Good Friday

Today is Good Friday. BizzyBlog has an entry up as a reply to those who would claim Jesus Christ never existed. He has a run down of contemporary historians who wrote of his existence.

Josephus
Josephus was a Jewish historian who was born in either 37 or 38 AD and died some time after 100 AD. He wrote the Jewish Antiquites and in one famous passage described Jesus as a wise man, a doer of wonderful works and calls him the Christ. He also affirmed that Jesus was executed by Pilate and actually rose from the dead!

Make up your own mind, but I'd rather believe and be wrong than not believe and be wrong.

Along the same lines, Chuck Colson has a column discussing how Jesus' disciples maintained their beliefs even under threat of execution.

Just think about the situation Christ’s disciples were in after He left them. Here was a group of peasants, powerless, up against the most powerful empire in the world. Possible prison time was the very least of their worries. They knew that torture and execution could be in their future if they refused to stop preaching the name of Jesus Christ.

But they couldn’t stop.

To a man, they kept talking about Christ’s life, death, and resurrection to anyone who would listen. None of them would deny or retract their story. Eventually, just as the authorities had threatened, most of them were executed for it. But still, all of them maintained to the very end that Jesus had risen from the dead—that they had seen Him, touched Him, talked with Him.

What would inspire men to suffer and die for a belief? Only one thing—the absolute certainty that their belief was true.