Results Attained: The Death of Christ.

At this point, we need to pause and look back at the ground we have covered. We found evidence that led us to believe that Jesus of Nazareth gave a decisive new impulse to the religious life of humanity. In His own day, the human race seemed to be sinking toward ruin; through Him, it was turned onto a path of steady progress. So we set out to learn more about the teaching of so extraordinary a Teacher.

We have also found, from abundant and indisputable documentary evidence, that the great Apostle who founded the Churches of Europe did in fact teach the following: using language shaped by the Jewish thought of his own time, he taught that God receives into His favor all who believe the good news announced by Christ; that this salvation comes to them through Christ’s violent death; that Christ deliberately laid down His life for this purpose; and that the need for such a costly means of salvation lay in human sin. We found teaching equivalent to this attributed to Christ in four memoirs that have come down to us from the first century of the Christian Church, though the wording and ways of thinking in those memoirs are quite different from Paul’s. We found similar teaching in other documents from the same period as well. This agreement among witnesses, despite wide differences in form and detail, gave us complete proof that Paul had correctly understood and reproduced the teaching of Christ. It is also clear that Paul and the other writers of the New Testament accepted these doctrines with complete confidence, and that these doctrines shaped their whole way of thinking and living.