The Atheist Who Shouted Jesus

A bus on the Lagos to Ibadan road

Here is a scene. I have built it from pieces that anyone who has travelled that road will recognise, so please read it as a scene and not as a report.

A commercial bus leaves the park in Lagos on a weekday morning, every seat sold, and has hardly settled into the traffic when a man in the third row stands, grips the seat in front, and begins to pray over the trip. He prays for twenty five minutes. He rebukes the spirit of accidents. He declares angels along the whole length of the road. At some point he seems to address the tyres directly. Nobody asked him to stop, and nobody tries, because it is a Nigerian bus and you don’t interrupt a man who is praying.

Now I want to be fair to him. The instinct is sound. The Lagos to Ibadan expressway is about 128 kilometres long, and media reports cited by Africa Check put the toll at 645 deaths over twenty seven months, and 73 deaths from 175 crashes in the first quarter of 2025 alone (Africa Check, 2026). A traveller who does not pray before that road has either not read the news or has decided that fatalism is a spiritual gift. Praying before you set out is plain good sense.

What I would ask about is the kind of praying. Some prayer comes from a person who knows God the way you know someone whose number you actually have, and it can be quiet because it is not performing for anybody. And some prayer is driven by dread, loud and long and never sure it has said enough, because stopping feels dangerous. The letter to the Hebrews describes the people Christ came for in just those terms.

“and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

— Hebrews 2:15 (NIV)

I can’t see inside the man in the third row, and neither can you. He may be the most settled believer on the bus having a loud morning. Hold that thought, because the scene is not about him.

Somewhere past the first toll point, a passenger two rows behind says, in the local language and loud enough for the driver to hear, that he would like to do his own ministration now. Then he turns to the driver and tells him to drive carefully and bring everybody safely, since nobody is watching over us except the satellites in space.

The bus laughs. I’d have laughed too. It was well made, that jab. He had kept the shape of a prayer, the address and the petition and the confident close, and swapped God for GPS.

Why the quoting did not land

What happens next is something Nigeria produces better than anywhere I know. Half the bus turns on him. Someone gives him Genesis. Someone gives him John. A woman by the window delivers Psalm 23 with the force of a person who has known it since before she could tie her shoes. The man listens to each verse, shrugs it off, and waits for the next. He is not rude about it. He simply does not accept the premise.

And here I have to say something that will sound disloyal. He’s right to refuse the method. His conclusion is wrong, but his refusal of the method is correct. If I quote a book to you as proof, and you have not agreed that the book has any standing, then I have made a claim and not an argument. A Christian who cannot feel that difference will lose the debate before anyone speaks, and not because the Bible is weak. They skipped the step that makes the Bible usable in that conversation.

The people on that bus were sincere. They had the right God. But they were building a case the one man who needed it couldn’t walk into.

There is a second thing I would say, and it matters more. Nobody on that bus had actually asked for an answer, and that’s the part we skip. He had made a joke. Hold that against what Peter wrote, because Peter is the verse people reach for at this exact point.

What Peter meant by a defence

Most of us quote 1 Peter 3:15 as a slogan for being ready in an argument. Read it again with its neighbours and it sounds quite different.

Peter is writing to scattered exiles in Asia Minor who were being slandered, shut out and sometimes persecuted by their own families (Nichols, 2019). He tells them not to be frightened, and then he gives the instruction. The very first clause is not about arguments at all. It is about worship. In your hearts, revere Christ as Lord. The apologist’s foundation is that Jesus is actually Lord of him, which is a harder thing than being clever.

The word behind “answer” is apologia. It is a courtroom word, the speech a person makes when called to account. Socrates gave one in Athens. Paul gave one to the crowd in Jerusalem in Acts 22 and before Festus in Acts 25, and he described his whole Roman imprisonment in Philippians as a defence of the gospel (Nichols, 2019). So Peter is not asking Christians to start fights. He is asking them to be able to stand up and explain themselves when someone with a real question puts them on the stand.

Notice who triggers it. The answer is for “everyone who asks.” Peter doesn’t say everyone within earshot. He expects the question to come, often because people have watched how his readers live under pressure and want to know what is holding them up. And what is asked for is a reason for the hope, which is wider than a proof of a theory. Mikel Del Rosario says the verse is about hope, a relationship and not only philosophical ideas (Del Rosario, 2019), and I think he has it right. Finally, the whole thing is to be done “with gentleness and respect.” Nichols points out that the word translated respect can also mean reverence, the same word used for how we approach God (Nichols, 2019). So the person across the table from you gets treated with a trace of the awe you bring to your Lord.

Measured against that, a bus full of Christians shouting verses at a man who made a joke was a fine display of conviction and a poor display of 1 Peter 3:15. Nobody had asked for a reason, and nobody was offering one in a voice he could hear without flinching.

