthusiasm by clarifying: “No I mean what if Jesus wasn’t there. Do you think there’s a real Jesus?”
Kid Rock’s answer was, once more, simple and direct, “Absolutely, one thousand percent.”
Rogan then followed up: “What makes you convinced?”
Without skipping a beat, Kid Rock replies, “My faith.”
That answer is a natural one for believers. For most Christians most of the time, the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a given. The sun rises in the morning, sugar is sweet, and Jesus lives and reigns. Such faith seems unnatural even to the most sympathetic of skeptics.
Yet the sympathetic Joe Rogan is genuinely impressed by Kid Rock’s answer and says so, explaining, “I mean, that’s a good answer.” But then he pauses, thinks, and finally muses:
I always wonder when people are telling stories, though, like how long did that story take place before people wrote it down? How many times did people alter it, just like they do with everything today? I got to imagine that at a certain point in time, in history, they probably didn’t tell the truth about a lot of things.
Joe Rogan is hardly alone in his skepticism, and sometimes even Christians experience it. Timothy Paul Jones, vice president of doctoral studies, professor of Christian family ministry, and chair of the department of apologetics, ethics, and philosophy at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has, too. In his new book, Did the Resurrection Really Happen?, he relates how he grew up in an insular and sectarian religious milieu that had insulated him from such doubts: “Then I went to college. It was a Christian college, and the professors believed the Bible. But none of them believed the Bible like I’d been taught to believe it. My studies quickly plunged me into a dark corridor of doubt.”
He was introduced to the study of comparative religion, and the claims of Christianity began to seem less unique or even derivative of other religious traditions. He also read the British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, in which the author makes the bold claim that “historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if he did we do not know anything about him.”
His faith shaken, Jones went looking for answers. Crass “Jesus mythicism,” the view that there never was a historical Jesus in the first place, was easily dismissed with a cursory survey of mainstream scholarship. Russell’s bald assertion and Rogan’s “What if there was nobody there?” question have been answered a thousand times over by historians both believing and skeptical. The main, broad contours of Jesus of Nazareth’s life, ministry, and death (if not each discrete discourse and event recorded in the New Testament narratives) are not a matter of academic controversy but rather consensus. Jones gives a helpful roundup of accessible literature on this topic in a note that includes the agnostic New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.
The question of Christianity’s uniqueness and its relationship to older religious traditions proved a stickier wicket. It was upon reading C.S. Lewis that Jones first discovered that “certain questions that had seemed new and shocking to me—the possibility that there were parallels between the Gospels and pagan myths, for example—weren’t really new at all.” Lewis’s understanding of myth opened deeper ways of understanding why we would expect parallels between the world’s religions (they each resonate with a shared human nature and experience), but also drew attention to discrepancies and distinctives:
The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified … under Pontius Pilate.
This passage is found in Lewis’s essay “Myth Became Fact” and accounts for the structure of the argument that unfolds over the 70 breezy pages of Did the Resurrection Really Happen? Jones makes the case that the New Testament narratives and the Resurrection are the product of distinct eyewitness accounts, that each of those accounts are in basic agreement with one another on the main points of the Resurrection story, and that they diverge in distinctive ways from earlier parallel accounts found in other religious traditions.
The book had me reaching for my own Bible to make notes for further study, which is the highest praise for a book of this size and kind that cannot be a definitive treatment so much as an introduction and invitation to further inquiry. Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection are each essential to understanding his person and work, and fertile ground for study and devotion. Timothy Paul Jones makes a convincing argument that the Resurrection narratives in particular set Christianity apart from the world’s other religious traditions. This particularity should not surprise us, for St. Paul himself proclaims, “If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17).
Jones concludes Did the Resurrection Really Happen? by asking the question, “What about you?” He expresses the hope that the reader has learned that faith in the Resurrection can be grounded in evidence, but “Whether or not you think the resurrection of Jesus happened, there is a longing for resurrection inside of you.”
After Joe Rogan voiced to Kid Rock his skepticism regarding the Gospel narratives, the conversation drifted in a couple of different directions until Rock helpfully returned and placed it in a larger context. “Let’s circle back. You told me that you believed in Bigfoot.”
The skeptical Rogan, mildly embarrassed, replies, “I was joking around, but I wanted Bigfoot to be real, for sure. Just like I want Jesus to be real. Well, Bigfoot used to be real, the thing that I found out when I really got fascinated by Bigfoot …”
Skeptics like Rogan would assuredly benefit from reading Did the Resurrection Really Happen? So would Christians who have similar doubts. But belief in Jesus Christ is not like belief in Bigfoot, and not merely because Jesus is real and Bigfoot is not. In the words of Kid Rock, “Jesus is real, right in this moment,” and real in eternity: “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Cor. 5:14–15).
