Why I Couldn’t Explain Jesus Away — And I Tried Hard

With a Subtitle: A skeptic's challenge outside a market led me to a question I couldn't escape.

A brief Excerpt: One honest attempt to face the questions about Jesus that don't dissolve under scrutiny — not as religion, but as a personal reckoning that wouldn't let go.

The Author is: Joseph

Editor’s note — We don’t usually publish a piece that begins by trying to dismantle Jesus. This one earns the exception. Joseph sets out to reason his way toward a smaller, safer Jesus — the admired teacher who makes no awkward claims — and finds he can’t get there. What follows is less a sermon than a sidewalk conversation, written by a man who has clearly done the wrestling himself. We’re glad to share it here at BCWorldview.

The Question Nobody Prepared Me For

She stood on the pavement outside a market, arms folded and politely doubtful. She spoke like someone who already knew the answer: “Jesus was just a prophet.”

“A good man. Why do Christians make it more complicated than that?”

I opened my mouth.

And for a second, just a second, I felt the weight of everything I actually believed pressing against the back of my throat.

Because the honest answer was not simple. The honest answer would lead us to a place she might not want to visit. I had already been there before, alone, at 2 a.m., reading and questioning. I pulled at threads I was scared would unravel everything.

The honest answer began with a question I couldn’t ignore.

Why is Jesus the only one coming back?

I grew up in church. I learned the music before I learned the theology. I was able to memorize the Apostles’ Creed before I knew what any of it meant.

But the questions came after. They always do.

And the one that stopped me, the one I couldn’t Sunday-school my way out of was this:

Out of every prophet, every teacher, every holy man across every tradition in recorded history, why does Jesus hold a position that none of the others do?

Not just in Christianity. In Islam, a tradition built on the conviction that Jesus was not divine, He is still called Isa al-Masih Jesus the Messiah. He is still described as born of a virgin. Still credited with raising the dead. Still described as the Word of God. Still expected to return at the end of days.

That is not how any other prophet is described. Not anywhere.

I sat with that for a long time.

A faith of 1.8 billion people, one that explicitly rejects the Christian claim about Jesus still cannot place Him in the same category as every other prophet. They honor Him. They protect His name. They expect Him back.

If He was just a man, why does He refuse to stay ordinary even in the traditions that insist He was?

Editor’s note — It’s worth slowing down on Joseph’s observation here. A faith that exists in part to deny Christ’s divinity still cannot quite file Him under “ordinary prophet.” That is not a small detail. It is the kind of thing that should make an honest skeptic curious rather than comfortable.

What He Was Contested For

Here is something that gets lost in the argument about Jesus.

He was not controversial because of His miracles. Miracles were not unusual in the ancient world other figures in Jewish tradition were associated with healings and signs. The crowds followed Him for the miracles. The miracles were not the problem.

He was challenged on account of what He claimed about Himself.

“Heart, your sins are forgiven!” He did not say, “Why don’t you go and get forgiven by God?” No, He made that proclamation Himself, in His name, with His authority.

The religious leaders in the room didn’t ask why He claimed to heal. They asked why He claimed to forgive.

For only God can forgive sins. This wasn’t theology, mind you; this was rock-bottom truth.

And He kept on going. He accepted worship in a way that not even one Jewish prophet had done without getting straightened out. “My Lord and my God,” says Thomas after the resurrection, when he sees Him for the first time. And Christ doesn’t reply, “No, no, get up; I’m only a man.”

He received it.

The thing that got Jesus killed was not what He did. It was who He said He was.

That sentence sat in my chest for weeks after I first understood it. Because if He was lying if He was a deceiver or delusional then nothing else He said holds. The Sermon on the Mount collapses. The parables become manipulation. The whole moral architecture falls.

But if He were telling the truth? Then everything changes.

Editor’s note — This is the hinge of the whole piece. The offense was never the miracles; it was the authority. When the paralytic’s sins were forgiven, the watching religious leaders understood exactly what was being claimed — that only God can do such a thing (Mark 2). Joseph is right that you cannot quietly soften this into “good teacher” without losing the plot entirely.

The Man Who Never Needed Judgment

There is a detail in Islamic theology that I think deserves more attention than it usually gets.

In accordance with Islam’s doctrine, each individual human, be it a prophet, a saint, or a messenger, will be brought before Allah for his or her account on the Last Day. There is no way around this.

