She Came Back Having Looked It Up

She is sixteen and she does not say much and she has been coming since she was eleven.

It was not a big conversation. Six of them in the room at the end, chairs stacked, somebody's mum outside in a car. And she said, in the doorway, half turning to go: how do we actually know it is not made up?

And what came out, easily and warmly and without one second of thought, was: well, they all died for it, and nobody dies for something they know is a lie.

She said okay. She went.

Two weeks later she came back and stood in the same doorway and said: I looked that up.

And then she said, carefully, in the way a sixteen year old says something she has rehearsed in a car: most of the stories about how they died are from way later, aren't they. Like, hundreds of years later. Is that right?

It is right. It is broadly right and she had done the work and she was not being clever about it and she was not being cruel.

And the woman she asked has been leading that room for six years, and what she felt, standing there with a stack of chairs in her arms, was not embarrassment.

It was something colder than embarrassment, which arrived about a second later, and it was this: she thought I would not have known.

She did not think her leader had lied. She thought her leader had never checked. And she came back anyway, and she asked anyway, and she stood in that doorway waiting to find out which one it was.

Paul put the possibility into his own argument

Let me name what that girl did before anything else, because it is the largest thing in this story and it will get lost under your own reaction.

She checked. And then she came back. Those are two separate acts of courage and the second one is much rarer than the first.

Almost every sixteen year old who checks something and finds it thin does not return to the doorway. They keep it. It goes quietly into a pile of things that did not hold, and four years later they are gone and nobody in that building can name a single reason.

She came back. She stood there with it in her hands and gave you the chance.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: what you were handing her had a real version underneath it, and you can give her that, and you do not have to defend the version you said. That is not my kind reading of a hard fortnight, it is what stands written in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it was in that doorway both times.

Read what Paul is willing to put into his own argument.

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that He raised Christ from the dead.1 Corinthians 15:14-15

We are then found to be false witnesses.

He puts it in himself. He names the possibility that he and everybody with him are lying about God, in writing, in the middle of the case, and he does not soften it.

That is a man arguing the way that girl argues.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a way to save face: you are inside a tradition that does its own checking out loud, because the written word states the falsifying condition in the first person and keeps it in, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the risky sentence was not edited out of the argument.

And here is the version to give her, which is narrower and better than the one you gave.

The detailed accounts of how most of the Twelve died do come from a great deal later, and she is right about that, and you should say so first and without qualification.

What is on firm ground is smaller: that the movement was persecuted early, that some of its leaders were killed, that this is recorded inside the New Testament and outside it, and that the people involved were claiming to have seen something rather than to have been told it.

And then the honest part, which is the part that will keep her: people do die for things that are not true. That happens. So this does not prove the claim. It addresses whether they were making it up, and that is a smaller thing, and it is real.