In The Case for Christ, Yale Law School graduate and former Chicago Tribune legal-affairs reporter Lee Strobel approaches the history of Jesus Christ as though it were a story he was reporting on. He isolates the most important aspects of Jesus’s life and death—His biography, His divinity, His resurrection—and consults world-renowned experts in those aspects to determine their truth. A long-time religious skeptic, Strobel begins the book as an atheist; by the end, overwhelmed by the amount of evidence in favor of faith, Strobel is reborn as a follower of Christ.
In course of the book, Strobel visits 14 scholars with an array of expertise—in philosophy, archaeology, psychology, medicine, history, and theology—and subjects them to the same kind of cross-examination he might have used on a witness in a court of law. The results of his investigation are these:
Whereas Strobel once thought the gospels were legends concocted by biased authors, his conversation with Craig Blomberg, a scholar of the New Testament, confirms that the gospels bear all the markings of trustworthy eyewitness accounts: Their contradictions concern only small details; and even the gospel writers’ contemporary critics took much of Jesus’s story, including the working of miracles, for granted. If the central events of Jesus’s life weren’t contested in the years after his death, there’s no reason to question them today.
It has long been noted that the gospels of the New Testament don’t all tell the same story, and some skeptics have latched onto that phenomenon to call Jesus’s reality into question. However, the fact that the gospels harmonize on all the major points while diverging on minor ones suggests that (a) the gospels are reliable and (b) the overall contours of Jesus’s story are factually accurate. Also, Christianity couldn’t have thrived in Jerusalem—as it did almost immediately after Jesus’s death—if the gospels had been exaggerated: Everyone would have known the gospel authors were lying.
Strobel’s interview with Bruce Metzger, a Princeton professor specializing in the textual history of the New Testament, confirms that the documents on which the New Testament is based date to an extremely early period in the Church and are authentic. This finding answers the suspicion that Jesus’s supernatural activities were added to the Gospels after the fact to establish his divinity.
Many believe the only textual source for Jesus’s existence is the Bible itself, but Strobel’s investigation proves otherwise. In fact, there is more historical evidence for Jesus’s existence than for many historical personages whose reality we take for granted. And not only his existence: Secular sources, like Josephus’s Testimonium Flavianum and Tacitus’s writings, attest to Jesus’s ability to perform miracles as well as his crucifixion and his early followers’ belief in his Resurrection.
No archeological finding has disproved the New Testament, and Luke’s gospel has proven especially accurate, with references to geographical and cultural landmarks later confirmed by archaeological digs in the Middle East.
The Jesus Seminar, a collective of liberal and radical Christian scholars, has attempted to draw a distinction between a naturalistic Jesus (who really existed) and a mythological Jesus (who only exists in the New Testament). But the Jesus Seminar’s scholars rely on a number of specious sources, such as the Gospel of Thomas, to make their case. The evidence for the gospels’ account, from secular sources like Josephus to the documentary record of the Christian canon, is far more robust and convincing than that for the Jesus Seminar’s theories.
Some skeptics have argued that Jesus didn’t actually believe he was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. However, the numerous references Jesus makes to his own provenance as a deity and the Messiah confirm he did in fact believe he was the Christ, sent to redeem the world. Examples include Jesus’s allusions to the Book of Daniel, wherein the Messiah was “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven,” and his affirmation of Peter in Matthew 16:15, when Peter names Jesus as the Christ.
Skeptics of Jesus have claimed he was just a mentally disturbed man whom later peoples have taken all too seriously. However, those with paranoid schizophrenia or other mental illnesses exhibit an array of symptoms beyond delusions of grandeur, including antisociality and trouble expressing emotion. Jesus exhibited none of these symptoms, and he supported his claims of divinity by performing independently verified miracles.
Although some believe Jesus voluntarily limited his divine powers when he was incarnated, the New Testament shows that he possessed all the attributes of deity, including omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. Key examples include John 16:30 (“Now are we sure that thou knowest all things”), which entails Jesus’s omniscience, and Matthew 28:18 (“All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth”), which indicates Jesus’s omnipotence.
Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Micah made a number of predictions about the identity of the Messiah, including minor details like his place of birth and whether he would be buried with no broken bones. The odds that someone could match these prophecies by chance is infinitesimal. Jesus, of course, fit these predictions completely.
Skeptics of the Resurrection have attempted to explain away Jesus’s “rise” by claiming he never actually died on the cross. Strobel interviews Dr. Alexander Metherell, a biblical scholar and medical doctor, whose medical analysis of Jesus’s brutal beating before the crucifixion, as well as the damage done by the crucifixion itself, establishes conclusively that Jesus was dead when he was entombed.
The relevant canonical sources for the empty tomb—the gospel of Mark and the creed in 1 Corinthians—have been dated to within a matter of years of Christ’s Resurrection; thus it’s highly unlikely their accounts are the product of legend. Skeptics at the time implicitly accepted that the tomb was empty, and the fact that the canonical accounts describe women discovering the empty tomb is a testament to the accounts’ reliability: If the New Testament authors were making the whole thing up, they would undoubtedly have chosen to have men discover the empty tomb (first-century Jewish society was extremely patriarchal; women’s testimony wasn’t even admissible in the Jewish courts of the time).
There is ample biblical evidence for Jesus’s appearance after his death: The early-authored book Acts contains references to Jesus’s appearance, and the gospels describe encounters Jesus’s followers and others had with Jesus. But there is also a wealth of circumstantial evidence that corroborates the biblical account of the resurrection, including the disciples’ subsequent martyrdom and the remarkable speed with which Jews converted to Christianity. No person would go to his or her grave, or completely renounce the religion of his or her birth, for a lie.
At the conclusion of his investigation, Strobel undergoes an existential crisis: Although he’s lived his life as an atheist, he’s discovered the evidence for Jesus Christ is irrefutable. He locks himself in his home office to meditate over all he’s learned; as he does so, he confesses his heavy drinking and adultery to the reader. Looking over the notes from his investigation, he takes what he considers the logical next step: He pledges himself to Christ.
For much of his life, Lee Strobel, a Yale Law School graduate and legal affairs reporter for the Chicago Tribune, was an atheist. For him, belief in God required too many leaps of faith: Why was there evil in the world if people were created by a loving God? Wasn’t the evidence of evolution far more compelling than that of a divine creator? Weren’t miracles that flouted the laws of nature literally incredible?
Strobel’s attitude toward Christ began to change in 1979, when his wife, a longtime agnostic, declared that she had become a Christian. Strobel worried that she would become puritanical and self-righteous, but when she began exhibiting greater poise and self-confidence, he became intrigued by the doctrine of beliefs that was improving her character.
He decided to treat Christ and Christianity like a story he was reporting on. He dived into the research scholarship on the Bible as well as the text of the Bible itself. He interviewed experts and studied the archaeological record. And as his knowledge grew, he found himself drawn to a conclusion he’d previously thought absurd: that Jesus had not only existed, but was also divine.
The Case for Christ is a reconstruction of Strobel’s spiritual journey from skeptic to believer. Each chapter of the book is built around a particular question concerning Jesus: whether the eyewitness accounts of his existence can be trusted, whether Jesus truly believed he was the son of God, whether Jesus was in fact resurrected. To answer each of these questions, Strobel interviews an academic expert and analyzes the relevant historical and biblical texts. He lays out “the case for Christ” as a lawyer might—with ample eyewitness, documentary, and corroborating evidence—and asks us, his jury, to approach his argument objectively and with an open mind.
Strobel begins his investigation by interviewing Dr. Craig Blomberg, a renowned biblical scholar and author of the book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. (The four gospels are, in essence, biographies of Jesus.) Strobel picks Blomberg because, although he’s a man of faith, he can be trusted not to paper over gaps in the historical record: He is known to have grappled with the objections to Christianity and nevertheless maintained his belief.
The Gospels
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
One of the primary points of controversy surrounding the first three gospels (also known as the “Synoptic” gospels) is their authorship: Did Matthew, Mark, and Luke truly write the gospels to which their names are attached?
The answer is yes. Although scholars don’t know for certain who wrote each gospel, early church testimony is uniform on the subject of the authorship of the first three gospels. According to writings by Papias (125 AD) and Irenaeus (180 AD), Matthew, a tax collector also known as Levi, was the author of the first gospel; John Mark, a disciple of Peter, was the author of the second gospel; and Luke, Paul’s companion and physician, was the author of “The Gospel of Luke” and “Acts.” It is unlikely that commentators like Papias and Irenaeus would lie about the authorship of these texts: As a tax collector, Matthew was probably not much favored during Jesus's time, and Mark and Luke weren’t even among Jesus's twelve apostles. When later writers created apocryphal (in other words, fictitious) gospels, they used more famous figures like Philip, Peter, and Mary.
There is some debate, however, when it comes to the authorship of John’s gospel, the fourth gospel. An early Christian writer named Papias refers to the author both as John the apostle and John the elder, and it’s unclear whether they’re two different people or the same person; there’s also evidence of an “editor” modifying the very end of John’s gospel. Papias’s writings notwithstanding, the testimony unanimously points to John the apostle as author.
When we pick up a biography in a bookstore, we expect the story to begin with the subject’s birth—or even before it—and proceed to the subject’s death (if the subject of the biography is already deceased). But the biographies offer only a partial account of Jesus’s life.
It’s important to remember that ancient biographies are quite different from the biographies we might buy in our local bookstore. In the ancient world, biographies had a didactic function: that is, they were meant to teach readers lessons rather than depict their subject’s entire life. So Mark, for example, felt no compunction about minimizing Jesus's early years in favor of the events leading up to Jesus's crucifixion.
There’s also a theological reason for the gospels’ selective approach to Jesus's life. Jesus's teachings derive their authority from his divinity—his death and resurrection, which provided atonement for the sins of humanity. Because this event is the most important part of Jesus's story, it stands to reason his biographers would concentrate on it.
“Q” is scholars’ shorthand for “Quelle,” German for “source.” Analysts of the first three gospels have determined that Mark’s gospel was written prior to Matthew’s and Luke’s, and that Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels not only draw on Mark’s, but also include material from an anonymous text, “Q.” Q comprises a compilation of Jesus's sayings without any narrative to connect them.
Some skeptics have claimed that the existence of “Q” undermines the gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s life because it doesn’t feature miracles. But, though there’s no narration of miracles in Q, Jesus does speak of miracles he’s performed. Because Q predates the Synoptic Gospels, these references provide strong evidence of Jesus's divinity.
(Another curiosity is why Matthew and Luke, who were eyewitnesses to Jesus's works, would rely on Mark’s gospel, which was a second-hand account based on the recollections of Peter. Blomberg responds that Peter was closer to Jesus than Matthew or Luke, and so Mark’s gospel, as a representation of Peter’s account, contained information neither Matthew nor Luke could know.)
Scholars and skeptics alike have noted the differences between the gospel of John and the three gospels that precede it. At one time, the scholarly consensus was that the linguistic and theological differences one finds in John were due to the fact it was written last—in other words, John felt no need to repeat the stories told in the prior three gospels. More recently, scholars have opined that John’s gospel was written largely independently of the other three and so reflects John’s own personal emphases.
