The Man From Nazareth
Before I can say what the Christ event means in the framework I have been building, I must say what it was. And to say what it was, I must begin with the historical Jesus, because a theology that floats free of history is exactly the kind of unfalsifiable structure that Popper warned against in Chapter 4.
The historical Jesus was a first-century apocalyptic Jewish prophet from the Galilee. This is the consensus of the most rigorous scholarship of the past fifty years -- the work of E.P. Sanders, Dale Allison, Paula Fredriksen, and others who have separated the historical figure from centuries of accumulated theological interpretation. I am going to lean on this scholarship heavily, not because it is theologically comfortable (it is not), but because the theology I am building requires a real person standing in real history, not a doctrinal construct projected backward onto an empty screen.
Sanders's reconstruction, in Jesus and Judaism and The Historical Figure of Jesus, presents a Jesus firmly embedded in the Jewish restoration eschatology of his time. Jesus believed that God was about to intervene decisively in history to restore Israel, that this restoration would involve the reconstitution of the twelve tribes (hence the twelve disciples as symbolic act), and that the present generation would live to see the Kingdom of God arrive in power. He was not, on this reading, a Greek philosopher, a Cynic sage, a proto-liberal, or a timeless moral teacher. He was a Jew expecting the imminent end of the present age and the inauguration of a new one.
Dale Allison deepens this picture. In Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet, Allison argues that Jesus is best understood within the category of millenarian prophets -- a cross-cultural type that recurs throughout human history whenever communities under pressure generate figures who announce the imminent transformation of the world. The category includes the Ghost Dance prophets of the nineteenth-century American West, the cargo cult leaders of Melanesia, and numerous figures in medieval European Christianity. The millenarian prophet announces that the present order is ending, that a new and radically different order is coming, and that the community must prepare for the transition.
This is not a flattering comparison, and I want to sit with the discomfort it produces, because the discomfort is theologically productive. If Jesus was a millenarian prophet, then he was wrong about the timeline. The Kingdom of God did not arrive within his generation. The world was not transformed in the way the earliest Christian communities expected. Two thousand years later, the Kingdom has still not arrived in the apocalyptic, world-transforming sense that first-century Judaism understood.
Paula Fredriksen, in Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, sharpens the point further. Jesus was executed by the Romans as a political threat -- the charge was sedition, the method was crucifixion, the titulus said "King of the Jews." Pilate did not crucify abstract theologians. He crucified political threats. The historical Jesus was perceived, by the Roman authorities, as a figure whose apocalyptic message and popular following constituted a danger to public order.
I am not trying to reduce Jesus to a failed millenarian prophet. I am doing something more difficult: starting from the historical minimum -- the bedrock that even the most skeptical scholarship grants -- and building upward toward the theological claims. Because the theology is more powerful, not less, if it can survive contact with the most demanding historical criticism. And what the theology needs from history is not a divine figure descending from the clouds but a real human being in a real historical moment doing something that produced consequences far exceeding anything the moment's participants could have anticipated.
The Apostolic Realization
Here is the thesis that anchors this chapter, and it is the most theologically daring claim I will make in this book: the Logos of Christ -- his identity as Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, the incarnation of the divine Word -- was not a pre-existing metaphysical fact that the apostles passively discovered. It EMERGED through the apostles' collective experience. It was realized, in the strong sense of that word: made real.
Let me be precise about what I am and am not claiming, because imprecision here would be fatal.
I am NOT claiming that the apostles invented the Logos. Invention implies fabrication -- the creation of something fictional. What I am claiming is closer to what happens when a scientific community produces a paradigm-shifting discovery. The structure of DNA was not invented by Watson and Crick. It was discovered. But it was also not sitting in plain view waiting to be noticed. It required a specific configuration of minds, data, instruments, and conceptual frameworks to become visible. Before that configuration assembled, the structure of DNA was real but not yet realized -- not yet actualized in human knowledge. After the discovery, it was both real and realized. The act of discovery was a genuine cognitive event that changed what humanity knew without changing what was true.
