‘How the Christian revolution re-made the world’. Tom Holland

For years there have been furious arguments between theists and atheists over the existence of a personal God and between Christians and everyone else over the Christian claim that Jesus is the key link between humanity and the divine. Cosmological the big bang, necessary versus contingent, teleological, fine tuning, intelligibility, the mind, moral law, ontological so the debate rages on.All interesting arguments which theists, like myself, believe to point overwhelmingly towards the existence of a creator. One argument which atheists find particularly vexing is the Christian belief in miracles. But the biggest miracle , after the resurrection lays, I believe, in plain historical sight and is factually incontrovertible and available to anyone with even a mere smattering of knowledge of classical history.

Luke 2 begins with the verse’ Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world’ and leads to verse 8 ‘ there were shepherds living in the fields’. The roman empire at the time of Augustus was at its height. From what in todays world is France across to eastern Turkey, the middle east, north Africa and the Iberian peninsula and everything in between all were under the sway of Rome. Every province had a Roman governor with the absolute power of life and death. Roads linked every corner of the empire temples, laws an absolute dictatorship based on power, might and total obedience. Weakness was despised and any dissentor subject to instant crucifixion or the lions.Augustus was son of a God and on his death was declared a God himself and worshipped as such throughout the empire.

Set this against a child born in in a minor province of the empire to a carpenter whose first visitors were shepherds herding their sheep. A man crucified as a criminal with other criminals either side of him.Whose teachings stood against everything that represented the ideals of Rome to whom the beatitudes would have been as revolting as they were unintelligible.A man who apart from a period of exile in Egypt as a child never travelled further than 100 miles from Jerusalem.Reviled and betrayed by his own people who left his unwritten legacy in the hands of fishermen. His followers relentlessly persecuted and killed in their thousands by arguably the most efficient engine of power that the world has ever seen.

Three hundred years later the roman empire was Christian. Over the centuries billions came to worship him and still do.The morality of the western world and much of the rest is his whether you believe in him or not.A historic miracle that is truly unbelievable and breathtaking.Yet it happened.As C S Lewis wrote ‘ a reality ….that you could not have guessed.’