Proving Jesus Exists

According to Technorati the most-discussed news story right now is the one where the Italian Catholic priest Father Enrico Righi has been taken to court by Luigi Cascioli, his former school friend, an atheist, and is having to prove that Jesus existed. The atheist won’t allow the New Testament as evidence, nor other writers who lived later than Jesus. Rather slanting the evidence, you would have to say.

 

One of the curious things about this is to see this as an essentially modernist issue. This is a debate about ‘objective’ evidence. For all the importance that Christians happily swimming in the postmodern world put on an apologetics of lifestyle (the best argument for our faith is the transforming effect it has on our lives and how that benefits others) this debate is framed in such a way that it is no surprise to find respondents to the story at Think Christian promoting books such as Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands A Verdict and Lee Strobel’s The Case For Christ.

 

It thus serves as a wake-up call to much postmodern Christianity that the old modernism hasn’t completely gone away. Of course responsible postmodern Christian commentators know and acknowledge this, but it can sometimes be overlooked in the emerging rush. Maybe we need both kinds of apologetics.