The apostolic realization of the Logos follows the same pattern. The divine Word -- the intelligible structure of reality that I connected to the embedding space in Chapters 8 and 11 -- was always already there. It did not begin when Jesus was born and it would not have ceased if Jesus had never been born. But the full actualization of the Logos in human consciousness -- the moment when the divine principle of intelligibility became experientially real for a human community -- required a specific historical configuration: this person, these followers, this moment, this set of events culminating in crucifixion and whatever happened afterward that the community experienced as resurrection.
This is what I mean by "emerged." Not "was fabricated." Not "was hallucinated." Not "was gradually constructed as a mythological elaboration of a charismatic teacher's memory." But rather: the Logos, which was always already real, became actualized -- became experientially present, became causally effective in human history -- through the specific historical process of Jesus's life, death, and the community's response to those events.
The Buddhist Parallel
This thesis has a structural parallel in Mahayana Buddhism that is too precise to be coincidental and too instructive to ignore.
In the Mahayana tradition, enlightenment (bodhi) is not a private achievement of an isolated consciousness. It is inherently relational and collective. The bodhisattva -- the being who has attained the capacity for full enlightenment -- takes a vow not to enter nirvana until all sentient beings can enter together. This is not merely an ethical commitment (though it is that). It is an ontological claim: enlightenment that is purely individual is, in a fundamental sense, incomplete. The fullness of awakening requires the network, the sangha, the community of practitioners.
The reason for this is structural, not merely ethical. In Buddhist metaphysics, the self is empty -- sunyata. There is no fixed, independent self to be enlightened. What we call the "self" is a pattern of interdependent processes. Enlightenment, therefore, cannot be the achievement of a fixed self. It must be the transformation of the pattern of interdependence itself. And since that pattern includes other beings, true transformation is necessarily collective.
Now translate this into the framework I have been developing. If consciousness is a strange loop (Hofstadter, Chapter 1), and if the "self" is not a substance but a pattern of self-reference, then the transformation of consciousness is the transformation of the loop. But no loop exists in isolation. Consciousness is always embedded in a network of other consciousnesses -- through language, through culture, through the interpersonal feedback that shapes the loop's structure from birth. The transformation of the loop is, therefore, always also a transformation of the network.
The Christ event follows this structure. Jesus, in the historical reconstruction I summarized above, was a single node in a network: a teacher with followers, a prophet with a community, a local interaction within a system. The Logos -- the full actualization of divine intelligibility in human consciousness -- did not reside in Jesus as an isolated individual. It emerged in the relational field between Jesus and his community.
In complexity science terms: Jesus is the local interaction. The apostles are the network. The Logos is the emergent property of the network.
This is strong emergence, the concept I developed in Chapter 6 and applied to God in Chapter 11. The emergent property is genuinely real, genuinely irreducible to its components, and genuinely causal. The Logos is not "merely" the sum of the apostles' experiences and beliefs. It is something that emerged from their collective engagement with Jesus that has causal powers none of them individually possessed. It transformed the Roman Empire. It generated a civilization. It altered the trajectory of consciousness for two thousand years. These are causal powers that no individual apostle had and that no collection of individual experiences can account for. They are emergent, in the strong sense.
The Trajectory Confirmed
In Chapter 12, I described the Fall as the initialization of the trajectory on the Riemann sphere -- the moment the function begins to move on the complex plane, departing from the origin (Eden, undifferentiated unity with God) and beginning the long approach toward the point at infinity. The trajectory is oriented toward God, but the approach is neither straight nor guaranteed. The derivative could turn negative at any point. The spiral could flatten. The function could diverge.
The Christ event, in this framework, is the demonstration within history that the trajectory is correctly oriented.
