The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus

by Lee Strobel

Craig Blomberg is widely considered to be one of the country’s foremost authorities on the biographies of Jesus, which are called the four gospels. He received his doctorate in New Testament from Aberdeen University in Scotland, later serving as a senior research fellow at Tyndale House at Cambridge University in England, where he was part of an elite group of international scholars that produced a series of acclaimed works on Jesus.

For the last dozen years he has been a professor of New Testament at the highly respected Denver Seminary.

“Tell me this,” I said with an edge of challenge in my voice, “is it really possible to be an intelligent, critically thinking person and still believe that the four gospels were written by the people whose names have been attached to them?” Blomberg set his cup of coffee on the edge of his desk and looked intently at me. “The answer is yes,” he said with conviction.

“It’s important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous. But the uniform testimony of the early church was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the tax collector and one of the twelve disciples, was the author of the first gospel in the New Testament; that John Mark, a companion of Peter, was the author of the gospel we call Mark; and that Luke, known as Paul’s ‘beloved physician,’ wrote both the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.”

“Contrast this with what happened when the fanciful apocryphal gospels were written much later. People chose the names of well-known and exemplary figures to be their fictitious authors—Philip, Peter, Mary, James. Those names carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. So to answer your question, there would not have been any reason to attribute authorship to these three less respected people if it weren’t true.”

“What about John?” I asked. “He was extremely prominent; in fact, he wasn’t just one of the twelve disciples but one of Jesus’ inner three, along with James and Peter.” “Yes, he’s the one exception,” Blomberg conceded with a nod. “And interestingly, John is the only gospel about which there is some question about authorship.” “What exactly is in dispute?” “The name of the author isn’t in doubt—it’s certainly John,” Blomberg replied. “The question is whether it was John the apostle or a different John.

“But in any event,” he stressed, “the gospel is obviously based on eyewitness material, as are the other three gospels.”

Blomberg leaned forward. “Again, the oldest and probably most significant testimony comes from Papias, who in about A.D. 125 specifically affirmed that Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter’s eyewitness observations. In fact, he said Mark ‘made no mistake’ and did not include ‘any false statement.’ And Papias said Matthew had preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.

“If we can have confidence that the gospels were written by the disciples Matthew and John, by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter, and by Luke, the historian, companion of Paul, and sort of a first-century journalist, we can be assured that the events they record are based on either direct or indirect eyewitness testimony.” As I was speaking, Blomberg was mentally sifting my words. When I finished, he nodded. “Exactly,” he said crisply.

Mark—he doesn’t talk about the birth of Jesus or really anything through Jesus’ early adult years. Instead he focuses on a three-year period and spends half his gospel on the events leading up to and culminating in Jesus’ last week. How do you explain that?” Blomberg held up a couple of fingers.

“The only purpose for which they thought history was worth recording was because there were some lessons to be learned from the characters described.

roughly half his narrative to the events leading up to and including one week’s period of time and culminating in Christ’s death and resurrection. “Given the significance of the Crucifixion,” he concluded, “this makes perfect sense in ancient literature.”

“You see, it was a common literary genre to collect the sayings of respected teachers, sort of as we compile the top music of a singer and put it into a ‘best of’ album. Q may have been something like that. At least that’s the theory.”

Luke, the theologian of the poor and of social concern; Matthew, the theologian trying to understand the relationship of Christianity and Judaism; Mark, who shows Jesus as the suffering servant. You can make a long list of the distinctive theologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.”

“Christianity was likewise based on certain historical claims that God uniquely entered into space and time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so the very ideology that Christians were trying to promote required as careful historical work as possible.”

We know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life was St. Mark’s gospel, which was not written until about the year 70, some forty years after his death. By that time, historical facts had been overlaid with mythical elements which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers. It is this meaning that St. Mark primarily conveys rather than a reliable straightforward portrayal.7

Acts ends apparently unfinished—Paul is a central figure of the book, and he’s under house arrest in Rome. With that the book abruptly halts. What happens to Paul? We don’t find out from Acts, probably because the book was written before Paul was put to death.”

“That means Acts cannot be dated any later than A.D. 62. Having established that, we can then move backward from there. Since Acts is the second of a two-part work, we know the first part—the gospel of Luke—must have been written earlier than that. And since Luke incorporates parts of the gospel of Mark, that means Mark is even earlier.

“If you allow maybe a year for each of those, you end up with Mark written no later than about A.D. 60, maybe even the late 50s. If Jesus was put to death in A.D. 30 or 33, we’re talking about a maximum gap of thirty years or so.”

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

“And here’s the point,” Blomberg said. “If the Crucifixion was as early as A.D. 30, Paul’s conversion was about 32. Immediately Paul was ushered into Damascus, where he met with a Christian named Ananias and some other disciples. His first meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem would have been about A.D. 35. At some point along there, Paul was given this creed, which had already been formulated and was being used in the early church.

“Were these first-century writers even interested in recording what actually happened?” I asked. Blomberg nodded. “Yes, they were,” he said. “You can see that at the beginning of the gospel of Luke, which reads very much like prefaces to other generally trusted historical and biographical works of antiquity.”

“It seems quite apparent that the goal of the gospel writers was to attempt to record what had actually occurred.”

They have said that early Christians were convinced Jesus was going to be returning during their lifetime to consummate history, so they didn’t think it was necessary to preserve any historical records about his life or teachings. After all, why bother if he’s going to come and end the world at any moment?

They were willing to live out their beliefs even to the point of ten of the eleven remaining disciples being put to grisly deaths, which shows great character.

Bruce Metzger on a Saturday afternoon at his usual hangout, the library at Princeton Theological Seminary, where, he says with a smile, “I like to dust off the books.” Actually, he has written some of the best of them, especially when the topic is the text of the New Testament. In all, he has authored or edited fifty books, including The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content; The Text of the New Testament; The Canon of the New Testament; Manuscripts of the Greek Bible; Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament; Introduction to the Apocrypha; and The Oxford Companion to the Bible.

Metzger’s education includes a master’s degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and both a master’s degree and a doctorate from Princeton University. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by five colleges and universities, including St. Andrews University in Scotland, the University of Munster in Germany, and Potchefstroom University in South Africa.

how can we be sure the biographies of Jesus were handed down to us in a reliable way?

tell me about the writing of authors from about the time of Jesus.”

“Consider Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about A.D. 116,” he began.

So there is a long gap between the time that Tacitus sought his information and wrote it down and the only existing copies.

“With regard to the first-century historian Josephus, we have nine Greek manuscripts of his work The Jewish War, and these copies were written in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. There is a Latin translation from the fourth century and medieval Russian materials

“Of the entire New Testament,” I said, “what is the earliest portion that we possess today?” Metzger didn’t have to ponder the answer. “That would be a fragment of the gospel of John, containing material from chapter eighteen. It has five verses—three on one side, two on the other—and it measures about two and a half by three and a half inches,” he said. “How was it discovered?” “It was purchased in Egypt as early as 1920, but it sat unnoticed for years among similar fragments of papyri.

Then in 1934 C. H. Roberts of Saint John’s College, Oxford, was sorting through the papyri at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England. He immediately recognized this as preserving a portion of John’s gospel. He was able to date it from the style of the script.”

“He concluded it originated between A.D. 100 to 150.

Sir Harold Bell, Adolf Deissmann, W. H. P. Hatch, Ulrich Wilcken, and others, have agreed with his assessment. Deissmann was convinced that it goes back at least to the reign of Emperor Hadrian, which was A.D. 117–138, or even Emperor Trajan, which was A.D. 98–117.”

“We have what are called uncial manuscripts, which are written in all-capital Greek letters,” Metzger explained. “Today we have 306 of these, several dating back as early as the third century. The most important are Codex Sinaiticus, which is the only complete New Testament in uncial letters, and Codex Vaticanus, which is not quite complete. Both date to about A.D. 350.

“Basically, the early church had three criteria,” he said. “First, the books must have apostolic authority—that is, they must have been written either by apostles themselves, who were eyewitnesses to what they wrote about, or by followers of apostles. So in the case of Mark and Luke, while they weren’t among the twelve disciples, early tradition has it that Mark was a helper of Peter, and Luke was an associate of Paul. “Second, there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the rule of faith. That is, was the document congruent with the basic Christian tradition that the church recognized as normative? And third, there was the criterion of whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.”

“We can be confident that no other ancient books can compare with the New Testament in terms of importance for Christian history or doctrine. When one studies the early history of the canon, one walks away convinced that the New Testament contains the best sources for the history of Jesus.

‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, render to God the things that are God’s, render to me the things that are mine.’ In this case the later phrase has been added.

If we compare the present state of the New Testament text with that of any other ancient writing, we must . . . declare it to be marvelously correct.

Edwin Yamauchi at Miami University in picturesque Oxford, Ohio, I walked underneath a stone arch bearing this

He has delivered seventy-one papers before learned societies; lectured at more than one hundred seminaries, universities, and colleges, including Yale, Princeton, and Cornell; served as chairman and then president of the Institute for Biblical Research and president of the Conference on Faith and History; and published eighty articles in thirty-seven scholarly journals.

In 1968 he participated in the first excavations of the Herodian temple in Jerusalem, revealing evidence of the temple’s destruction in A.D. 70. Archaeology has also been the theme of several of his books, including The Stones and the Scriptures; The Scriptures and Archaeology; and The World of the First Christians.

“As a historian, could you give me your assessment of the historical reliability of the gospels themselves?” “On the whole, the gospels are excellent sources,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, they’re the most trustworthy, complete, and reliable sources for Jesus. The incidental sources really don’t add much detailed information; however, they are valuable as corroborative evidence.”

The [Christian] church bases its claims mostly on the teachings of an obscure young Jew with messianic pretentions who, let’s face it, didn’t make much of an impression in his lifetime. There isn’t a single word about him in secular history. Not a word. No mention of him by the Romans. Not so much as a reference by Josephus.

we do have very, very important references to Jesus in Josephus and Tacitus.

Templeton and Yamauchi had both mentioned Josephus, a first-century historian who’s well known among scholars but whose name is unfamiliar to most people today.

“Josephus was a very important Jewish historian of the first century. He was born in A.D. 37, and he wrote most of his four works toward the end of the first century.

“He was a priest, a Pharisee, and he was somewhat egotistical. His most ambitious work was called The Antiquities, which was a history of the Jewish people from Creation until his time. He probably completed it in about A.D. 93. “As you can imagine from his collaboration with the hated Romans, Josephus was extremely disliked by his fellow Jews. But he became very popular among Christians, because in his writings he refers to James, the brother of Jesus, and to Jesus himself.”