I’ve been on the offensive with a series of posts on the
historicity of the New Testament. In conversations with
Christians, however, I’ve been asked variations of this: “Okay,
smart guy: you make clear that you don’t want to interpret the
gospel story as literally true. Enlighten us then—how do you
explain the facts? What do you think happened?” That’s a fair
question, and I’m happy to make a claim and defend it. Even if
you accept my contention that the Bible is just legend and that
the supernatural stuff didn’t happen—that it’s the surviving
fragments of the blog of a prescientific tribe of people who
lived two to three thousand years ago—that only tells us what
didn’t happen. So what did happen? That the New Testament exists
is undeniable; what explains it? Here we go. 1. Jesus lived. The
Christ Myth Theory, which argues there is insufficient evidence
for a historical Jesus, is another possibility, but the simplest
argument seems to be that a real man grounded the Jesus story.
It’s easy to imagine false l