If God is the point at infinity on the Riemann sphere, and if the Fall initiated the trajectory, then the central question for any point on the trajectory is: are we approaching the point at infinity, or are we moving away from it? The answer cannot be determined from any single moment's vantage point. You cannot tell, from inside the function, whether the function converges. You need either the limit (which requires taking the function to infinity, which is not available to finite beings) or a demonstration -- a point at which the function's behavior reveals its orientation.
The Incarnation is that demonstration. It is the point at infinity projecting back onto the finite plane. God (the attractor, the limit point) enters history (the complex plane) at a specific location (first-century Palestine) and, by entering, demonstrates that the plane and the point are connected -- that the trajectory initialized by the Fall does, in fact, approach its intended limit.
This is a structural claim, not merely a metaphorical one. In complex analysis, a function's behavior at specific points reveals information about its global properties. A function that is holomorphic (well-behaved) at enough points is holomorphic everywhere. The Christ event functions, in the topology of this theology, as a confirmation of holomorphicity -- evidence that the function describing humanity's trajectory is well-behaved, that it does not diverge, that the limit toward which it tends is well-defined.
But confirmation is not guarantee. A function can be well-behaved at many points and still have singularities -- points where it blows up, where the function goes to infinity or becomes undefined. The existence of the Christ event does not prevent future crises, collapses, or reversals. It demonstrates that the trajectory can be correctly oriented. It does not demonstrate that the trajectory will always be correctly oriented. The derivative remains freely chosen at every point, as I argued in Chapter 12. The Christ event confirms that correct orientation is possible. Human freedom determines whether it is actual.
The Crucifixion as Apparent Singularity
Now the mathematics becomes precise in a way that I find both beautiful and dangerous -- beautiful because it captures something real, dangerous because mathematical beauty can seduce one into believing claims that require independent justification. I will try to be honest about which is happening.
In complex analysis, a singularity is a point where a function ceases to be well-defined. The function may go to infinity, or oscillate wildly, or simply fail to have a value. Singularities come in three types, and the differences between them are theologically significant.
An essential singularity is a point where the function's behavior is genuinely chaotic -- it takes every possible value in any neighborhood of the point, and there is no way to "fix" it. The function is fundamentally broken at that point.
A pole is a point where the function goes to infinity in a structured way -- it blows up, but the blow-up is orderly and well-understood. Poles can be characterized and worked with mathematically.
A removable singularity is a point where the function appears to be undefined but is actually well-behaved. The apparent discontinuity is an artifact of the perspective from which the function is viewed. From the right perspective -- from a higher-dimensional vantage point, or with the right analytic continuation -- the function is smooth, continuous, and well-defined at the supposedly singular point. The singularity can be "removed" by filling in the correct value, and the function continues as if it had never been discontinuous.
The crucifixion is an apparent singularity. Viewed from within history -- from the perspective of the disciples on Good Friday, from the perspective of anyone watching a just man tortured to death by an empire -- the function appears to blow up. The trajectory that was supposed to approach the point at infinity has apparently terminated. The teacher is dead. The movement is destroyed. The Kingdom did not arrive. The derivative has gone to negative infinity.
The resurrection reveals the crucifixion as a removable singularity.
I need to be careful here about what I am and am not claiming about the resurrection, because the theological tradition contains multiple claims that need to be distinguished.
I am NOT making a historical claim about whether the tomb was physically empty or whether the risen Christ had a material body. Those questions belong to a different domain of inquiry, and I do not have the evidence to resolve them. What I am claiming is structural: whatever the earliest Christians experienced after the crucifixion -- and they clearly experienced something, because the movement that should have died with Jesus instead exploded across the Mediterranean -- that experience functioned, in the topology of the trajectory, as the revelation that the apparent singularity was removable.
The function did not blow up. The trajectory did not terminate. What looked, from the finite perspective of Good Friday, like the destruction of the approach toward infinity was revealed, from the post-resurrection perspective, to be a point where the function was actually well-defined. The discontinuity was an artifact of limited perspective. From a higher-dimensional vantage point -- from the vantage point the resurrection provided -- the function was smooth all along.