One more point before leaving the passage. The scene is invented, but the cost of being the dissenter on a Nigerian bus is not. Mubarak Bala, a Nigerian atheist, was convicted over Facebook posts that were found to blaspheme Islam, saw his sentence cut on appeal, and was released in January 2025 after four years in prison. One report of his release carried the headline that he feared for his life (Gazette, 2025). I raise it not to argue about the law, which is for another day, but because it should slow us down. Anyone in this country who says openly that he does not believe in God is paying a price for saying it. The least we owe such a person is the courtesy of an argument.

How the apostles argued with strangers

Look at how the apostles actually went about it with people who did not share their book.

At Pentecost, Peter did not open with doctrine. He opened with what his hearers already knew. He told them Jesus of Nazareth was “a man attested to you by God” through works God did among them, which they had seen for themselves (Acts 2:22, ESV). The thing came first and the interpretation came second. He was standing on shared ground before he asked anyone to move, and the Acts account has him ending the day with about three thousand people baptised.

Stephen, before the council that was about to condemn him, walked his judges through their own history, from Abraham to the prophets, and used it to show them a pattern in their own tradition of refusing the messenger God sent. He argued from their book, because they accepted it. Paul on the Areopagus in Athens had a different audience, so he used a different door. He began with an altar to an unknown god, which he could see, and then quoted their poets.

“‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”

— Acts 17:28 (NIV)

The NIV footnotes name two sources, the Cretan philosopher Epimenides and the Cilician Stoic Aratus (Christianity.com, n.d.). Paul read pagan literature carefully enough to quote it accurately and then turned it toward the resurrection. Nobody who did that opened with “the Bible says.”

None of this means Scripture drops out. It means a Christian earns the hearing. The case that the New Testament deserves to be taken seriously has real support, and it can be offered as a case. Greek manuscripts of the New Testament number about 5,795 in the tally Clay Jones cites, with Homer’s Iliad next at 1,757 and Plato at 210, which is far more than the old figure of seven that apologists quoted for years (Jones, 2012/2013). Jones makes a point that I wish more of us took to heart, which is that many popular figures in our circles are “woefully out of date,” and that being careless with them does us no favours. The New Testament still comes out by far the best attested ancient work. And the claim that Jesus rose was not a legend that took centuries to grow. Paul passes on a statement of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15 that scholars across the spectrum, including the sceptics Bart Ehrman and Gerd Lüdemann, place before Paul wrote. Lüdemann dates the elements of the tradition to the first two years after the crucifixion, and Ehrman says the creed was already circulating before Paul’s letters (Credo House, n.d.). That is a claim made in the lifetime of people who could have contradicted it.

A man who rejects the resurrection will still need to deal with that, and a verse thrown at him will not do it for him. Paul told Timothy to be a worker who handles the word of truth correctly (2 Timothy 2:15), and handling it correctly includes knowing when it is the argument and when the argument has to introduce it.

The tyre and the shout

Back to the bus, which has now reached one of those recently resurfaced stretches that make a driver lower his guard.

A tyre bursts.

It is loud, and the bus lurches, and for a second or two every position in the vehicle is suspended, the pastor’s and the Muslim cleric’s and the sceptic’s. There are only people who have been told without warning that they might not arrive.

And the man who twenty minutes earlier had promoted the satellites to guardian angels shouts the name of Jesus. Not as punctuation, and not ironically. He shouts it like someone in the dark with nobody to impress.

The driver is a professional. His hands know what to do before his mind has caught up. The bus slows, and stops, and everyone is alive. Then comes the laughter that people laugh when they have been shown something about themselves and are not sure what to do with it.

It would be easy to stop here and announce that God has been proved. I’d rather be honest about how much a shout is worth.

What a shout can and cannot prove

It doesn’t prove much to anyone but the shouter. Frightened people call on whatever name they grew up with, and in this country that is a name many people have heard since childhood. It could be reflex. It could be habit, or residue. And the research that tests the old saying about foxholes points the awkward way. In a 2012 set of studies, reminders of death pushed Christians and Muslims toward stronger belief in their own God, while atheists showed no such response, and the researchers concluded atheists do not turn to religion when confronted with death (LiveScience, 2012). Heflick and Goldenberg (2012) found something quieter and interesting. Atheists’ anxiety about death eased when their view that there is no afterlife was affirmed, and it did not ease when that view was challenged. The authors saw the same pattern in believers. So the folk wisdom that the sceptic always cracks in the end is not safe to build on. If we tell the story of the bus as a proof, a thoughtful sceptic will reply that we have misread our own side’s data.

But there is still something left, and I don’t want to throw it out. The man did not plan the shout. It came from below the positions a person builds over years, and it came in Jesus’ name and not the name of a satellite. That is worth noticing, gently, and then worth asking about. Why that name? The honest answer might be culture, or it might be more, and the right use of the scene is as the start of a conversation and not the end of one. C. S. Lewis, who spent years in unbelief himself, wrote that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (Lewis, 1940, as quoted in Christ and Pop Culture, n.d.). Whether the man on the bus heard anything in that tyre is between him and God. What I can say is that the megaphone was on, and the man heard something.

