Arie

Doubting that Jesus is God is, in itself, a remarkable stance. It means accepting that an obscure carpenter, born in a stable in the first century, in a forgotten village in the Middle East, among an enslaved population, in a remote province, to an unremarkable young woman without prospects, simply lived his life like countless others. It means believing he grew up amid forests, dust, markets, and tools, a man like millions of others; that he never led anything, received no formal education, authored no writings, ran no institutions, founded no schools, commanded no armies, and influenced no contemporary philosophers; that he was surrounded by a circle of friends made up of a handful of fishermen, a despised tax collector, and a few marginalized women, and expressed himself in parables of sowers and sheep. This man spent his time with the poor, the sick, and the outcasts, subtly unsettling the religious authorities. He had no palace, no fortune, no throne; he was eventually arrested, hastily tried, ridiculed, beaten, and executed outside the city, naked, bloodied, and forsaken by all. There is no reason his name should have spread beyond the borders of his village or the memory of his generation. But there is a problem. His name did not vanish. It was not swallowed by time. His name was not erased by death, but rather seemed to conquer it. His name crossed centuries, languages, cultures, and oceans. It overturned certainties, shattered idols, and brought empires to their knees. It became the reference point for entire nations, the source of modern laws, the foundation of civilization. His teachings, transmitted by humble followers, became the catalyst of an unprecedented intellectual, moral, spiritual, and political upheaval that reshaped the world. There was a before and after Him, and the whole world agrees. Around the story of this ostensibly unknown man from Galilee, a Church was established, from which cathedrals rose over centuries, hospitals were invented, charters were drafted, monastic orders sprang up across the world, kingdoms were founded, the poor protected, orphans raised, and the concept of freedom conceived. It was in His name that people painted, sculpted and composed. It is in His light that thinkers have developed the great insights of the human soul: personhood, consciousness, charity, forgiveness, justice, salvation. And this movement, which should have died with this insignificant and unvalued man, not only survived, but is the only one that has spread everywhere, across the globe, nourished by the persecution of its own martyrs. Its apparent weakness was, in truth, its greatest strength. Against all odds. Against all logic. Against any ideology that sought to spread by the sword. It was in His name that the laws of nature were discovered, not to flee from God, but to deepen our understanding of Him, the supreme Lawgiver. It was in the shadow of cloisters that the first universities were founded, where faith inspired the pursuit of truth, whatever the outcome. It was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who formulated the Big Bang theory, which he called, with calm conviction, “the moment of creation.” It was a monk, Gregor Mendel, who laid the foundations of genetics. It was Isaac Newton, a devout believer, who saw the universe as a book written by the hand of God. It was Galileo, far from legend, who asserted that “nature is a mathematical language whose author is God.” Modern science did not arise in opposition to faith, but within it, sustained by the idea that the universe is intelligible because it was willed, ordered, and conceived, not by chaos, but by the Word and the Spirit. There is no scientific discipline today that was not founded or profoundly influenced by His followers. Beyond wars, betrayals, heresies, crimes, and errors, His movement endures. It persists. It resurfaces. It continues to shape debates, laws, ideas, revolts, and hopes today. Even those who deny it rely on the structures it enabled to attempt, as best they can, to undermine it. And every time it seems to vanish or fall silent, the winds shift, and it returns stronger, clearer, and harder to ignore, as if some unseen force were speaking again to the world, calling it back to Him. So, should we believe that this wave of unprecedented power came from a simple man, with no family, no authority, no scholarship, no future, who died in obscurity two thousand years ago? We must admit that to believe this, one must possess faith. But a rare kind of faith. A heroic, commendable faith. The faith that from nothingness, miracles can be born. The faith that the greatest can emerge, alone, from the most insignificant. The belief that chance, once in history, achieved exactly what only God can do.