One of the most obvious differences between the Jesus described in John and the Jesus of the Synoptic gospels is Jesus’s divinity—John’s Jesus is much more emphatic about his status as the Son of God and God himself. Skeptics have latched onto this disparity to argue that John’s account is influenced by legend and likely a fabrication.
Although references to Jesus's divinity are more pronounced in the gospel of John, they are very much present in the Synoptics as well (see Matthew 14:22–33 and Mark 6:45–52, wherein Jesus walks on water). Another example is Jesus's reference to himself as “Son of Man” in the Synoptics. Whereas many commentators take this moniker to signify Jesus's humanity or mortality, it’s actually a reference to Daniel 7:13–14, wherein the Messiah was “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven.” In other words, “Son of Man” actually signifies deity.
In short, John’s theological emphasis doesn’t compromise the factuality of his account. Although John is more overtly theological than the Synoptic authors, the Synoptics too have theologies: Luke, for example, emphasizes the moral obligation to care for the poor, while Matthew contemplates the relation between Christianity and Judaism.
We all know that memory is unreliable; sometimes it’s hard to remember what we had for dinner last night. Can the gospel accounts be trusted given how long after Jesus’s life and death they were written?
In her book A History of God, former nun Karen Armstrong notes that Mark’s gospel, the earliest gospel to be written, wasn’t written until 70 AD, approximately forty years after Jesus’s death. She argues that by that time, the events of Jesus’s life had become so overladen with myth that it’s impossible to treat Mark’s gospel—or any of the gospels—as factual accounts.
Blomberg offers two corrections to this account.
It’s worth remembering that the books of the New Testament don’t appear in the order in which they were written. In fact, the earliest sections of the New Testament to be composed are Paul’s letters (written between 40–50 AD), which themselves feature elements from an oral tradition dating back to within a few years of Jesus’s death. A key example appears in 1 Corinthians 15. This passage finds Paul repeating the creed of Jesus’s death, resurrection, and appearance to his apostles and followers. If Paul was told of these events shortly after his conversion to Christianity—which took place in the mid-30s AD—that means that Jesus’s divinity was accepted fact in the immediate aftermath of his death. In other words, the earliest accounts of Jesus in the New Testament support the theology of the gospels.
Although Strobel finds Blomberg’s arguments compelling, he intends to make sure he raises as many objections as he can to strengthen the case for Jesus. So, putting on his lawyer cap, he subjects Blomberg’s account to eight tests.
Given the theological goals of the gospels’ authors—that is, their goal of persuading and converting nonbelievers—one might think they weren’t at all interested in providing an accurate historical account. This is not the case.
On the contrary, the gospel writers were at pains to adhere to the conventions of historical or biographical writing of the time. For example, Luke begins his gospel with an explicit statement of purpose; he defines his task as producing an “orderly account” of the events he relates, based on his own careful investigation.
Some scholars have argued that the gospel writers’ intent was not to record history accurately, but rather to provide a history where none existed. This argument relies on the fact that early Christians believed Jesus would return to consummate history during their lifetimes, and so they had no reason to preserve his teachings for posterity. When it became clear that Jesus would not be returning in the immediate future, the gospel writers took it upon themselves to fashion a concrete historical record.
There are two problems with this argument:
In early Christianity, it was common for Christians to believe Jesus was speaking to them from the spiritual world, and these “prophecies” would be considered on par with Jesus’s own teachings. Thus the gospels, as a blend of the pronouncements of Jesus and these prophecies, muddy the water in terms of what Jesus really said and did.
This objection betrays an ignorance of the text of the New Testament. In his letters, Paul is careful to distinguish early Christian prophecy from Jesus’s own words (for examples, see 1 Corinthians 7 and 1 Corinthians 14).
A second rebuttal to this objection consists in the fact that many of the controversies of the early Christian church—concerning circumcision, the relationship between Jew and Gentile, and divorce, among other topics—aren’t addressed in the gospels. If the gospels were indeed a mix of prophecy and direct reportage, the gospel writers would have included various “prophecies” concerning these topics. Because they didn’t, it stands to reason that they were only interested in Jesus’s own words.
If one concedes that the gospel authors’ primary intent was the accurate presentation of facts, there remains the question of ability: Were the gospel authors able to give an accurate portrayal of Jesus’s life given the resources available to them? Because they were writing some 30 years after Jesus’s death, weren’t they at the mercy of flawed memories and mythological thinking? Can we be sure Jesus’s actual acts were well preserved for the gospels’ authors?
The answer is yes, due to the emphasis on orality in the ancient world. Papyrus scrolls—the most advanced information-storage technology of the time—were rare, and most teaching and learning happened via oral communication. This practice had two key effects:
Isn’t it possible that the gospel writers were simply dishonest—that they created a false history to fool people?
There’s no evidence to suggest Jesus’s acolytes were anything but principled and honest. Ten of the eleven remaining disciples after Jesus’s death refused to renounce their beliefs and were subsequently put to death. Given their willingness to die for the Jesus they immortalized in their writings, it’s highly unlikely that they embellished their accounts (because what person would die for something he or she made up?).
As noted above, there are obvious discrepancies among the four gospels. But, counter-intuitively, these inconsistencies actually constitute a sign of authenticity. Imagine if all four gospels were entirely consistent in their every feature—or, better yet, imagine if they were identical? Wouldn’t that seem suspicious, as though the authors conspired to get their stories straight?
In fact, the gospels are more believable because of their internal differences. Even legal scholars like Simon Greenleaf, a Harvard Law professor, have determined that the amount of inconsistency among the gospels is actually consistent with truthfulness.
And when it comes to specific contradictions among the gospels, there are usually perfectly reasonable explanations. To take one example, Mark and Luke write that Jesus sent the demons into the swine in a place called “Gerasa,” whereas Matthew says the place was “Gedara.” In fact, Gerasa was a transliteration of a particular town’s name, and Gedara was the province in which that town was located.
The gospel writers loved Jesus deeply and had committed their lives to spreading his Word—wouldn’t they be tempted to skew the record to make Jesus look better than he was in reality?
This is a possibility, but it’s more likely that, because of their devotion, the gospel writers took it upon themselves to portray their God as faithfully as they could.
Most scholars’ efforts have been devoted to authenticating what the gospel writers included in their works. But how can we test for what they didn’t include? In other words, isn’t it possible the gospel writers suppressed embarrassing or disqualifying details of Jesus’s life?
This question fails to take into consideration the many inconvenient passages the gospel writers did include in their accounts. For example, scholars and religious leaders have long referred to the “hard sayings” of Jesus. These are precepts that challenge believers’ abilities, whether by dint of the sayings’ difficulty or their complexity. Several of these hard sayings seem to undermine Christ’s divinity: Mark 6:5, for instance, tells us that Jesus’s power to do miracles in Nazareth was limited by people’s lack of faith (thereby calling into question his omnipotence); and, in Mark 13:32, Jesus says he doesn’t know the date or hour of his return (thus calling into question his omniscience). If the gospel writers were really intent on covering up the “hard” parts of Jesus’s life, why would they include these events?
In the final analysis, if the gospel authors felt obligated to include these difficult passages in their accounts, it stands to reason they’d feel beholden to the truth overall, too.
Police detectives will often follow up on witness testimony by visiting the scene of the crime and using forensics to make sure the witness’s account “checks out.” Have archeologists and other scholars attempted to find corroborating evidence for the gospels?
The answer is yes. Recent archeological and archival discoveries have corroborated the gospel writers’ references to the material aspects of their world: places, central figures, and events. (See Chapter 5 for an archeologist’s opinion on the veracity of the gospels.)
If there had been contemporaries of Jesus and his disciples who could challenge or deny the accounts in the gospels, they would have done so: Jesus was a controversial figure whose teachings were seen as heresy by dominant religious authorities of the time, and those authorities would have been more than happy to correct the record.
Interestingly, the contemporaneous challenges to the gospels never question Jesus’s power or ability to work miracles—rather, they portray Jesus as a magician whose gifts derived from some other source than God. In other words, they implicitly acknowledge the factuality of Jesus’s divinity by admitting his ability to work miracles. They had to concede Jesus’s supernatural abilities—too many of the writers’ contemporaries had witnessed Jesus’s miracles themselves.
After Blomberg shows that the gospels pass Strobel’s eight tests, Strobel asks Blomberg about his own faith. Blomberg recalls the story of doubting Thomas—who needed to see to believe—and acknowledges that sound evidence shouldn’t be the grounds for faith. Nevertheless, he says, his faith has been strengthened by his scholarly work on the New Testament, and he tells Strobel that there are scholars who came to the New Testament as doubters and soon became believers. Strobel notes he falls into the latter camp.
The text of the gospels that we know today is the product of generations of copying: from the original manuscripts of the gospel writers, lost long ago, to modern-day laser printers. Given that early copies were made painstakingly by hand, how can we be sure that the present-day text of the gospels is exactly the same as the gospel writers’ manuscripts? And isn’t it possible that, in the early days of the Church, further biographies of Jesus were suppressed or discarded in favor in the four we know today?
These two questions lead Strobel to Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, where he meets with Bruce Metzger, an 84-year-old professor emeritus whose specialty is the New Testament.
With the advent of digital reproduction processes, we no longer have to worry about quality or fidelity loss as we copy materials, whether music files, digital images, or word-processing documents. Even modern-day Xerox machines produce near-pristine copies of originals.
When we’re dealing with ancient manuscripts, however, which had to be copied by hand onto fragile materials and transported on foot, the risk of corruption or loss is great.
Nevertheless, there are three interlinked reasons for us to trust that the gospels we have today are faithful to the originals:
According to another esteemed scholar of the New Testament, F.F. Bruce, the New Testament is unparalleled in terms of the textual evidence for its accuracy.
There are certainly differences among the many ancient copies of the gospels (the highest estimates place the number of differences among the copies at 200,000). But these differences are by and large insignificant. For example, a great many differences occur because two Greek words are transposed (think “goes he” instead of “he goes”). But because Greek is an “inflected” language—that is, each word’s form indicates its part of speech—these kinds of “errors” have no effect on the text’s meaning.
And even more material variations—for example, the fact that the earliest manuscripts of 1 John feature no mention of the Trinity—don’t undermine the key doctrines of the Church. In the case of the Trinity, although the earliest versions of 1 John don’t mention it, other books (2 Corinthians, for instance) do.
The documentary provenance of the books included in the New Testament is considerable. But—as skeptics and more liberal Christian scholars are wont to point out—those aren’t the only gospels to have been discovered. In fact, some gospels—for example, those of Philip, of the Egyptians, and of Nativity of Mary—were suppressed by early Church leaders. Which raises the question: How can we be sure the canonical gospels comprise the truest accounts of Jesus?
In the early church, there were three criteria for canonization:
Despite some disagreement among various fringe factions in the early church, the four gospels as found in the Bible today satisfy these three criteria. The noncanonized gospels, like those of Peter or Mary, had authors different from the names attached to them and were usually written later than the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
The Gospel of Thomas
Discovered among the Nag Hammadi documents unearthed in Egypt in 1945, the Gospel of Thomas has found many adherents among liberal scholars of the New Testament. For example, the members of the Jesus Seminar—a scholarly collective active in the 80s and 90s—believed the Gospel of Thomas should be canonized.