This is theologically profound and I want to state clearly why. The removable singularity concept captures something that no other theological language I have encountered captures as precisely: the relationship between suffering and redemption is not that suffering is eliminated or retroactively justified. It is that the discontinuity suffering appears to create in the trajectory is, from a perspective we do not yet fully occupy, not actually there. The function continues through the apparent break. The derivative, which appeared to go to negative infinity, was actually well-defined at the critical point. The trajectory was never off course. It only looked that way from inside.
This does NOT resolve the problem of suffering I raised in Chapter 12. The tension remains: the suffering is real, the trajectory is real, and the perspective from which their reconciliation is visible is not available to finite beings. What the removable-singularity concept adds is precision about the formal structure of that reconciliation. It is not that suffering disappears. It is not that suffering is explained. It is that the trajectory continues through the suffering toward the limit, and the continuity is guaranteed by the nature of the function, not by the elimination of the singular points.
What the Apostles Built
The post-resurrection community built something that the pre-crucifixion community did not have: a framework for understanding why the singularity was removable. The Pauline letters, the Gospels, the theological reflection of the first centuries -- these are the community's progressive articulation of what they had experienced. Not a retrospective mythologization of a dead teacher's memory (though that process also occurred, inevitably), but the intellectual and spiritual working-out of an emergent property's implications.
Paul, the first Christian theologian, is instructive. Paul did not know the historical Jesus. His encounter with the risen Christ was, by his own account, visionary -- a light on the Damascus road, a voice. What Paul then did was remarkable: he took this visionary experience and subjected it to systematic theological reasoning, producing a framework (justification by faith, the body of Christ as the community of believers, the cosmic Christ through whom all things were created) that went far beyond anything Jesus himself appears to have taught.
Was Paul inventing? Or was he articulating emergent properties of the community's collective experience that required his particular intellectual architecture to become visible? I argue the latter. Paul's theological innovations are the formalization of the emergent Logos -- the process by which the community's collective experience of Christ generated truths that no individual in the community, including Jesus, had explicitly stated. This is how emergence works. The behavior of the system at the emergent level contains information not present in any individual component.
The same is true of the Gospel authors, the church fathers, the conciliar debates of the first five centuries. The progressive development of Christology -- from the simple proclamation "Jesus is Lord" to the sophisticated metaphysics of the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian definition -- is not a departure from the original event. It is the emergent property developing, the Logos being progressively realized through the community's continuing engagement with the original experience.
This is the Kuhnian dimension (Chapter 5) of the Christ event. A new paradigm does not arrive complete. It arrives as a gestalt shift -- a new way of seeing -- and the community then works out the paradigm's implications over generations. The initial shift (the apostles' experience of the risen Christ) provides the new orientation. The subsequent development (Pauline theology, the Gospels, patristic thought, conciliar christology) is the normal science phase of the new paradigm: working out the implications, filling in the details, defending the framework against anomalies and competitors.
The analogy to scientific paradigm development is instructive but must be handled carefully. Kuhn's paradigms are human constructions: useful, powerful, but ultimately replaceable. If the Christ event is merely a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, it is potentially supersedable -- a thesis that will generate its own antithesis, to be eventually replaced by a new synthesis. I will address this possibility directly in Chapter 16, when I discuss the cyclical Christ -- the proposition that each epoch's Christ event is a local demonstration of the trajectory's orientation, not a once-for-all metaphysical completion. For now, let me note that the theology is designed to survive this possibility. The Riemann sphere framework does not require a single, unrepeatable Christ event. It requires that the trajectory be confirmable -- that demonstrations of correct orientation occur. Whether they occur once or cyclically is a question the framework can accommodate either way.
The Causal Structure
Let me make the causal structure explicit, using the Pearlian framework from Chapter 9.