I should also say what the scene does not teach. It does not teach that the quiet man in the third row was a hypocrite, or that a loud prayer is a bad one. It does teach that faith which has been examined and found true can afford to be calm in the same moment that fear of death makes everyone else noisy.

Prepared hands and an open invitation

The driver also deserves a word, since I have been so busy with the theology. God rarely suspends the road to protect us. More often he puts competent hands in the right seat at the right moment, and I would call that grace without apology. Nehemiah, rebuilding Jerusalem under threat, prayed and then posted a guard (Nehemiah 4:9). The prayer and the guard were the same posture.

That has a public edge in Nigeria today. On 30 June 2026 the Federal Government confirmed that the Ibadan end of this very expressway was, in the words of the Minister of Works, “failing very badly,” and announced that the damaged section would be rebuilt in reinforced concrete (Nairametrics, 2026). Earlier, in May 2025, repairs had begun on failing expansion joints on bridges at Kara, Arepo and Magboro after a crash at Arepo (Nairametrics, 2026). I don’t know what burst the tyre in my scene, and it needs no villain. But a believer who prays for his trip and says nothing about the state of the road, the condition of the tyres, or the speed of the driver has not finished praying. Part of the work of faith is to ask for what the Government is paid to supply.

So here is what I would invite you to do with this. Next time somebody in your family, or your office, or your lecture hall says something outrageous about God, and you feel the verse rising in your throat, wait a moment. Ask them what they actually think and why. Find out what they will grant you. Find a place where you both already stand, and say something true from there, as gently as you can, and see whether they ask a second question. If they do, you are in 1 Peter 3:15 territory, and you will have earned the right to say what the Bible says.

Jesus Christ is Lord of every road, at every speed, and through every burst tyre and every joke that does not quite land. The tomb outside Jerusalem is empty, and the witnesses are on record. That is worth saying quietly to someone who has asked.

References

Biblical References

Acts 2:22 (ESV). Peter at Pentecost argues from what his hearers had seen. Quoted in part; the ESV was opened at biblia.com, where only a short excerpt could be displayed.
Acts 17:28 (NIV). Paul quotes pagan poets on the Areopagus; the footnotes name Epimenides and Aratus.
Hebrews 2:15 (NIV). The fear of death as a form of slavery, used to frame prayer that comes from dread.
1 Peter 3:15 (NIV). The epigraph and the centre of the argument: revere Christ, answer those who ask, with gentleness and respect.
2 Timothy 2:15. Referred to in paraphrase, as the call to handle the word of truth correctly.
Nehemiah 4:9. Referred to in paraphrase: Nehemiah prays and posts a guard.

Other Sources

Africa Check. (2026, February 4). Factsheet: Road safety in Nigeria in wake of high profile crash. https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/factsheets/factsheet-road-safety-nigeria-wake-high-profile-crash
Christ and Pop Culture. (n.d.). Celebrating C. S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain. https://christandpopculture.com/celebrating-c-s-lewis-the-problem-of-pain/
Christianity.com. (n.d.). Acts 17:28 (NIV). https://www.christianity.com/bible/niv/acts/17-28
Credo House. (n.d.). How we know 1 Corinthians 15:3 to 7 is a very early creed. https://credohouse.org/blog/how-we-know-1-corinthians-153-7-is-a-very-early-creed
Del Rosario, M. (2019, August 5). What every apologist needs to know about 1 Peter 3:15. Cross Examined. https://crossexamined.org/?p=76828
Gazette. (2025, January 8). Atheist, Mubarak Bala, jailed for blasphemy fears for life despite release after four years in prison. https://gazettengr.com/?p=348294
Heflick, N. A., & Goldenberg, J. L. (2012). No atheists in foxholes: Arguments for (but not against) afterlife buffers mortality salience effects for atheists. British Journal of Social Psychology, 51(2), 385-392. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/psy_facpub/1474
Jones, C. (2013, October 1). The bibliographical test updated. Christian Research Institute. (Original work published 2012 in Christian Research Journal, 35(3)). https://www.equip.org/articles/the-bibliographical-test-updated/
Lewis, C. S. (1940). The problem of pain. (Publisher to be added from the owner’s own copy.)
LiveScience. (2012). Thoughts of death make only the religious more devout. https://www.livescience.com/20994-death-religion-coping.html
Nairametrics. (2026, June 30). Lagos Ibadan expressway: FG confirms failed Ibadan section, orders rebuild. https://nairametrics.com/2026/06/30/lagos-ibadan-expressway-fg-confirms-failed-ibadan-section-orders-rebuild/
Nichols, S. (2019, March 25). An apology for apologetics. Ligonier Ministries. https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/apology-apologetics

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.