One problem with the Gospel of Thomas, which comprises an array of Jesus’s sayings without any narrative, is that many of Jesus’s pronouncements run contrary to those that appear in the canonical gospels. For example, in the Gospel of Thomas, there are utterances that paint Jesus as a pantheist and misogynist—quite opposite to his teachings in the four canonical gospels.
These uncharacteristic pronouncements are why the early church didn’t accept the Gospel of Thomas as legitimate. Some believe that there was a conspiracy among the fifth-century councils to suppress the Gospel of Thomas, but the truth is simpler: The early followers of Jesus knew—in the same way they knew Jesus was God—that the Gospel of Thomas wasn’t an accurate portrayal of Jesus. They sensed its inauthenticity.
Considering the Bible as a whole, there has been little scholarly dissension surrounding twenty (Matthew through Philemon, plus 1 Peter and 1 John) of the 27 books. As for the remaining seven, though they were treated with some skepticism by the early church, they have now gained full acceptance.
The “pseudepigraphia”—a term for the array of documents that appeared in the centuries after Jesus’s death—on the other hand, are widely disputed. Strobel finds them ludicrous and inconsistent with Jesus’s teachings, and their origins in the fifth and sixth centuries are too distant from Jesus’s life to be credible testaments to Jesus’s historical existence.
As convincing as Blomberg’s and Metzger’s arguments are, they do have one weak spot: They rely solely on the texts of the Christian tradition. If there were historical evidence for the gospels’ account that didn’t originate with the Church, then the gospels would be that much more credible.
Strobel pursues this line of inquiry by visiting Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, a professor at Miami University of Ohio and a renowned historian of the Mediterranean. Yamauchi participated in the 1968 excavation of the Herodian temple in Jerusalem (destroyed in 70 AD) and has published dozens of papers in scholarly journals. Although he was born into the Buddhist faith, he became a Christian in 1952.
It’s a common misconception that the evidence for Jesus’s life is confined to the Bible itself—that no secular source records his existence. In fact, there are clear and important references to Jesus in several non-Christian sources.
Primary among them are the works of Josephus, a Jewish historian active in the first century AD. In The Antiquities, a history of the Jewish people from Creation to the late first century AD, Josephus refers to Jesus as the “Christ,” or Messiah, and he mentions the execution of James, Jesus’s brother. And in the Testimonium Flavianum, Josephus gives a plainspoken account of Jesus’s ability to do miracles, his crucifixion, and his resurrection.
But is this account actually Josephus’s, or was it added later by editors sympathetic to Jesus?
Over the years the scholarly consensus alternated between acceptance and skepticism, but today there’s widespread agreement that the account is authentic, albeit affected by interpolations. In other words, although most of the account reads as though a first-century Jewish writer wrote it, there are some phrases and vocabulary that appear to have been added later. The interpolated passages, it bears mentioning, include references to Jesus’s divinity, his role as the Messiah, and his resurrection. That is, the passages that are authentically Josephus corroborate Jesus’s existence and acts, but the passages that describe Jesus’s metaphysical characteristics are likely the work of someone else.
Nevertheless, those that insist Jesus never existed are willfully distorting—or ignoring—the record. Josephus’s bona fides as a historian are well known: His accounts have been supported by archeological findings as well as the accounts of Tacitus, arguably the most important Roman historian of the period.
Tacitus, too, mentions Jesus in his writings. In his account of Nero’s persecution of Christians in 115 AD, he explicitly references a “Christus,” who was crucified by Pontius Pilate and inspired an “immense multitude” to adhere to his teachings. The reasons Tacitus’s account is especially trustworthy are (1) he was generally unsympathetic to Christians, and so would have no reason to fabricate Christ’s existence, and (2) he establishes that Jesus attracted a large group of followers. Given that Jesus was executed using the most disgraceful method of the time—and so, under normal circumstances, would have been forgotten or disowned—the fact that he commanded a massive following of adherents who would rather die than renounce him at least implies his resurrection.
Josephus and Tacitus are merely the most famous of the ancient historians to corroborate Jesus’s existence.
Nephew to first-century encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger served as governor of a Turkish province in the early second century. In his letters, he recounts arresting Christians and questioning them about their beliefs. These Christians testified to the divinity of Jesus and their commitment to a moral life. Pliny’s letters confirm the wide and rapid spread of Christianity in the generation after Christ’s death.
One Biblical event to which skeptics often point is the darkness that fell over the earth while Christ was on the cross. But, according to a first-century historian named Thallus, the darkness was caused by a solar eclipse—a possibility seconded by other historians of the period. According to these histories, the eclipse was visible from several cities in the Mediterranean.
Another question mark is Pontius Pilate’s true nature. The gospels portray Pilate as a conflicted authority who eventually yields to the pressure of his Jewish subjects, whereas most historical accounts depict him as tough and inflexible. Don’t these inconsistencies raise red flags?
According to Yamauchi, critics who harp on these contradictions don’t fully understand the historical context of time. Pilate’s benefactor in Rome, Sejanus, was removed from his position for plotting against the emperor in 31 AD, and so, even if he were temperamentally unyielding, Pilate would have been keenly aware of his weakened position. A fight with his Jewish subjects would have gotten him in even more trouble with the emperor, thus the New Testament accounts are probably accurate.
Roman histories report on Jesus in more detail than do Jewish histories, largely because the Jews of the time considered Jesus a heretic. Nevertheless, there are references to Jesus in the Talmud, a key text in the Jewish canon, that describe him as a false messiah and sorcerer. Although these accounts are pejorative, they do, in a negative sense, corroborate Jesus’s ability to do miracles.
Secular histories aren’t the only sources to ground the gospels in fact—other books of the New Testament, as well as ancient Church documents, corroborate Jesus’s biographies, too.
Recall that, though the gospels are the first books of the New Testament, they weren’t written first: that distinction goes to Paul’s letters (or “epistles”).
Because Paul’s letters comprise the earliest documents of Jesus’s life in the New Testament, they are the least likely to have been influenced by myth or legend. And the Jesus one finds in Paul’s letters is very similar to the Jesus of the gospels: He’s described as the Messiah, and Paul attests to Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection.
The fact that Paul, after witnessing the resurrection, worships Jesus as God is highly significant, for two reasons. One, Paul was Jewish, and to embrace Jesus as a God was anathema to Jewish monotheism (so he must have had a compelling reason, i.e., the Resurrection). Two, there’s a body of criticism that alleges Jesus’s deity was inserted into Christian doctrine by later adherents. Paul’s attestation to Christ’s deity undercuts that theory, thereby making Christ’s deity all the more certain.
In addition to the canonized epistles—that is, the letters included in the New Testament—there are also a number of letters written by the earliest Christians that corroborate the key facts of Jesus’s life and works. These epistles, whose authors are known as the “apostolic fathers,” include the Epistle of Polycarp, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Epistle of Ignatius.
The Epistle of Ignatius is particularly enlightening. Ignatius, a Syrian bishop who was executed in 117 AD for his beliefs, testified not only that Christ was both human and God, but also that Christ was persecuted and crucified by Pilate and that he rose from the dead.
Given the wealth of secular and religious testimony to Jesus’s existence, even if the gospels didn’t exist, we would know that:
Similar to Blomberg, Yamauchi’s intensive study of the historical materials has bolstered his faith rather than undermine it. Although he admits that there are still some gaps in the record, he has complete faith in the factuality of the gospels and the New Testament as a whole.
With the documentary evidence for the historical Jesus well established, Strobel moves on to investigate the scientific evidence for Jesus’s existence. To do so, he visits John McRay, a professor of the New Testament and archaeology at Wheaton College in Illinois. McRay is the author of a 432-page textbook entitled Archaeology and the New Testament, and he supervised several archaeological digs in Israel over an eight-year period.
Strobel’s object in interviewing McRay is to determine whether the accounts in the gospels are true and accurate. Archaeology can tell us about the history and geography of the ancient world, but it can’t tell us whether the New Testament is the Word of God or whether we ought to commit our lives to Jesus. These are spiritual truths whose value cannot be underwritten by scientific discovery.
But if the gospel writers’ references to particular places and landmarks prove consistent and accurate, it lends credibility to the other parts of their accounts.
Luke’s contributions to the New Testament, his gospel and the book of Acts, comprise almost one quarter of the entire text of the Bible. If we can be sure that Luke is a conscientious and trustworthy historian, we can be confident in his depiction of Jesus as well.
The consensus among contemporary scholars is that Luke is indeed a careful, reliable recorder of history.
In fact, over the years, scholars have asserted that Luke was mistaken about certain historical facts only to be proven wrong by archaeological findings. For example, many scholars saw Luke’s reference to Lysanias as the tetrarch (governor) of Abilene in 27 AD as a disqualifying error—Lysanias ruled Chalcis 50 years before; he was no tetrarch. An inscription found on a dig, however, later proved Luke right. One study from the early ’90s reviewed each of Luke’s references to physical places and found not a single mistake. It stands to reason that if Luke was assiduous enough to get the ancillary details correct, it’s likely he got the really big stuff—like Jesus’s resurrection—right as well.
John’s gospel, the last to have been written, has been doubted due to geographical inaccuracy as well—until it too was vindicated by relatively recent archeological discoveries.
For example, John describes Jesus healing an invalid at the Pool of Bethesda, which, in John’s telling, has five porticoes. Because no such pool had been found, many scholars doubted this part of John’s gospel (and, in turn, his gospel as a whole). But then, lo and behold, the pool was excavated from 40 feet below ground—and it matched John’s description precisely.
Mark, according to his gospel’s critics, was conspicuously ignorant of ancient Palestine’s geography. His mistakes are particularly troubling given that his gospel is widely accepted to be the first to have been written.
But are they really mistakes? Critics have fixated on Mark 7:31, wherein Jesus travels from Tyre through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee. Scholars of the geography of the time have pointed out that if Jesus were traveling from Tyre in the direction of Sidon, he would be moving away from the Sea of Galilee. But these scholars fail to take into account the mountainous terrain and winding roads of the region. Based on the actual topography of the land, the route Mark describes is perfectly logical.
In McRay’s long career in archaeology, he has yet to come upon a finding that undermines the Bible—in fact, everything he’s discovered or studied has confirmed the Bible’s veracity. But Strobel is still hesitant. He puts three challenging riddles to McRay.
According to the narratives of Jesus’s birth, a census forced the citizens of Judea, including Joseph and Mary, to return to Joseph’s birthplace of Bethlehem, where Jesus was eventually born. Critics typically focus on two aspects of this story:
In terms of #1, censuses like this—where inhabitants were required to return to the places of their birth—did in fact occur in the ancient world. An Egyptian prefect named Gaius Vibius Maximus, for example, ordered a similar census in the second century AD.
In terms of #2, the debate concerns the historical timeline: According to the Bible, Quirinius ruled Syria during the time of King Herod, but most secular sources show Quirinius ruling Syria in 6 AD, ten years after Herod’s death. However, recent archaeological findings suggest there were two Quiriniuses—one who ruled during the reign of Herod and one who reigned after. (Other archaeologists have proposed an alternative theory: that there was only one Quirinius, but he ruled at two different times.)
