Why Jesus?

From the God of Abraham to the God who speaks in history: has He shown His face in Jesus of Nazareth?

Reason brought us to a God who is one and personal, and the path narrowed to a covenant God who has already spoken, and promised more. The question is no longer whether God speaks, but whether He has now spoken not through a prophet but in person, by entering history Himself. That is no longer a question of philosophy but of history: of documents, witnesses, and events that either happened or did not.

The Christian claim is that God did not stay at a distance but entered history in Jesus of Nazareth, whose life, death, and Resurrection are attested by witnesses who went to their deaths rather than take back what they claimed to have seen. That is a claim large enough to change everything if true, and specific enough to be tested if false. This stage walks it as an ordered path, one question leading to the next, refusing to assume what it sets out to weigh:

• Who was Jesus: the man of history, and what exactly is being claimed about him?
• Can the Gospels be trusted as historical sources at all?
• Did Jesus claim divine authority: a claim no mere prophet would make?
• If He is God, does that break the one God reason reached?
• Does the messianic expectation of the Hebrew Scriptures converge on Him?
• Was the claim vindicated by His rising from the dead?
• Does it survive its hardest objections, and did the risen Christ found a visible Church?

Each step earns the next: establish the sources before the claims, the claims before the vindication, the vindication before the Church. Begin below, and follow the path from step to step.