I want to note that the cult that has Jesus as their messiah eventually got to "the incarnation of God himself", that was only by the fourth Gospel, when it was apparent he wasn't coming back. In today's world of Christianity, the resurrection was the big deal. But originally, it was when he returned that would be the big deal. His said lack of return led to pulling things back a bit.
Yes—excellent point, and one that actually strengthens what I was getting at.
The earliest followers of Jesus didn’t originally preach a fully developed theology of incarnation or Trinity. The earliest Gospel (Mark) doesn’t present Jesus as “God incarnate” in the way later texts do. Paul’s letters—some of the earliest Christian documents—focus more on resurrection and imminent return than divine ontology. It wasn’t until the Gospel of John, written decades later, that we see the full-throated theological claim that Jesus was God: “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God.”
This gradual escalation—from apocalyptic prophet to risen messiah to divine Logos—shows precisely how theological claims evolved over time in response to real-world disconfirmation. When Jesus didn’t return as expected, the early church shifted emphasis: from waiting for the Kingdom on Earth to building a spiritual Kingdom, from a promised return to a cosmic reinterpretation of who he had been all along. The doctrine grew as a theological retrofit to fill the gap between expectation and reality.
So when modern Christianity asserts a universal truth claim about Jesus as the divine Son of God, it’s doing so at the far end of a long arc of theological development—one that began much more modestly and became increasingly metaphysical only as original claims (like his return) failed to materialize.
And that’s the key point: truth claims that evolve to protect themselves from falsification require more, not less, scrutiny. The moment a worldview rewrites itself to escape being proven wrong, it moves out of the realm of reliable truth and into the realm of unfalsifiable belief.
So yes, you’re right—the claim that Jesus was God incarnate wasn’t there from the start. But that doesn’t make the final version stronger. It just makes it more carefully constructed. And that’s exactly why we have to treat it not as inherited truth, but as historical theology—subject to evidence, context, and reason like any other belief.
I think the reply is that there is no place for facts in faith.
If faith has no place for facts, then it removes itself from the realm of truth claims entirely. In that case, faith becomes a private mode of meaning, not a public explanation of reality. And if someone says, “This story brings me comfort,” or “This ritual helps me feel connected,” there’s no argument to be had—those are personal experiences, and they live in the subjective domain. They’re not the kinds of things that can be verified or falsified.
But religion, as it’s commonly practiced and preached, rarely stays in that private lane. It doesn’t stop at “this is meaningful to me.” It says: God exists. Jesus rose from the dead. The universe was created with intention. There is an afterlife. You must believe. These aren’t abstract metaphors—they’re specific claims about how the world works, what happened in history, and what awaits us after death. And the moment those claims are made, we’re back in the territory of facts—of things that are either true or false.
If someone says, “Jesus literally rose from the dead,” that’s either a historical event or it isn’t. If someone says, “Heaven exists,” that’s either an actual destination or it isn’t. These aren’t symbolic truths—they’re assertions about reality. And if those assertions are to be taken seriously, they need to be backed by more than emotional resonance or inherited tradition. They need evidence. They need consistency. They need to be open to scrutiny, just like any other claim about the world.
So here’s the problem. You can’t say “faith has no place for facts” and then turn around and use that same faith to make factual claims about how the universe began, what morality demands, or what happens when we die. If faith is removed from facts, then it must also remove itself from conversations about truth. But if faith is trying to describe what’s real, then it has to play by the same rules as every other claim about reality.
You have to pick one. And that’s the heart of the issue. If faith is just personal meaning, it’s not a debate. But if faith is about what’s true, then it has to stand where all truth claims stand: in the light of reason, evidence, and honest inquiry.
NHC