Unbeknownst to most Christians, there is spirited scholarly debate about whether Nazareth existed when Jesus was a child; there is no mention of the town in the Old Testament, the Talmud, the histories of Josephus—even Paul’s epistles! (Skeptics of Christianity argue the town was created and named later.)
Nazareth was likely overlooked by these writers because of its tininess—according to one scholar, its population was probably a maximum of 480. And there is in fact archaeological evidence the village existed in the first century: ancient documents, as well as tombs discovered in the area, indicate the village existed at least as early 70 AD and likely far earlier.
In Matthew 2:16, Herod the Great, fearing that a recently born baby will grow to usurp his throne, orders his soldiers to Bethlehem to slaughter all male children under two. Joseph and Mary, of course, having been warned by an angel, escape with Jesus to Egypt.
It has long been noted among atheists and skeptics that there is no evidence for this event beyond Matthew’s account. Certainly a crime of this magnitude would have been noticed by contemporary observers?
The answer is, Not necessarily. First, in a town the size of Bethlehem (500–600 people), the actual number of babies singled out by Herod’s soldiers was likely small. Second, though it’s hard for us to imagine, violence like this was not uncommon in the ancient world. Herod was known as a particularly brutal king, and his executing a small number of babies in a humble village would likely not have risen to the level of breaking news. Thus the fact that Matthew is the only one to mention the event isn’t surprising—and certainly doesn’t undercut its factuality.
Arguably the most famous of twentieth-century archaeological discoveries, the Dead Sea Scrolls, found near Jerusalem in 1947, feature papyrus documents dating from 250 BC to 68 AD. Skeptics of Christianity often note that none of these documents mention Jesus.
While it’s true that the scrolls—which, in reality, mostly concern Jewish religious customs—don’t mention Jesus explicitly, they nevertheless provide essential context that corroborates accounts in the gospels. For example, in Matthew 11:3, John the Baptist’s emissaries visit Jesus to ask him if he’s in fact the messiah. He gives them an enigmatic answer that references Isaiah 35 from the Old Testament, but he adds the words “the dead are raised,” which don’t appear in the canonical Torah.
Incredibly, a manuscript among the Dead Sea Scrolls includes a different version of Isaiah 61 with the phrase “the dead are raised.” Jesus, John, and his followers would have been familiar with this earlier version of Isaiah, and thus Jesus’s answer isn’t enigmatic at all: John and his followers would have known immediately that Jesus was proclaiming himself the Messiah, the “one who was to come.”
Whereas archaeological research has repeatedly grounded the New Testament in fact, it has shown Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon, the central text of Mormonism, to be utterly baseless.
According to authorities at the Smithsonian Institute, not a single piece of archaeological evidence of any of the cities, places, people, or events related in The Book of Mormon has ever been found. Its account of early America is sheer myth, whereas the New Testament is routinely corroborated by archaeological discoveries.
In the ’90s, a small group of New Testament scholars calling themselves the Jesus Seminar rose to prominence. These scholars, a tiny minority of New Testament experts, received a wealth of media coverage due to their idiosyncratic methods and radically new accounts of the Bible. For example, the group voted on the authenticity of each of Jesus’s sayings with colored beads; later, they published a book called The Five Gospels (the canonical four plus the Gospel of Thomas), which featured color-coded text reflecting their votes. 82% of the book was rendered in black, the color for words Jesus never said at all; only 2% of the book was in red, the color for words Jesus definitely said.
Given the attention paid to the Jesus Seminar in the media and their assertions of Jesus’s “materiality” (that is, his mortality rather than his deity), Strobel feels it’s vital to consider, and, hopefully, refute, the Jesus Seminar. To do so, he visits Dr. Gregory Boyd, a professor at Bethel College who received his graduate education in divinity at Yale and Princeton. Boyd is the author of a 416-page scholarly rebuttal to the Jesus Seminar entitled Cynic Sage or Son of God? Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revisionist Replies, and, in addition to his scholarly work, he serves as a pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The Jesus Seminar holds that Jesus as a historical human being did indeed exist. This Jesus, however, was exclusively a “naturalistic” Jesus. That is, this Jesus might have had extraordinary qualities—of leadership, charisma, or piety—but he was not in any way supernatural; according to the Seminar, the accounts in the gospels of miracles like walking on water or rising from the dead are almost certainly legends created by Jesus’s followers to cope with his death and burnish his memory.
Advocates of a divide between a naturalistic Jesus and a mythological one often point to the historical context in which Jesus lived, a time when miracle workers were not uncommon and so-called “mystery religions” built around resurrections were in existence. When these facets of the ancient world are cited, there are two claims being made: (1) that Jesus’s supernatural qualities weren’t actually true to him, but rather imported from preexisting and obviously mythological sources; and (2) that if there were other similarly endowed figures around at the time as Jesus, Jesus isn’t uniquely deserving of worship.
The Jesus Seminar aims to develop a new Christianity, one free of fundamentalism and responsive to the situation of contemporary human beings. Scholars in the Jesus Seminar hold a variety of viewpoints on Jesus: Some see him as a religious zealot, others as a political revolutionary, still others as a proto-feminist or socialist.
Although the members of the Jesus Seminar portray themselves as lonely truth-tellers amid a sea of biased believers, their positions are actually undermined by their own biases.
For example, the scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar assume from the outset that any sort of supernatural event is impossible, simply because none of them have ever witnessed such an event. When you start your analysis of the New Testament or the historical record of Jesus from this position, the gospels become mythological, thus untrustworthy, and you inevitably end up with a naturalistic Jesus.
Beginning with this assumption, however, is in fact an act of enormous hubris. Is it more humble and objective to say, “The supernatural is impossible in any time or place no matter what” or “At certain unique points in human history, it’s possible that God has intervened in the world”? When you begin with the humility of the latter assumption, then the historical and documentary evidence of Jesus’s deity begins to look very different.
To determine the authenticity of Jesus’s pronouncements, the Jesus Seminar uses an array of flawed criteria, including double dissimilarity and multiple attestation.
Under this criterion, for a statement of Jesus to be considered authentic, it cannot resemble something a rabbi or early Church leader would say. The reasoning here is that, if a statement of Jesus does resemble early Jewish or Christian sources, it was likely taken from those sources by the gospels’ authors and attributed to Jesus.
The problem with this logic, however, is that Jesus was both a Jew and the founder of Christianity—it’s completely unsurprising that he would sound like the rabbis of his time, and that later Church leaders would sound like him.
Under this criterion, a saying of Jesus can only be considered authentic if it’s found in more than one source.
One problem with this rubric is that many of our most trusted sources of ancient history are singular—that is, for many events of antiquity that we assume actually happened, we only have a single source. In other words, the Jesus Seminar holds the events of the bible to a stricter standard than other ancient events.
Another problem is that, according to the Jesus Seminar’s precepts, the mention of a saying in more than one gospel doesn’t count as multiple attestation. For this rule, they’re relying on the argument that Matthew and Luke are based on Mark, thus any saying that’s mentioned in all three really amounts to just one mention. What this position fails to take into account is recent scholarship that disputes Matthew’s and Luke’s reliance on Mark (see the discussion of “Q” in Chapter 1).
Members of the Jesus Seminar have sought to emphasize Jesus’s “naturalism” by placing his pronouncements and deeds in historical context—by showing that rabbis and other Jewish figures were purported to have performed miracles as well. If other religious leaders of the time were perceived as having supernatural powers—powers no one now believes in or takes seriously—then it stands to reason Jesus’s powers should be treated similarly: as myth.
However, the parallels between Jesus and other “wonder workers” of the time don’t go very far. Boyd notes three ways in which Jesus is unique:
Skeptics have often noted the parallels between Apollonius of Tyana, a historical figure active in the first century AD, and Jesus: both healed the sick, performed exorcisms, and raised the dead; and both were allegedly seen by their followers after they died. However, Apollonius’s feats are dismissed as legend whereas Jesus’s are accepted as fact. Why, a skeptic might ask, do we not worship Apollonius? Or, vice versa, dismiss Jesus?
There are numerous problems with this line of argument:
Just as certain skeptics believe accounts of Jesus to have been influenced by first-century myths, others believe Christianity itself to be a hodgepodge of already existing religious practices. For example, there were a number of “mystery religions” practiced in the ancient world that included narratives of death and resurrection as well as rituals of baptism and communion.
As with other arguments about external influence, there are too many logical flaws in this critique for it to be credible. For example, it’s often noted that the mystery religions feature myths of gods dying and rising again. But these myths are tied to natural lifecycles, like crops dying in the fall and growing again in the spring, and take place sometime in the distant past. Jesus’s death and resurrection have no such metaphorical and fairytale content—they are narrated by near-eyewitnesses as fact.
Arguably the most controversial of the Jesus Seminar’s pronouncements was that the Gospel of Thomas, a long marginalized text, should be included in the New Testament canon. The Gospel of Thomas features passages that the Jesus Seminar argues (1) predate the accounts of Jesus found in the canonical gospels and (2) depict a naturalistic Jesus.
Scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar have also raised questions about other “secret gospels” that have been discovered, including “Secret Mark” and the “Cross Gospel.” Some Jesus Seminar members have speculated that these secret gospels feature revelations about Jesus that expose him as exclusively mortal.
To most serious scholars of the New Testament, however, these so-called “secret gospels” are simply a distraction. In fact, most aren’t even discoveries: theologians have long known about the Gospel of Thomas—and have dismissed it because it so clearly contravenes the Jesus of the canonical four gospels (see Chapter 3).
“Secret Mark,” according to its proponents, is a longer and more reliable version of the gospel of Mark, one that was suppressed by the early Church. The problem with this assertion is that no copy of “Secret Mark” exists, and there’s only the thinnest evidence it ever did exist. Everything we know about “Secret Mark” is contained in a quote from it included in a letter by a second-century author. (And, curiously enough, there’s no existing copy of the letter, either—only a picture taken of it by the mid-twentieth-century scholar who found it.)
(Shortform note: Some contemporary commentators believe that the scholar who photographed the letter actually fabricated it.)
For liberal interpreters of the New Testament, like the scholars comprising the Jesus Seminar, Jesus’s divinity becomes symbolic: The miracles and resurrection are there simply to inspire Christians to hew more closely to Jesus’s teachings.
For Boyd, whose belief is rooted in his years of scholarship and deep faith, this understanding of Jesus is utterly wrongheaded. Jesus’s power to inspire and instruct is indistinguishable from the truth of his supernatural abilities; Paul himself says that if the resurrection didn’t truly happen, then faith is useless. The fact that Paul—and the gospel authors—remain committed to their faith is a token of Jesus’s divinity in fact.
Boyd, too, is committed to Jesus because he is certain of the reality of Jesus’s divinity. He acknowledges that some of the claims about Jesus, the supernatural ones in particular, are perhaps hard for a modern person to believe. But the evidence for those supernatural events—the healing of the sick, the rising from the dead—is incontrovertible. The Jesus Seminar’s distinction between a “Jesus of History” and “Jesus of Faith” simply doesn’t hold up under scrutiny; the Seminar’s central pieces of evidence are thin and/or contradictory, whereas the New Testament, coupled with secular sources like Josephus, paints a remarkably consistent picture of a divine Jesus.
For Boyd, it’s a no-brainer for him to put his trust in the gospels.