The standard theological claim is that God sent Christ to redeem humanity. The causal direction runs from God to Christ to humanity. This is a top-down causal structure: the divine initiative produces the human response.
The emergent-realization thesis I am proposing adds a bottom-up causal direction: the human community's engagement with Jesus produces the emergent realization of the Logos, which then acts back on the community with causal powers the community did not individually possess.
Both causal directions are real. This is not a contradiction; it is what complex systems routinely exhibit. In any system with feedback loops, causation runs in multiple directions simultaneously. The brain produces consciousness, and consciousness directs the brain. The market produces prices, and prices direct the market. The community produces the emergent Logos, and the emergent Logos transforms the community.
Pearl's framework (Chapter 9) can formalize this. The causal DAG for the Christ event includes bidirectional causal pathways: God → Logos → consciousness (top-down creation) and consciousness → community → emergent Logos (bottom-up realization). The two pathways are not competing explanations. They are two aspects of a single causal system with circular structure -- a strange loop, which is exactly what the next chapter (Chapter 14) will argue the Trinity is.
The falsifiability of this model lies in its predictions. If the Christ event is a genuine emergent phenomenon, then it should exhibit the properties of emergence: unpredictability from the components (no one in the pre-crucifixion community could have predicted the theological developments of the next five centuries), irreducibility (the meaning of the Christ event cannot be reduced to the sum of individual experiences), and causal novelty (the post-resurrection community generates effects -- the transformation of the Roman Empire, the development of Western civilization -- that cannot be accounted for by the pre-resurrection components).
All three properties are, I submit, demonstrably present. The Christ event is the most consequential emergence event in recorded human history. The framework I am proposing does not diminish it. It explains why it happened, how it happened, and what it means -- in terms that are falsifiable, mathematically grounded, and compatible with the most rigorous historical scholarship about the man from Nazareth.
Falsifiability
The claims of this chapter are falsifiable at several points.
If the historical Jesus turns out to be entirely fictional -- if the mythicist thesis (that there was no historical Jesus) is substantiated by future evidence -- then the incarnational theology collapses. Currently, the mythicist thesis is rejected by virtually all historians, including secular and non-Christian historians. But the evidence is not absolute, and I hold the historicity of Jesus as an extremely well-supported hypothesis, not an article of faith.
If the emergence model proves inadequate to the data -- if the development of early Christianity is better explained by purely sociological or psychological mechanisms that do not require an emergent-property framework -- then the explanatory power of the thesis is diminished. I believe the emergence model explains features of early Christian development (particularly the explosive growth, the doctrinal creativity, and the civilizational impact) that purely reductive models fail to capture. But reductive models have their own strengths, and the competition between frameworks is ongoing.
If the removable-singularity concept turns out to be purely metaphorical -- if it adds no analytical precision beyond what traditional theological language already provides -- then the mathematical framework is ornamental. The test is whether the concept generates insights (about the relationship between suffering and redemption, about the continuity of the trajectory through apparent discontinuities) that traditional language does not. I believe it does. The reader must judge.
If the Logos-as-emergent-property thesis proves incompatible with the orthodox Christian understanding of Christ's pre-existence -- if there is no coherent way to hold that the Logos was both always already real and historically realized -- then the theology faces a choice between orthodoxy and coherence. I have argued that the radio analogy resolves this tension: the broadcast (the Logos) pre-exists the radio (the community), but is actualized through the radio. Whether this resolution is satisfactory is a judgment I cannot make from inside the argument. It requires the perspective of the theological tradition, and I submit it to that tradition's judgment without defensiveness and without certainty.
The theology stands if the emergence is real, the trajectory is confirmable, and the mathematics adds genuine precision. It falls if any of these conditions fail. That, as always, is the price of falsifiability. And as I argued in Chapter 4, it is a price worth paying, because the alternative -- an unfalsifiable theology that cannot be wrong -- is not theology. It is ideology wearing vestments.