I Had Used That Argument For Years

He has said it at that table for about eleven years and he has always said it well.

It goes like this: nobody dies for something they know is a lie. Twelve men, and eleven of them were killed for refusing to take it back, and men do not do that for a story they invented themselves. He has said it kindly and he has said it to at least four people who were genuinely wondering, and one of them still brings it up.

And in March, a man he had met twice, a colleague of his brother's, listened to the whole thing and then said, without any edge at all: which eleven, and how do we know?

Not aggressive. Curious in the way somebody is curious when they have been in a room where things get checked.

And he opened his mouth and found that he had two names, and that one of them he was not certain about.

He got through it. He said something about the early accounts and the conversation moved and the evening was good and the man went home and has since asked to be invited again.

Then he sat up until about half past one looking it up.

And what he found was not a disaster and it was not comfortable either. Some of what he had been saying for eleven years is well attested. Some of it comes from documents written a very long time afterwards, of a kind that everybody who studies this treats as later tradition rather than as record, and he had been handing all of it across the table at the same weight.

He has not said the argument since March.

The narrow version is smaller and it holds

Let me be fair to eleven years before anything else, because the shame carried since March is out of all proportion.

You did not invent that argument and you did not check it because almost nobody checks the things they were handed by people they trust. That is how most of what any of us knows arrives, and it is not a character flaw, and the four people you said it to were not damaged by it.

But the man asked the right question, and you know it, which is why you have not used it since.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: there is a narrower version of that argument, and it is smaller, and it holds. That is not my kind reading of a hard spring, it is what stands written in the twelfth chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was at your table in March.

Read what the New Testament itself records about the death of one of the Twelve.

It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword.Acts 12:1-2

One sentence. No detail. No speech, no last words, nothing to make it stirring.

That is the death of an apostle recorded inside the New Testament, and it is almost the only one.

Now here is what you found at half past one, said plainly, because you are going to say it at that table eventually and it is better said carefully.

The detailed stories of how most of the Twelve died come from writings produced well after the first century, and people who study these things treat them as later tradition rather than as documentation. That is not a hostile claim and it is not a secret. It is the ordinary view, held by careful people on all sides, and a man who repeats those stories as though they were court records will be corrected by anybody who has read anything.

What is on much firmer ground is narrower: that the earliest movement was persecuted, that some of its leaders died for it, and that this began early.

So this is yours right now rather than pending some larger case: you have something real to say and you have had it the whole time, because the written word records one apostle killed with a sword in a single unadorned sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the plain version survived alongside the later stories.

And here is the distinction that does the actual work, which the big version was obscuring.

People do die for things that are not true. That happens constantly and the man at your table knows it and so do you, and any argument that pretends otherwise deserves to fall over.

The narrower claim is different. These were people in a position to know whether they had made it up. Not people who had been told something and believed it; people who said they had seen something. And some of them paid for saying so and did not take it back.

That is not a proof. It does not establish that they were right. It establishes that they were not knowingly lying, which is a smaller thing and a real one.