Test your knowledge of the evidentiary record for Jesus’s existence.
If someone skeptical of Jesus’s existence asked you for proof, what might you say? (Helpful hint: Review the chapters just above and pick the pieces of evidence most convincing to you.)
Why is it important that some of the source material for the gospels dates to within decades of Jesus’s death?
How would you respond to someone who believes Jesus of Nazareth really existed, but that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the product of legend?
A crucial facet of the “case for Christ” is understanding what Jesus thought about himself. Did he view himself simply as a rabbi or prophet, one who would be aghast at his subsequent deification? Or was he indeed convinced of his own deity? Did Jesus truly believe he was the Christ?
To answer these questions, Strobel travels to Kentucky to interview Dr. Ben Witherington III, a professor at the Asbury Theological Seminary. Educated at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and the University of Durham in England, Witherington has taught at the Divinity School of Duke University and written over fifty books, including The Many Faces of the Christ, Jesus, Paul, and the Ends of the World, and Women in the Ministry of Jesus.
It has long been remarked that the Jesus presented in the gospels is hesitant to refer to himself as the Messiah or Son of God. In 1977, a book coauthored by more than a dozen theologians argued that Jesus never thought of himself as God or the Messiah, and that any references to his deity were added after his death.
However, there are a number of clues that suggest that Jesus did indeed think of himself as God incarnate.
The fact that Jesus performed miracles isn’t necessarily a token of his deity—his disciples later performed similar feats without claiming deity for themselves. Rather, it’s how he thought about his miracles that sets them apart.
For example, when Jesus would perform a miracle, he would situate it in a very specific context: as a sign of the coming of the Kingdom of God. Rather than view himself as simply a worker of miracles, Jesus saw himself as an emissary of God, through which God’s promises would come to pass. In short, he saw himself as transcendent.
Some have latched onto the fact that Jesus was called “rabbi” by his followers to argue that he simply viewed himself as a religious instructor. But Jesus’s way of teaching and speaking distinguishes him from the rabbis of his time.
For example, Jesus refers to God as “abba,” a term of intimacy a son would use with a beloved father. Whereas most Jews of the time tried to avoid saying God’s name at all, for fear of mispronouncing it and disrespecting Him, Jesus, by using “abba” and encouraging his disciples to use it, evidenced a personal familiarity with God.
(Jesus also referred to himself as “Son of Man.” See Chapter 1 for a discussion of this long misinterpreted phrase.)
Those familiar with the gospel of John will recall the poetic and powerful opening lines, wherein the author praises Jesus as the fleshly embodiment of the Word of God (ergo God Himself). But the question is: Would Jesus recognize himself in those lines?
The scholarly consensus is “Yes.” Although John’s gospel is more interpretive than the Synoptic Gospels, commentators agree that John’s theological presentation is the natural extension of the Jesus described in the first three gospels.
And, even without John’s gospel, a Messianic Jesus is inescapable. In Matthew 16:15, when Peter names Jesus as the Christ, Jesus affirms him.
For all Jesus’s gnomic references to his own deity, the history of the church immediately subsequent to his death strongly implies Jesus believed he was the Christ.
For example, the oldest doctrinal and liturgical documents in the Christian church—the oldest sermon, the oldest secular report of the church, the oldest liturgical prayer—refer to Jesus as the “Lord” or “God.” Given that these artifacts were created within decades of Jesus’s death, while many of his original followers were still living, it stands to reason that they were honoring Jesus’s own beliefs about himself.
In sum, there is little doubt Jesus believed that he was the son and agent of God, put on Earth to save the world through his own sacrifice.
The evidence that Jesus believed he was the Son of God, the Messiah, cuts two ways: While it establishes that he did indeed believe himself to be divine, it also raises questions about his sanity. If no other rabbi of the time felt compelled to make similar claims about his divinity, isn’t it possible that Jesus was simply crazy?
Of course, the person to ask is a psychologist. Strobel visits Gary Collins, a clinical psychologist (Ph.D., Purdue University) who taught at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for twenty years. He has written well over 100 articles for scholarly journals and has written 45 books on psychological and theological themes, including Christian Counseling: A Comprehensive Guide.
A common symptom of mental illness is delusion, particularly delusions of grandeur. Many paranoid schizophrenics will at times believe they are someone famous or important: a Nobel Prize winner, the President of the United States—even Jesus himself. If misbegotten beliefs like this are so common among the mentally ill, who’s to say Jesus too wasn’t suffering from psychosis?
What distinguishes Jesus from the mentally ill is the lack of accompanying symptoms. Psychotics often have an inflated sense of their own importance, yes, but they also exhibit emotional distress, like irrational anger, paranoia, or anxiety; difficulty thinking logically; and/or antisocial behavior, like dressing strangely or neglecting personal hygiene. Jesus exhibits none of these traits.
In fact, the gospels attest to a well-adjusted and emotionally balanced human being. Jesus befriended people from all walks of life, inspired love in his compatriots, and had deep compassion for his fellow man. He spoke eloquently and had a firm grip on reality, and he responded to people’s hardship with empathy. In short, there’s nothing in his behavior to indicate he was mentally disturbed.
Of course, our understanding of Jesus is based exclusively on the biblical and historical evidence. It’s a fact that many of Jesus’s contemporaries believed he was crazy. For example, in John 20:20, we read that the Jews of the time believed Jesus was possessed by a demon and “raving mad.”
Although Jesus’s countrymen did indeed question his sanity, their suspicion was prompted by Jesus’s uniqueness, not any evidence of mental disturbance. (In other words, they called him “insane” because his teachings were so unfamiliar.) And, unlike a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur, Jesus established his divinity through specific acts: for example, healing the sick or bringing the dead back to life.
(Skeptics have charged that Jesus’s “miracles” are likely less impressive than they seem. For example, many conditions in the ancient world were psychosomatic—that is, imagined—and so Jesus’s ability to heal was tantamount to the placebo effect: Because people believed Jesus was a healer, they simply willed themselves better once he administered to them.
The problem with this argument is that death is not a psychosomatic condition, yet Jesus was nevertheless able to bring the deceased back to life.)
Author Ian Wilson has advanced an elaborate argument that Jesus was simply a master hypnotist, able to induce trance- or coma-like states that mimicked death (for example, in Lazarus) and create illusions in the minds of his followers. Wilson’s central piece of evidence for this theory is the strange fact that Jesus was unable to perform many miracles in his hometown of Nazareth. Wilson believes this is because the awe surrounding a hypnotist is a major factor in his power to hypnotize, and Jesus’s family and friends wouldn’t find him mysterious enough to fall under his sway.
This theory has a number of shortcomings:
Jesus traced illness and strange behavior to possession by evil demons, and he healed people by exorcising those demons. Isn’t the belief in demons a sign of mental disturbation? Is there any psychological evidence for the real existence of demons (or angels)?
Collins replies that, although he hasn’t personally encountered demons in a clinical setting, his colleagues have; and he also notes that many trained psychologists have been exploring the so-called “spiritual” world. In short, greater and greater numbers of psychologists are coming around to the possibility of supernatural influence on our behavior. A belief in supernatural beings having an effect on us, as far as Collins is concerned, isn’t a sign of psychosis.
It goes without saying that Christians believe Jesus is God, but what exactly does being God entail? The Old Testament provides a number of details about God that, if Christian doctrine is right, would have to hold true for Jesus as well. For example:
Some of these attributes immediately present problems for Christian apologists. For example, how can Jesus be omnipresent? When he was delivering the Sermon on the Mount by the Sea of Galilee, he wasn’t simultaneously standing on a street in Nazareth!
To get some clarity on these issues, Strobel visits D. A. Carson, a professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Carson has authored or edited over 40 books and reads a dozen languages. He holds a bachelor of science from McGill University and a doctorate in the New Testament from Cambridge.
Whereas the God of the Old Testament is omni-everything, Jesus appears limited in all sorts of ways: he can’t exist in two places at once, he admits that he doesn’t know when he’ll return to Earth, and he’s unable to perform miracles in his hometown (there goes omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence). The case against Jesus’s deity, at least how deity is understood in the Old Testament, seems closed.
However, theologians throughout the years have been able to explain these “contradictions” using a variety of approaches. Two of the most prominent are:
For Carson’s part, though, the quest for an exhaustive explanation misses the point. Incarnation—the event of spirit becoming flesh—is a miraculous process that can’t help but be mysterious. It is an act of God, and so it should come as no surprise that mortals have difficulty comprehending it.
Nevertheless, there is clear textual evidence that Jesus satisfied all five of the key attributes of God:
For most Christians, Jesus’s miracles are the core piece of evidence for his deity. However, New Testament scholars concede that figures other than Jesus were able to perform miracles. So what sets Jesus apart?
One less-remarked-upon trait of Jesus that indicates his deity is his forgiveness of sin. In the Jewish tradition, when men sinned, they sinned against God and subsequently had to beg his forgiveness. Jesus’s ability to forgive sin Himself indicates his deity, for God alone can forgive sin.
And not only was Jesus able to forgive sin: He was utterly without sin himself. Other than God, no being is morally perfect, and so, therefore, Jesus is God.
The most definitive sign of God’s divinity, arguably, is the fact that He is the creator of all things. But in a number of places in the New Testament, Jesus is portrayed as having been created—for example in John 3:16 and Colossians 1:15. Does this mean Jesus isn’t truly God?
The notion that Jesus was created stems from flawed translations of the original New Testament Greek. In John 3:16 for example, when the author calls Jesus the “begotten” Son of God (King James Version), the Greek word typically translated “begotten” actually means something closer to “unique and beloved.” That is to say, the original Greek doesn’t have the connotation of “created.” (More modern translations use “one and only Son” in lieu of “begotten.”)
At certain points in the New Testament, Jesus seems to diminish his own primacy. For example, in John 14:28, Jesus tells his disciples that the “Father is greater than I,” implying that Jesus’s deity isn’t foremost.
Whereas many misreadings of Jesus’s pronouncements have their origin in poor translation, others stem from the omission of necessary context. In the case of John 14:28, Jesus is preparing his disciples for his ascension to Heaven, and the lines before the above-quoted phrase fill out Jesus’s meaning: “If you loved me, you’d be glad for my sake [that I’m going away], because the Father is greater than I.” In other words, Jesus, as the mortal incarnation of God (the Son of God), is simply saying that God the Father is in a better place than Jesus is currently. That Jesus says “the father is greater than I” isn’t a denial of his deity; it’s a comparison between equal beings.
In both the New and Old Testaments, God is said to be a beneficent and loving being. But isn’t it the height of hypocrisy for an infinitely compassionate being to (1) consign people to Hell and (2) allow them to be enslaved?
Consigning sinful humans to eternal suffering is undoubtedly spectacular, but it doesn’t entail a cruel or mean-spirited God. First, without some sort of deterrent, human beings would sin constantly and egregiously, thereby turning Earth into Hell itself. A case could be made that by creating Hell, God was acting kindly.
Second, God doesn’t consign people to Hell unjustly. Those who have repented, who understand that God is the center of the universe, are never sent and confined to Hell; it’s only those who refuse to repent that stay there for eternity. At the Final Judgment, Romans 3:19 says, “every mouth may be stopped” by God’s law. In other words, all will understand that their fate, however blessed or cursed, is fair.