Peace be upon him, Prophet Muhammad, as stated by the Hadith tradition, recognized the lack of certainty regarding his status before God. He was a person who placed himself at God’s mercy, like any other individual.

Yet.

There is no passage in Islamic scripture, no ayah, no surah that describes Jesus being judged by God. He is not placed in the line of humanity awaiting a verdict. He is returning as an agent of judgment. A man who, in Islamic theology, is still fully human.

Who does not stand in line? Who is not waiting for the outcome.

I am not saying this to argue. I am saying this because it is the kind of detail that once you see it you cannot unsee.

Something about Jesus resists the categories we try to place Him in. Even the categories of people who are most committed to keeping Him human.

What He Did That No One Has Explained

The philosopher C.S. Lewis, a man who spent years as a committed atheist before his conversion, framed it this way: a man who says the things Jesus said is either a liar, a lunatic, or who He claimed to be.

It’s a blunt framework. But some philosophers disagree with this argument. After all the time I have spent reading their arguments against it, I have noticed that they tend to skirt around the core of the argument rather than tackle it head on.

Jesus knew what people were thinking.

The Gospel accounts treat this as unremarkable. He told the Samaritan woman at the well everything she had done. Not as a magic trick. As a quiet, settled knowledge of a specific person.

He wept at Lazarus’s tomb, genuinely grieved, and then called him back from four days of death.

He walked on water. No, not to show off. The disciples feared Him. He was upset with them for being afraid.

And then after His death, after His actual bodily death by execution, He appeared in a room where the doors were shut tight and said:

“Feel my hands. Feel my side. I am he.”

Thomas touched. And said the only thing that made sense to him: “My Lord and my God.”

The resurrection was not reported as a spiritual vision. It was reported as a body. A specific, scarred, touchable, eating-breakfast-on-the-beach body.

Three hundred years of Roman persecution did not dissolve that testimony. Neither did two thousand years of scholarship, archaeology, or philosophy.

Something happened. People have been arguing about what it was ever since.

Editor’s note — Notice how physical these accounts are. Not a comforting vision, not a felt presence, but a body that could be touched and that ate breakfast on a beach. The first Christians staked their lives on a claim that was either historically true or a deliberate lie. That narrows the options considerably.

Why This Is Not About Religion

Let me say right up front that I realize how this could come off.

I don’t write this to undermine someone’s faith or make someone feel bad about the faith they were raised in. There is no love in that. But there is love in all of this discussion.

However, love without truth is just comfort. And sometimes that isn’t what’s needed.

What I believe and what I cannot talk myself out of, even when I’ve tried, is that this is not fundamentally a religious question.

It’s a personal one.

Muhammad, by his own account, did not know where he was going after death. That is not a criticism; it is a statement of profound humility before God. He submitted. He trusted. He waited for judgment like the rest of us.

“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believeth on me shall never die.”

This one shows a man pointing to God.

The other is claiming to be the door. Both cannot be equally true at the same time. And the stakes of which one is right are not small.

I’m alive today to keep asking that question. You are too.

That feels like something.

What I Actually Believe

I think that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be.

Not out of an unwillingness to challenge what I’ve been taught since birth. No, I challenged that dogma quite thoroughly. I looked at the skeptics. I considered the historical facts. I examined the theologians’ attempts to reconstruct Him as a great teacher.

None of it held.

What held was this: the people who saw Him after He died didn’t just believe. They died for it. Not in the abstract sense of dying for an idea people do that for things that are false all the time. But they died insisting on something specific: that they had seen Him. Touched Him. Eaten with Him.

People die for what they believe is true. Very few people die for what they know is a lie.

Eleven of the twelve disciples were executed for their testimony. The twelfth was exiled. Not one of them, under the pressure of imprisonment and death, recanted the resurrection.

I don’t know how to explain that without the resurrection.

I have tried.

The woman outside the market listened to all of this. Some of it landed. Some of it didn’t. She smiled at me, not convinced but not dismissive either, and said she’d think about it.

I told her that was enough for today.

Because the question, once it finds you, tends to stay.

It found me at 2 a.m. with an open book. It found Thomas in a locked room. It found a woman at a well in the middle of the day.

It seems to find people in the quietest moments.

And then it waits.

---

---