Why Did Anyone Believe This in the First Place?
I’m reading Paul, a Biography by N. T. Wright. Shocker, I know. What’s grabbing me isn’t just Paul himself, but the world around him. Wright starts to pull back the curtain on the historical moments surrounding the stories we read in Paul’s letters and in Acts, and what stands out is how many conversations were happening at once. Layered, complex, and all orbiting this explosive claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead.
We’re heading into Easter, and this is the season where those words get said a lot. Jesus. Resurrection. Hope. You hear it everywhere. But I think we miss just how radical all of this actually was. People were traveling from city to city, carrying this message about a man who had lived, died, and somehow been raised, not centuries before, but within their lifetime. Decades. That’s it.
We’ve grown used to the story. They hadn’t.
I keep thinking about Paul walking into Athens. To him, it might as well have been the other side of the world. A Greek city, shaped by philosophy, tradition, and entirely different assumptions about reality. And somehow, the message lands. Not just intellectually, but personally. People begin to trust this story about a Jewish, itinerant preacher from Nazareth who suffered, died, and was raised a few days later.
Why?
Why would anyone walk away from the life they knew, the gods they worshiped, the systems that made sense to them, for this?
They hadn’t met Jesus. They didn’t have the Gospels. No podcasts. No YouTube breakdowns. Just a guy, showing up with a message that a new kind of world was possible through this Rabbi named Jesus.
And that’s the question that keeps sitting with me. Is that message still true? Is it still worth trusting, given the world as it is right now?
I think it is. Honestly, maybe even more now than in Paul’s day.
But here’s the harder question. Is the way we talk about Jesus today compelling enough for someone to actually believe that? Not just agree with it, but trust it?
Because maybe the issue isn’t Jesus. Maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s the way we’ve talked about him. The way we’ve reduced something that once disrupted entire cities into something that feels flat, predictable, or disconnected from real life.
Maybe what we need isn’t a different message, but better language. Language that actually connects. Language that takes seriously the people in front of us, instead of assuming they understand the world we came from.
Paul didn’t walk into Athens expecting them to think like he did. He paid attention. He listened. And then he spoke in a way they could actually hear.
Maybe that’s where we start again.
I’m Just Saying is a weekly email where I share a thought I’m wrestling with in real time. It is an invitation to pause, reflect, and reconsider the way we think about faith, the Bible, Jesus, and the Church. No pressure. Just an honest thought, once a week.