Modern humans, with good reason, find slavery morally unconscionable. But Jesus, despite his ethical perfection, never mentions the practice or advocates for its abolition. (In Jesus’s time, Jews and Gentiles alike owned slaves, and there were even slave rebellions during Jesus’s childhood.) Which raises the question: How can a morally perfect being have nothing to say about slavery?
The first thing to remember is that slavery in the ancient world was vastly different from slavery as it was practiced in the US. In the ancient world, people contracted themselves as slaves to pay debts, and slaves weren’t exclusively laborers: they served as private tutors for families as well.
Also, slaves in the ancient world hailed from any number of locations and practiced any number of religions. That is to say, unlike American slavery, no particular race was subject to slavery.
The other important fact to keep in mind is that Jesus’s mission on Earth was not the overthrow of the Roman economic system (which relied, in part, on slavery). Rather, Jesus’s mission was changing the hearts of men—freeing them from sin and inspiring them to love their neighbors as they loved themselves. Jesus’s teachings necessarily entailed the abolition of slavery; any human being who accepted Jesus as God would find slavery abominable.
A case in point is the evangelical awakening in England in the 19th Century. Devoted Christians in Parliament championed legislation to abolish slavery and then advocated the use of the British navy to put a stop to the transatlantic slave trade.
Another way to establish Jesus’s deity, separate and apart from his divine traits, is to compare him with Old Testament descriptions of the Messiah. Jewish scriptures are full of prophecies about the arrival of the Messiah, an emissary of God who would redeem humanity. These prognostications often feature specific details (so that the Jewish people would recognize the Messiah when he came). If Jesus matches these details, which were articulated generations before Jesus’s birth, there’s good reason to believe Jesus is indeed the Anointed One.
To explore this possibility, Strobel visits Louis Lapides, a pastor at a church in California. Lapides’s path to Christ was a winding one. Raised Jewish in New Jersey, Lapides was drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he began exploring Eastern religions. When he returned home, depressed and rootless, he experimented with drugs and even contemplated suicide.
Eventually, Lapides ended up in California, where he continued to search for a religious path. In 1969, an impromptu encounter with a pastor led to Lapides’s revisiting the Old Testament. The pastor had told him that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah—a figure entirely absent from Lapides’s childhood instruction in Judaism—and gave him a copy of the Bible with both the Old and New Testaments. Lapides began scouring the Old Testament for references to the Messiah.
Soon enough, he found them: in Deuteronomy, which prophesies the coming of a prophet greater than Moses; and in Isaiah, which describes the Messiah as an “oppressed and afflicted” man who dies for the sins of his fellow humans. In the end, Lapides found nearly 50 prophecies in the Old Testament that refer explicitly to Jesus, including:
After an epiphany he experienced while camping in the Mojave Desert, during which God spoke to him and told him Jesus was the Messiah, Lapides swore off drugs and accepted Jesus into his life. He married a Jewish woman who was also a follower of Christ and joined a church (which, coincidentally, was led by the pastor who’d given him the Bible that sparked his curiosity about Jesus).
Many Jews, like Lapides himself, are simply oblivious to the fact that the prophets of the Old Testament anticipate Jesus’s arrival; once they do the necessary reading—of the Bible and the relevant secondary sources—the facts of the case become undeniable.
That said, there are a number of possible objections to Jesus’s being the Messiah of the Old Testament.
Isn’t it possible that the parallels between Jesus and the Messiah described in the Old Testament are just the product of chance?
The simple answer is no. Mathematician Peter Stoner calculated the odds that a single person would fit even just eight prophecies at one-in-one-hundred-million-billion. The odds of fitting all 48 prophecies of Jesus? One of out of many trillions of trillions.
That is to say, it’s as good as impossible that Jesus matched the prophecies by coincidence.
Another challenge to Jesus’s messianism concerns the gospels. Given the fact they were written long after the Old Testament, by authors schooled in Jewish scripture, isn’t it possible the gospel authors simply added details to Jesus’s story to make him match the prophecies?
What this question fails to consider is the timeline of the gospels’ writing and dissemination. As noted earlier, the gospels would have been read by contemporaries of Jesus; if they’d noticed something amiss, they would have objected to it.
There’s an even more compelling rejoinder to this theory. Matthew was put to death for his loyalty to and faith in Jesus. Why would he have sacrificed himself for a lie?
Like the authors of the gospels, Jesus too was well versed in Jewish Scripture. Couldn’t he just have planned his activities so that they conformed to the Old Testament’s prophecies?
In some cases—for example, concerning the prophecy that the Messiah would ride a donkey into Jerusalem—this argument seems plausible, but in others, it patently fails. For example, how could Jesus arrange that his legs would remain unbroken on the cross? Or that Judas would be offered thirty pieces of silver to betray him? Or the circumstances and place of his own birth? (Daniel 9:24 prophesies that the Messiah would appear a specific amount of time after King Artaxerxes’s decree that the Jews rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Jesus appeared at that exact moment.)
Not all scholars agree that the passages Christians cite as prophesying Jesus are indeed prophecies. Could Christians simply be misinterpreting the Old Testament?
Lapides simply recommends that skeptics read the passages in question themselves, as he did. He also urges those skeptics to be open to God’s speaking to them—to ask God truly whether Jesus was the Messiah.
In the course of his reporting, Strobel found other people raised in the Jewish faith who later recognized Jesus as the messiah, among them Stan Telchin, whose book Betrayed! tells the story of his own coming to Christianity after his daughter converted, and Jack Sternberg, a cancer physician from Arkansas, who converted to Christianity when three rabbis he interrogated couldn’t disprove Jesus was the Messiah.
Review what you’ve learned about Jesus Christ.
How would you respond if someone claimed that Jesus never said explicitly that he was the Messiah? (Hint: Review Chapter 7)
Given that Jesus, Jewish himself, was steeped in Jewish scripture, isn’t it possible that he simply adopted the traits of the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament? Why or why not? (Hint: Review Chapter 10.)
If a skeptic told you that Jesus didn’t exhibit the traits of God, how might you respond? (Hint: Review Chapter 9.)
How has the analysis of Jesus, as both a man and a deity, changed your relationship to him (if at all)?
For all the other tokens of Jesus’s deity—his forgiveness of humanity’s sins, his healing of the sick, his raising of the dead—the truth of his divinity rests on his resurrection: the fact that he died on the cross and returned to life.
However, almost as long as there have been believers in Christ, there have been skeptics who argue the Resurrection was a hoax. The Koran, for example, written in the seventh century, floats the idea that Jesus never died on the cross; and conspiracy theorists throughout the centuries have speculated that Jesus simply swooned on the cross and was revived later on.
Given the commonness of these conjectures, Strobel decides to consult someone who can speak to the medical evidence of Jesus’s death and resurrection: Dr. Alexander Metherell, a former research scientist and radiologist who has published widely on topics in both engineering and medicine (in addition to an MD from the University of Miami in Florida, he has a PhD in Engineering from University of Bristol in England).
(Shortform note: Metherell gives a graphic account of Jesus’s torture and execution. The following sections feature descriptions of extreme violence.)
Of course, even before Jesus undergoes the barbarity of crucifixion, he endures an incredible amount of psychological and physical distress. For example, as he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper, his worry causes him to sweat blood—a detail that prompted any number of scoffs from skeptics.
However, Jesus’s sweating blood indicates a rare but known medical condition: hematidrosis. Hematidrosis occurs when severe stress causes capillaries in the sweat glands to break down, releasing tiny amounts of blood into the glands.
Hematidrosis also has a secondary effect: increased skin sensitivity, which would have made the flogging Jesus subsequently suffered at the hands of a Roman soldier even more painful.
As for the flogging itself, which breached Jesus’s skin and opened profusely bleeding wounds, it would have caused Jesus to go into hypovolemic shock. This is when a rapid and dangerous loss of blood causes weakness, fainting, and/or acute thirst. We see all three as Jesus carries the cross up to Calvary.
Given the viciousness of the whipping Jesus received before reaching the execution site, he was likely already in critical condition when he was crucified.
The stages of crucifixion were routinized: First, Jesus would have been laid on top of the patibulum—the horizontal beam of the cross—and nailed to this beam through the wrists. He would then have been hoisted in the air and the patibulum attached to a vertical stake. Once the two beams were attached, Jesus’s feet would have been nailed to the vertical stake. It’s likely that Jesus’s shoulders would have been dislocated once the patibulum was affixed to the vertical beam, thereby fulfilling the prophecy articulated in Psalm 22 that the Messiah’s bones would be “out of joint.”
Those executed by crucifixion would typically die of asphyxiation. The crucified position causes the diaphragm to be locked in the “inhale” position; in order to exhale, the person on the cross would have to raise himself up, causing further damage to his feet and raking his back against the wood of the vertical beam. Once a person simply grew too fatigued to soldier on, the lack of fresh oxygen would cause respiratory acidosis—the acidification of the blood due to an excess of carbon dioxide. Respiratory acidosis eventually causes cardiac arrest.
It’s important to remember, however, that Jesus was likely already suffering from hypovolemic shock. This condition would have caused an elevated heart rate and a buildup of fluid around the heart and lungs. That’s why, when the Roman soldier confirmed Jesus’s death by stabbing him through the heart and lung, he drew out clear fluid (“water”) as well as blood (John 19:34).
Likely before, and certainly after, the Roman soldier stabbed Him, Jesus was medically deceased.
Question 11.1: Why did the Roman soldiers break the legs of the two men crucified alongside Jesus, but not Jesus’s?
To speed up their death. By breaking the others’ legs, the Roman soldiers made it impossible for them to raise themselves to breathe, thus speeding along their asphyxiation. Jesus’s legs weren’t broken because he was determined already to be dead (which, of course, fulfills the old testament prophecy that Jesus’s bones wouldn’t be broken).
Question 11.2: An article in the Harvard Theological Review argues that there is scant evidence crucifixion victims’ feet were nailed to the vertical stake. Doesn’t this call into question the gospels’ account (which specifies that Jesus’s feet were nailed to the cross)?
Although victims’ feet and hands were indeed bound by rope on occasion, archaeological discoveries have confirmed that spikes were used as well to bind people to the cross.
Question 11.3: The Roman soldiers weren’t doctors—how could they confirm with certainty that Jesus was truly dead?
Put simply, death was a Roman soldier’s business—surely they could tell when an enemy was deceased. There is also the fear-of-punishment aspect: If the Romans had erroneously let a prisoner escape, they themselves might have ended up on the cross.
For the sake of argument, let’s say the purveyors of the “swoon” theory are right, and that Jesus was actually still alive when he was taken down from the cross and entombed. That would mean, despite his grave physical condition, that he unwrapped himself from his burial garments, moved the rock from the mouth of his tomb, evaded the Roman soldiers standing guard over him, and somehow located his disciples. He would have had to walk long distances on shattered feet, with gaping wounds on his torso. It’s simply physically impossible.
But there’s another absurdity to this counterfactual. If Jesus had appeared to his disciples in critical condition, he never would have inspired awe and belief in his disciples; rather, they would have rushed to care for him. The fact that Jesus’s resurrection confirmed his followers’ faith—not to mention inspired a timeless and global movement—suggests that, when he appeared to his disciples, he appeared as a healthy man.
