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Understanding Lent and Jesus' time is more complex than what meets the eye, but it is worth looking into.

At this time of each year Churches around the planet begin a time period called Lent. It starts about now and lasts 40 days. Wikipedia has a handy definition of it.

Lent (Latin: Quadragesima: Fortieth) is a solemn religious observance in the Christian calendar that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends approximately six weeks later, before Easter Sunday. The purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer for Easter through prayer, doing penance, mortifying the flesh, repentance of sins, almsgiving, and self-denial.

Now, I myself don’t put a lot of stock in Lent. That is because I grew up in a Church where prayer, turning from sins (repentance), giving money to help others (almsgiving) and reserving sex for marriage (“mortifying the flesh” isn’t the best way to think of that, but I’ll just leave it there for now) were meant to be part of everyday life, not just for a certain times of the year.

Here’s the main thing about Lent that I want to pay attention to right now. It ends with Good Friday and Easter. Good Friday is the day that the death of Jesus Christ is remembered. And Easter, two days later, is the remembering of Christ returning from the dead. God brought him back to life.

Christ returned from the dead: Well that is a pretty astounding thing to claim to say the least. If it is true, it changes everything about how we should think about our own existence. It means that the teachings of Jesus should probably receive maximal attention. And it means that our own deaths might also possibly end differently from what we expect. In fact, that is exactly what the hundreds of witnesses who saw Jesus after his death claimed. Jesus’ resurrection means that the pathway out of death has been opened and it (death) won’t have the last laugh.

But of course, none of what I’ve written here is useful to you (or me) if it isn’t true. Specifically, if God did not raise Jesus from the dead, it’s a waste of time to go on about it.

The way the question ultimately shakes down is this: Are the accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection reliable? Are they true? If so, the question about his return from death is more or less answered to a satisfactory level and then we can consider what follows from that.

People like Dan Brown spin fictional tales of how those accounts came into existence. They put it out there that the stories about Jesus, especially about his return from death, were set down on paper quite a long time after Jesus (allegedly) lived. Those accounts, it is said, were written down to give credence to the leaders of the early Church who were mainly after (so it is said) power. Those leaders used the story of Jesus rising to capture the minds and hearts of other people. They, the leaders of the emerging Catholic Church, claimed to represent this risen Jesus.

So, according to this way of thinking, the stories of Jesus are in the end, pretty unreliable as a record of events that actually happened. They are nothing more than a power grab.

Like most conspiracy theories, this one doesn’t bear much scrutiny. Even though it has many scholarly proponents, it is shot through with problems, fatal ones as far as I can tell.

Here’s one of those problems. It is quite technical, but I think I can break it down. It’s about the names and groups of people mentioned in the stories of Jesus, including in the stories of his appearances after his death. The problem is put forward by Richard Bauckham. He is a professor of New Testament, St. Andrew’s University in Edinburg. Bauckham is one of several (and not very few) Bible scholars setting the record straight about the reliability of the stories of Jesus.

He has done a very detailed study of names in the stories of Jesus. (Trivia: the study of names is called Onomastics.) We know the names of about 3,000 Jews who lived in Palestine between 330 BC (BCE) and 200 AD (CE). Many of the names are in the Bible’s stories of Jesus. But many also come from inscriptions (at burial sites for example) or from other writings from around the time of Jesus.

Bauckham’s analysis of the names, reveals that the ones that appear in the stories of Jesus are consistent with a number of key factors: the decades in which the events related in the stories took place; the popularity of certain names over others; the places in which the stories are set; and the way people with identical names are distinguished from each other (chapter three in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2017, Eerdmans Publishing).

Bauckham concludes that a study of the names in the stories of Jesus affirms the reliability of those stories.

That may not sound like a major victory for Christianity. But it’s a great start to seeing the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ no longer as instruments of power wielded by Catholic priests over an unsuspecting population. In fact, this is only a small part of the argument Bauckham lays out in a most recent book.

As it turns out, it makes a lot more sense to see the accounts of Jesus’ return from death as authentic. They are worth the attention of people of every time, religion and culture. And that is exactly how the stories have been received and continue to be received today.
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