...radical claims require radical evidence, and the Resurrection would have been a radical claim 2,000 years ago.
Yep. And when He did rise from the dead, that was the start of it all. A small band of cultists in the anus of an empire, whose leader had been crucified after being rejected by His own people, survived, and then thrived in light of tremendous resistance. And it was eventually embraced by the very empire that had tried to eradicate it...!
Karen Armstrong is an author who is no friend to evangelical Christianity. She wrote a book called ‘Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence’. She said, “Yet against all odds, by the third century, Christianity had become a force to be reckoned with. We still do not really understand how this came about.”
Whether a historian, an anthropologist, or even a skeptic with an agenda...it’s hard to explain. But something did happen in the 1st century that caused Christianity to spread like wildfire. I’m good accepting the separate and independent accounts of those closest to the actual events. People like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, Paul, give ample testimony for why Jesus’ movement overcame the religious and political power structures that had tried to destroy it...!
Between the Jewish Temple and the Roman Empire it’d seem that this small cult should’ve been squashed and buried alongside Jesus. But nope...! Nowadays, some of the 2.5 billion Christians worldwide are takin’ pics of the ruins of the Jewish Temple Mount and others are takin’ pics of the ruins of the Forum in Rome.