Jesus’s death on the cross, as conclusively established by Dr. Metherell, confirms the initial condition for the Resurrection (i.e., Jesus’s medical death). But what evidence do we have he was indeed raised?
There are two proofs for Jesus’s rise: The eyewitness accounts of his disciples (discussed in the next chapter), and the fact of his empty tomb.
To analyze the latter, Strobel visits William Lane Craig, an expert on the Resurrection and author of a number of classics of Christian apologetics, including Reasonable Faith, The Only Wise God, and The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe. Craig is also a renowned debater of atheists and skeptics.
It goes without saying that, in order for Jesus’s tomb to be empty, he would have had to be buried in a tomb in the first place.
As it turns out, this fact can’t be taken for granted. Historians have shown that the bodies of crucified criminals were generally left on the cross to be eaten by birds or thrown in mass graves.
But those skeptics that appeal to the general case ignore the specific circumstances of Jesus’s burial.
First of all, there’s ample textual evidence that Jesus was in fact buried. For example, Corinthians 15:3—which, we know from Craig Blomberg, was authored very shortly after Jesus’s death—says explicitly that Jesus was buried.
Second, the gospels corroborate the summary account one finds in Corinthians. In all four gospels, the authors mention that Jesus’s body was turned over to Joseph of Arimathea and buried. It’s especially important that these facts appear in Mark, which was the earliest of the gospels to be written and thus less vulnerable to later embellishment. And, according to the textual history of Mark, the story of Jesus’s final week—termed the “passion story”—was taken from an even earlier source.
Those skeptical of Jesus’s burial often highlight the implausibility that Joseph of Arimathea would have arranged for the honorable interment of Jesus’s body. This is because Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish leaders that voted unanimously to execute Jesus.
The gospel of Luke accounts for this twist with the addition of a key detail: Joseph of Arimathea wasn’t present at the vote to kill Jesus. Thus he may have been less indisposed toward Jesus than the rest of the Sanhedrin.
But there are other reasons to believe that this unlikely figure did indeed give Jesus an honorable burial. First of all, given early Christians’ anger toward the Jews for their role in Jesus’s death, it’s unlikely that an author of the time period would give credit to a member of the Sanhedrin if it wasn’t due. A second reason is that, for all the accounts of Jesus in both historical and Christian documents, there’s no alternate story of Jesus’s burial.
Interestingly, the biblical creed of the Resurrection (Corinthians 15:3–10) never mentions an empty tomb—it only reports that Jesus was resurrected and appeared to a number of witnesses. How can we be sure Jesus appeared physically rather than spiritually?
The Jewish understanding of resurrection—which is the same understanding present in the Bible—necessarily entails physical resurrection. (In fact, in the Jewish tradition, it’s the bones that are raised, while the flesh rots away.) So, when the Bible reports that Jesus appeared before the various witnesses to the Resurrection, it is implying an empty tomb.
It is also impossible that Jesus’s body was tampered with while he was entombed. First, based on archeological discoveries of tombs from that era, the entrance would have been blocked by a heavy stone disk that would have required several men to move. Second, the tomb likely would have been guarded.
One way skeptics call the Resurrection into question is by arguing that Jesus’s tomb wasn’t in fact guarded (and thus the disciples could have stolen his body).
Although contemporary scholars have ruled out the possibility that the disciples removed Jesus’s body—their later martyrdom simply wouldn’t make sense if they’d been the perpetrators of a hoax—there is historical evidence that Jesus’s tomb was indeed guarded.
When first-century Jews and Christians argued over whether the disciples had removed Jesus’s body, the Jews said, “The guards at the tomb fell asleep [which was why the disciples were able to remove Jesus’s body].” In this way, these first-century Jews, who were near contemporaries of Jesus, implicitly acknowledged that there were guards at Jesus’s tomb.
Naturally, there are some differences among the gospels regarding Jesus’s empty tomb—differences which skeptics have latched onto to call the entire Resurrection into question.
For example, in Matthew, Mary and Mary Magdalene arrive at the tomb at dawn and an angel opens the tomb for them; in Mark, the women arrive at sunrise and the tomb is already open; and in Luke, the women arrive at dawn to find the tomb already open. There also discrepancies regarding who arrives at the tomb (Is it just Mary and Mary Magdalene, or are Salome and Joanna there, too?) and who’s in the tomb when they arrive (in Mark, a “youth” is inside; in Luke, it’s “two men”).
When one focuses on these minor details, however, one risks losing the forest for the trees. In other words, the gospels are remarkably consistent with regard to the major events of the Resurrection: Joseph of Arimathea’s handling of Jesus’s body and its entombment; the arrival of some group of women at the tomb Sunday morning; the tomb’s emptiness; and the vision of angels reporting that Jesus has risen. The core of the story is consistent across the gospels, and so it’s better scholarly practice to trust those consistencies rather than dismiss them. In fact, if the gospels aligned perfectly in all their details, they would (counterintuitively) be less trustworthy: One would suspect that the gospel writers had colluded to get their story straight.
The immateriality of the discrepancies notwithstanding, there are in fact ways to harmonize the gospels’ accounts. For example, all the writers mention that Mary and Mary Magdalene arrived at the tomb with other women; some writers simply chose to mention some of the women by name whereas others didn’t.
As noted, the witnesses to Jesus’s empty tomb were a group of women sympathetic to him—isn’t it possible they fabricated their account?
What this objection fails to take into consideration is the position of women in first-century Jewish society. At the time, women were very much second-class citizens; in fact, they weren’t even allowed to testify in Jewish courts of law! If the gospel authors wanted to fabricate witnesses to the empty tomb, it’s likely they would have had one of Jesus’s male disciples (Peter or John, perhaps) go to the tomb on Easter Sunday. That all four gospels portray women bearing witness to Christ’s resurrection is a testament to the account’s veracity.
But why were the women there in the first place? If they knew the tomb was sealed, why would they go to anoint a body they knew they wouldn’t be able to access?
Simply put, they loved Jesus deeply and were in deep mourning. They likely visited his tomb in the desperate hope that, somehow, they would be able to anoint his body.
In addition to the rebuttals outlined above, there is a wealth of affirmative evidence that the tomb was empty.
This theory, proposed by Kirsopp Lake in 1907, is absurd on its face. As noted in #2 just above, both Jews and Christians of the time knew exactly where Jesus was buried. If the women witnesses had gone to the wrong tomb, they would have been quickly corrected by the Jewish authorities (who had an interest in showing Jesus’s Resurrection to be a concoction).
Even if the disciples were able to get by the guards and steal Jesus’s body, this theory doesn’t make sense given the disciples’ own faith—for which, eventually, they were put to death. Why would they die for a hoax they’d perpetrated themselves?
The textual scholarship on the gospels, Mark’s especially (see Chapter 1), has shown the gospels were written quite close in time to the events in question. Simply put, if the gospels contained fabrications or exaggerations, they would have been corrected by the eyewitnesses and near-eyewitnesses still living.
Isn’t any alternative account more plausible than a dead person coming back to life?
Yes, but only if one is thinking exclusively naturally or materially. If one believes in the existence of a supernatural God, however, the Resurrection is, in fact, comparatively simple.
The authenticity of the empty tomb established, Strobel sets out to determine whether the second key proof of the Resurrection—that certain people encountered Jesus after he was buried—holds up.
To do so, he travels to Lynchburg, Virginia, to meet with Gary Habermas, one of the most formidable apologists of Christianity in the world. A professor at Liberty University, Habermas has participated in high-profile debates with leading atheists, including Antony Flew, author of The Presumption of Atheism. Famously, in his debate with Flew, four of the five judges—who were philosophers affiliated with various colleges and universities—declared Habermas the winner, and the fifth said the debate was a draw.
Habermas earned his PhD at Michigan State University, and he has authored seven books concerning the Resurrection, including The Resurrection of Jesus: An Apologetic and Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate.
Critics of Christianity are eager to point out that, whatever other evidence there might be for the Resurrection, no one actually saw Jesus rise from the dead and leave the tomb.
Scholars like Habermas concede this argument, but they definitely don’t think it means the Resurrection didn’t happen. If Jesus died on the cross—which Dr. Metherell’s account established beyond the shadow of a doubt (see Chapter 11)—then all there’s left to prove is whether Jesus appeared to people after his death. And there’s ample evidence to indicate he did.
The early church creed featured in 1 Corinthians includes the assertion by Paul that Jesus had not only appeared to him, but to the twelve apostles, 500 of Jesus’s followers, and Jesus’s brother James. There are several reasons why Paul’s testimony is especially convincing:
Although the majority of Paul’s account is corroborated elsewhere in the New Testament, one detail he mentions is conspicuously absent from any secular or religious source: the 500 witnesses to whom Jesus allegedly appeared. To some, this unsubstantiated claim destroys Paul’s credibility.
One thing to remember is that the creed in 1 Corinthians is the oldest and most widely corroborated passage in the New Testament. Isn’t it just possible that Paul’s account is right where the others are wrong?
Another key point is that Paul didn’t have to mention the 500 if he didn’t want to. In essence, he was inviting his readers, many of whom would have been contemporaries of the 500 witnesses, to seek them out and ask about Jesus’s return themselves. Why would he invite this kind of scrutiny if he wasn’t sure his account was correct?
Another discrepancy between Paul’s creed and the gospel accounts concerns the person to whom Jesus first presented himself: in 1 Corinthians, it’s Peter; in John, it’s Mary Magdalene. Don’t these contradictions hurt Paul’s credibility?
They do not, because there may not even be a discrepancy. The creed actually never says that Jesus appeared first to Peter; rather, it says that Jesus appeared to a number of people and simply lists Peter first. That is to say, he might have appeared to Mary Magdalene first, but for contextual or cultural reasons—for example, the inadmissibility of women’s testimony in Jewish law—Paul decided to omit the specific female witnesses.
Of course, 1 Corinthians 15 isn’t the only place in the New Testament where Jesus’s reappearance is described; his appearance to an array of people both named and unnamed is reported in the four gospels and Acts as well. In fact, the gospels and Acts tell us that Jesus appeared to over a dozen individuals, including Mary Magdalene (John 20:10), Cleopas and another disciple (Luke 24:13), and a variety of the apostles (John 20:19, John 20:26, and Acts 1:4). And several sightings appear in multiple books: for example, both Luke 24:50 and Acts 1:4 describe Jesus as having been with the apostles just before His ascension.
It’s especially noteworthy that Acts in particular features detailed accounts of Jesus’s reappearance. Acts, like Paul’s letters, comprises quite early Church material and so is unlikely to have been embellished by legend. And it features the testimony of the witnesses themselves, for example, Peter’s description of eating and drinking with Jesus after he rose from the dead (Acts 10:41). Given the fact that these followers of Jesus would risk their lives—and, in some cases, give their lives—to worship him, it is highly unlikely they would base their devotion on a canard.
(Shortform note: The stories of the apostles’ fate after Jesus’s ascension vary in both the secular and Church literature. A common understanding is that eleven of the Twelve—all except John—were martyred. Other sources indicate that only Peter, Paul, and James were martyred.)
