“What makes Jesus any different from Zeus?” CJ Rhodes asked that as a teenager, and he says a lot of the time, people could not answer him. He eventually became a Christian anyway, and later pastor of Mount Helm Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. No one handed him a decisive rebuttal. What moved him was a combination: friends who kept showing up, experiences he could not explain away, and finally a night when he stopped arguing and asked God to save him. His story is a realistic picture of how belief forms in a thinking person.
The picture matters because skeptics and Christians often share an assumption. Both expect that if Christianity were true, someone should be able to say the one thing that settles it. When no one does, the skeptic concludes there is nothing there, and the Christian concludes he failed. Rhodes’s account suggests the expectation itself is off.
What kind of doubt was it?
Rhodes is careful with the word. An atheist claims there is no God. An agnostic says we do not know. But he adds that agnostics generally “tend to live in ways like atheists.” They are not praying, and if they keep religious habits, they are going through the motions. He lived that way from about age 11 to about 17, questioning everything and making the Christians around him uncomfortable with hard questions.
His doubt had several sources at once. His parents had grown up Baptist but drifted, and church attendance at home was irregular. They divorced when he was six, which left him with “a lot of intellectual and emotional questions.” On the Sundays the family did attend, he noticed what he later described with a line he credits to Dr. Jerry Young: “the audio in the video didn’t match.” People said one thing in church and did not live it after the service. Then his reading in Egyptian mythology, Greek mythology and the humanities raised bigger questions, including the one about Zeus.
That combination explains why a single argument rarely works. A strong answer to the Zeus question would reach the intellectual layer. It would do nothing for a boy’s questions about his parents’ divorce or his disappointment in churchgoers who did not live what they said.
Around age 12, he says, he “kind of broke up with God.” The terms he set are revealing: “if there’s a God, God will reveal God’s self to me at some point.” Someone who says that has stopped expecting the church to settle the question and has handed it back to God. He was refusing to pretend while staying open to being shown. For anyone talking with a skeptic, the difference between that and a person who has ruled the question out for good changes almost everything about the conversation.
Damascus or Emmaus?
Rhodes names two patterns from Scripture: “I think there are generally two kinds of conversion stories. There’s a Damascus Road, and then there’s an Emmaus Road.” He places himself on the second.
In Acts 9, Saul of Tarsus is stopped by a light from heaven and the voice of Jesus. It is sudden and overwhelming. In Luke 24:13-35, two disciples walk to Emmaus on the day of the resurrection. Jesus joins them, and they do not recognize him. They even tell this stranger that women had found the tomb empty and had seen angels saying he was alive (Luke 24:22-24). They had the report. They did not yet recognize the one standing beside them.
Recognition comes slowly. Jesus walks with them, opens the Scriptures, and sits down to eat. Only then “their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:31). Looking back, they ask each other, “Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32).
Both passages are narratives. They describe what happened to particular people and do not require every conversion to follow one route. Rhodes uses them to name two patterns, a fair application. The Emmaus account fits his question closely, though. What those disciples needed came through company, conversation and Scripture over the course of a walk.
What did his friends actually do?
In his late teens, Rhodes had Christian friends at school from Pentecostal and charismatic churches. He calls them “very relational, very humorous.” They talked with him whenever they could, sometimes handed him a cassette or a book, and occasionally said outright, “CJ, you need to be saved.” When he asked whether salvation was anything like Nirvana, they told him whatever he meant, this was very serious.
No one in this account builds a case that answers the Zeus question. The friends did something else, and it addressed the problem that had pushed him away. The church of his childhood had shown him people whose words and lives did not line up. These friends liked him, treated his questions as real, and cared enough about the gospel to say uncomfortable things. Their seriousness about salvation came from people he could see living with joy and consistency, so it was hard to dismiss as the performance he had learned to expect. Rhodes’s summary is plain: “those relationships planted seeds.”
Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, named the principle in the same conversation: “hypocrisy isn’t the absence of sin is the absence of honesty.” A doubter who has been burned by churchgoers is usually reached by honest people rather than flawless ones. As she put it, “They’re not looking for us to be perfect, but they’re looking for us to be transparent.”
What were the moments he could not explain?
The friendships prepared him. What finally moved him, Rhodes says, were “some very powerful experiences that I could not explain away.” In Pentecostal and charismatic settings, people he had never met told him things he knew no one else knew, and said God had told them to share them.
Those encounters produced a hunger. If God thought enough of him to send a stranger with a message meant for him, “then that was enough for me to begin a journey.” At 12 he had said that if God existed, God would make himself known. These moments felt to him like the start of that answer.
He then sets a limit on them: “I didn’t build my faith on miracles alone or the prophetic alone.” The experiences, he says, were what God used to get his attention. An experience can make a person willing to look. Rhodes never asks it to carry the full weight of a lifetime of belief.
Isn’t this just social pressure and strong emotion?
This is the strongest objection. Rhodes had warm friends in a particular church culture, had intense experiences in that culture, and then converted. A skeptic could reasonably ask whether he was absorbed into a community rather than persuaded of anything true, and whether supposed prophetic words are exactly the sort of thing people manipulate.
The conversation does not avoid the second point. Lisa Fields, who grew up in a nondenominational Pentecostal background, acknowledged that the prophetic and miraculous carry a negative reputation because people abuse them. She argued that abuse and authenticity can both be present and that “we can’t throw out the baby with the bath water.” Rhodes agreed and widened the point: every tradition has its abuses, including those of his Reformed friends, and none should be judged only by its worst examples.
On the first point, the honest limit is this. A testimony shows that something happened to a person and changed him. It does not prove to anyone else that Christianity is true. Rhodes’s story cannot answer the Zeus question for you, and it does not try. That question deserves its own hearing, because Christianity’s central claim is of a different kind from a myth: that a specific man was crucified and rose bodily from the dead in history. How someone came to believe is a separate matter from the case for what he believes.
Still, the objection assumes that if relationships and experiences were involved, reasons were not. Rhodes’s later life cuts against that. The teenager who read mythology for fun went on to Ole Miss and Duke Divinity School, became a pastor, and serves as a professor and director of religious life at Alcorn State University. He kept thinking after he started believing. His account suggests the friendships and experiences made him willing to take the questions seriously from the inside.
How did it end?
One night, after leaving a revival, Rhodes went home and cried out to God for salvation. His story lacks the dramatic rescue some testimonies describe. “I was the pretty good kid, but the one who was estranged from God intellectually.” Of that night he says, “I experienced God really embracing me as the prodigal son who had come home.”
The image comes from Luke 15. When the wayward son returns, “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The son has a speech prepared. The father reaches him before he can finish it.
For an intellectual doubter, that is a telling way to describe the end of doubt. Rhodes’s questions had been real, and he kept asking them for years. His friends never resolved all of them. They stayed close enough, and honest enough, that he was still listening when something else happened. And the step that ended his estrangement was one he experienced as being met by a Father who had been running toward him from a great way off.