Mark’s gospel, which most scholars agree is the earliest of the gospels, presents a quandary for believers: The earliest manuscripts of Mark are missing verses 16:9–20—i.e., the passages describing Jesus’s appearances after the women find his tomb empty.
Considering the wealth of witness reports elsewhere in the Bible, Mark’s omission certainly doesn’t disprove Jesus’s rise. In fact, Mark reports a young man saying that Jesus was risen and would appear to the apostles, including Mark’s companion Peter, in Galilee. Even if the “true” version of Mark doesn’t include accounts of Jesus’s appearance—a claim that is still debatable—Mark clearly believed that Jesus had risen from the dead and would appear to his brethren.
As with the fact of Jesus’s empty tomb, skeptics have proposed a number of alternative theories to explain Jesus’s “appearance” after his death.
If one concedes that Mark’s gospel ends before recording any posthumous appearances, one can construct a timeline whereby each successive gospel embellishes Jesus’s Resurrection. For example, in Mark, there are no appearances; in Matthew, a few; in Luke, more; and in John, the most. (Shortform note: This sequence follows the gospels’ chronological order of authorship rather than their sequence in the New Testament.)
There are three rebuttals to this argument:
Another possibility is that the various witnesses who claimed to see Jesus alive were being completely truthful—only they’d hallucinated Jesus’s appearance.
Gary Collins, whom Strobel interviewed to determine whether Jesus was psychotic (see Chapter 8), writes that hallucinations are by definition personal and subjective experiences. In other words, a “mass hallucination”—that is, an identical hallucination experienced by several witnesses—is a contradiction in terms. It’s impossible for all of the witnesses to Jesus’s rise to have hallucinated it.
But what about a softer form of hallucination: groupthink? Couldn’t some of the disciples who hallucinated Jesus have talked the others into seeing what wasn’t really there?
The notion that the disciples were “talked into” seeing Jesus fails for the same reason the “legend” argument does: It beggars belief that a disciple would go to his death believing a lie. (Not to mention: Among those who saw Jesus were skeptics like James and Thomas, who wouldn’t be vulnerable to groupthink or persuasion of this kind.)
As an evangelical Christian and ardent defender of the faith, Habermas believes that the Resurrection is the key event for Christianity, the justification for belief itself. However, his sense of the Resurrection’s importance is also personal.
In 1995, Habermas’s wife, Debbie, was dying of stomach cancer, and Habermas was distraught. But when he thought about God raising Jesus—when he recalled that if there’s a Resurrection, there’s a Heaven—he felt peace.
Through his discussions with Drs. Craig and Habermas, Strobel has grounded both the empty tomb and Jesus’s subsequent appearance in solid evidence—which is to say, he’s grounded the Resurrection in evidence.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that the accounts in the gospels and in Acts and Corinthians aren’t true. Is there circumstantial evidence—that is, evidence ancillary to the various narratives of the Resurrection themselves—that supports the truth of the Resurrection?
To answer this question, Strobel visits J.P. Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology. A chemist and philosopher by training, Moreland has published widely in scholarly journals on topics in theology and philosophy, and he’s written a number of books, including Christianity and the Nature of Science, The Life and Death Debate, and Love Your God with All Your Mind.
What are the facts—either historically or canonically grounded beyond a reasonable doubt—that prove the Resurrection happened as it did?
The skeptic’s argument that the Resurrection was a hoax entails an extraordinary ramification: that Jesus’s disciples would risk incredible emotional and physical suffering—even death—for the sake of a fabrication.
Imagine a magician who makes a priceless piece of art disappear. The magician is then arrested for robbery, tried in court, and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Would he endure his sentence for the sake of a silly magic trick? Doubtful. He’d reveal that the artwork’s disappearance was simply an illusion; he’d return the piece and be set free.
If Jesus’s Resurrection was a hoax, the disciples could have acted similarly: They could have renounced their beliefs the minute they were persecuted and consequently been spared. But they didn’t.
A powerful rejoinder to the notion that the Resurrection was a conspiracy cooked up by Jesus’s followers is the fact that Jesus’s skeptics saw him, too.
In the gospels, we learn that Jesus’s family, including his brother James, were embarrassed by him. But through Josephus, the first-century historian, we learn that Jesus’s brother James later became a leader of the Jerusalem church and was executed for his faith. And Paul, who, as Saul of Tarsus, was known even to execute Christians himself, later became one of Jesus’s most devoted disciples and a major contributor to the New Testament.
Their reason for this miraculous 180-degree turn? Seeing Jesus alive after his death on the cross. If they hadn’t truly seen him, the remarkable change in their worldview simply doesn’t make sense.
At the time of Jesus’s teaching, Jews, as they had been for centuries, were persecuted for their beliefs. Due to this interminable abuse, they’d developed extremely resilient religious traditions, and they clung to them even as they were enslaved, tortured, dispersed, and murdered. They did so because they believed these traditions were given to them by God and held out the promise of glory in the afterlife. Suffice it to say, they wouldn’t relinquish these traditions lightly.
Yet, in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s crucifixion, some ten thousand Jews suddenly become followers of Jesus. They were so convinced of Jesus’s importance, in fact, that they abandoned a number of the most essential institutions of Judaism, including the ritual sacrifice of animals, the observance of the Sabbath on Saturday, and the worship of God the Father only, without consideration of his Son and the Holy Spirit.
It’s hard to overstate how radical these changes would have been to a first-century Jew. A Jewish person renouncing these rituals would have been risking his or her friends, family, and soul. The fact is, Jewish converts to Christianity would only change their lives so drastically if they had been inspired to do so by something truly extraordinary: the Resurrection.
The sheer fact that early Christianity adopted the practices of communion and baptism isn’t especially noteworthy—any religion has its own rituals that distinguish it from other religions.
What is significant about communion and baptism is their meaning. Communion, for example, is a commemoration of Jesus’s grisly death (imagine devotees of Martin Luther King Jr. coming together to celebrate his assassination). Why would Jesus’s early followers devote a happy ritual to his abject suffering and death? Because they recognized that he’d died for them, and then rose again.
As for baptism, early Christians modified it from a Jewish form of baptism. In the Christian version, converts were submerged in water to signify Jesus’s death and brought to the surface to signify Jesus’s rise. Like Communion, this ritual was developed explicitly in response to the Resurrection.
It is a historical fact that Christianity spread at an unbelievable rate. After a mere twenty years, the religion had arrived in Rome, and it wasn’t long before it spread more widely (and eventually outlasted) the Roman Empire and its religion entirely. Now, devotees of Paganism are vanishingly rare, whereas one can find robust communities of Christians almost anywhere on Earth. How does one explain the incredible growth and resilience of this ancient religion, begun by the destitute followers of a humble carpenter? Secular historians are at pains to explain the phenomenon, but the best answer seems the most obvious one: that people were compelled to become Christians by the fact of the Resurrection.
The five categories of evidence described above are highly persuasive, but they need to be supplemented with one final proof: a personal experience of God.
For Moreland, this happened when he was a chemistry student in 1968. Skeptical of the story of Jesus, he examined the evidence and eventually became convinced of the truth of the Resurrection. But in order to know for certain that Jesus rose from the dead, he had to receive Christ as his savior and teacher and open himself to a relationship with him.
Since becoming a believer, Moreland has had experiences that simply can’t be explained naturally. The circumstantial evidence is more than convincing, but his personal experience of a divine Christ closes the case.
Revisit what you’ve learned about the Resurrection.
Isn’t it possible Jesus never died on the cross, and so was never really resurrected? Why or why not? (Hint: Review Chapter 11.)
Why is the fact that Christianity spread so widely so quickly after Jesus’s death evidence of the truth of the Resurrection? (Hint: Review Chapter 13.)
Write down three pieces of evidence that prove Jesus’s tomb was empty. (Hint: Review Chapter 12.)
At the culmination of his investigation, Strobel locks himself in his home office to review everything he’s learned. Through his interviews and research, he’s established the following:
Whereas Strobel once thought the gospels were legends concocted by biased authors, his conversation with Blomberg confirmed that the gospels bear all the markings of trustworthy eyewitness accounts.
That the gospels harmonize on the major points while diverging on minor ones suggests that (a) the authors are reliable and (b) the overall contours of Jesus’s story are factually accurate. Also, the early church couldn’t have thrived in Jerusalem—as it did—if the gospels had been exaggerated: everyone would have known the disciples were lying.
Strobel’s interview with Bruce Metzger confirmed that the documents on which the New Testament is based date to an extremely early period in the church and are authentic.
There is more historical evidence for Jesus’s existence than for many historical personages whose reality we take for granted. Secular sources attest to Jesus’s ability to perform miracles, his crucifixion, and his early followers’ belief in his Resurrection.
No archeological finding has disproved the New Testament, and Luke’s gospel has proven especially accurate, with references to geographical and cultural landmarks later confirmed by archaeological discoveries.
The Jesus Seminar has attempted to distinguish between a naturalistic Jesus and the mythological Jesus featured in the gospels, but its scholars rely on a number of specious sources to make their case. The evidence for the gospels’ account is far more robust and convincing than for the Jesus Seminar’s theories.
Some skeptics have argued that Jesus didn’t actually believe he was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. However, the numerous references Jesus makes to his own provenance and deity confirm he did in fact believe he was the Christ, sent to redeem the world.
Those with paranoid schizophrenia or other mental illnesses exhibit an array of symptoms beyond delusions of grandeur, including antisociality and trouble expressing emotion. Jesus exhibited none of these symptoms, and he supported his claims of divinity by performing independently verified miracles.
Although some believe Jesus voluntarily limited his divine powers when he was incarnated, the New Testament shows that he possessed all the attributes of deity, including omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.
Old Testament prophets made a number of predictions about the identity of the Messiah, including minor details like his place of birth and whether he would be buried with no broken bones. The odds that someone could match these prophecies by chance is infinitesimal. Jesus, of course, fit these predictions completely.
Skeptics of the Resurrection have attempted to explain away Jesus’s “rise” by claiming he never actually died on the cross. Detailed medical analysis of Jesus’s brutal beating before the crucifixion, as well as the damage done by the crucifixion itself, can’t but conclude that Jesus was dead when he was entombed.
The relevant canonical sources for the empty tomb—the gospel of Mark and the creed in 1 Corinthians—have been dated to within a matter of years of Christ’s Resurrection; thus it’s highly unlikely their accounts are the product of legend. Skeptics at the time implicitly accepted that the tomb was empty, and the fact that the canonical accounts describe women discovering the empty tomb is a testament to the accounts’ reliability: If the New Testament authors were making the whole thing up, they would undoubtedly have had men discover the empty tomb (women’s testimony wasn’t admissible in the Jewish courts at the time).
The early-authored book Acts contains references to Jesus’s appearance to people after his death, and the gospels describe encounters Jesus’s followers and others had with Jesus. There is also a wealth of circumstantial evidence that corroborates the biblical account of the resurrection, including the disciples’ martyrdom and the remarkable speed with which Jews converted to Christianity.
In Strobel’s case, the overwhelming evidence for the truth of Jesus Christ—as deity and Messiah—caused him to abandon his atheism. To conduct the experiential, rather than intellectual, test recommended by Dr. Moreland, on November 8, 1981, Strobel took three key steps: