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

by Lee Strobel

As for Jesus, didn’t you know that he never claimed to be God? He was a revolutionary, a sage, an iconoclastic Jew—but God? No, that thought never occurred to him!

He provided absolutely no solid proof of that. “Obviously” how?

“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.

At best, this is a third-hand account.

They did not have the sense, as we do today, that it was important to give equal proportion to all periods of an individual’s life or that it was necessary to tell the story in strictly chronological order or even to quote people verbatim, as long as the essence of what they said was preserved.

“They did not have the sense”?? Holy crap.

“Given the significance of the Crucifixion,” he concluded, “this makes perfect sense in ancient literature.”

I’m not even close to convinced. Based on these quotes, I’m in exactly the same position I was before I red them. In fact, I’m even more annoyed.

his quest for accuracy

Think of the story of Jesus walking on the water, found in Matthew 14:22–33 and Mark 6:45–52. Most English translations hide the Greek by quoting Jesus as saying, ‘Fear not, it is I.’ Actually, the Greek literally says, ‘Fear not, I am.’ Those last two words are identical to what Jesus said in John 8:58, when he took upon himself the divine name ‘I AM,’ which is the way God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3:14. So Jesus is revealing himself as the one who has the same divine power over nature as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.”

“Karen Armstrong, the former nun who wrote the best-seller A History of God, said it seems that the term ‘Son of Man’ ‘simply stressed the weakness and mortality of the human condition,’ so by using it, Jesus was merely emphasizing that ‘he was a frail human being who would one day suffer and die.’5 If that’s true,” I said, “that doesn’t sound like much of a claim to deity.”

“Look,” he said firmly, “contrary to popular belief, ‘Son of Man’ does not primarily refer to Jesus’ humanity. Instead it’s a direct allusion to Daniel 7:13–14.”

“This is someone who approaches God himself in his heavenly throne room and is given universal authority and dominion.

Also someone familiar with the Old Testament - Torah. Jewish tradition, etc.

“In the ancient world the idea of writing dispassionate, objective history merely to chronicle events, with no ideological purpose, was unheard of. Nobody wrote history if there wasn’t a reason to learn from it.”

“It’s important to remember that the books of the New Testament are not in chronological order,” he began. “The gospels were written after almost all the letters of Paul, whose writing ministry probably began in the late 40s. Most of his major letters appeared during the 50s.

“As you can see,” Blomberg continued, “Luke is clearly saying he intended to write accurately about the things he investigated and found to be well-supported by witnesses.”

Well, that’s what he says. Why should we trust he’s being honest? How does he earn such an assumption?

“The only other statement of purpose in the gospels comes in John 20:31: ‘These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.’ ”

You don’t find the outlandish flourishes and blatant mythologizing that you see in a lot of other ancient writings.

You don't see “outlandish flourishes” in the Gospels? He must mean that in a literary sense.

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

Or… to convince someone to follow. If what they say happened doesn't line up with what was spposed to happen theologically... They’d have incentive to exaggerate. All of them.

“And in 1 Corinthians 14, when Paul is discussing the criteria for true prophecy, he talks about the responsibility of the local church to test the prophets. Drawing on his Jewish background, we know that the criteria for true prophecy would have included whether the prediction comes true and whether these new statements cohere with previously revealed words of the Lord.

“These issues could have been conveniently resolved if the early Christians had simply read back into the gospels what Jesus had told them from the world beyond. But this never happened. The continuance of these controversies demonstrates that Christians were interested in distinguishing between what happened during Jesus’ lifetime and what was debated later in the churches.”

Okay, that’s a great point. I like that.

I asked Blomberg, “Won’t you concede that faulty memories, wishful thinking, and the development of legend would have irreparably contaminated the Jesus tradition prior to the writing of the gospels?”

“Rabbis became famous for having the entire Old Testament committed to memory. So it would have been well within the capability of Jesus’ disciples to have committed much more to memory than appears in all four gospels put together—and to have passed it along accurately.”

And remember that eighty to ninety percent of Jesus’ words were originally in poetic form. This doesn’t mean stuff that rhymes, but it has a meter, balanced lines, parallelism, and so forth—and this would have created a great memory help.

Playing Telephone

This is a good section. I’ve often thought about this, and I think the professor’s argument here is sound.

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.

Answering a question I had in the last chapter.

once you allow for the elements I’ve talked about earlier—of paraphrase, of abridgment, of explanatory additions, of selection, of omission—the gospels are extremely consistent with each other by ancient standards, which are the only standards by which it’s fair to judge them.”

“There is enough of a discrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them; and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of the same great transaction.”3

“What about Mark and Luke saying that Jesus sent the demons into the swine at Gerasa, while Matthew says it was in Gadara. People look at that and say this is an obvious contradiction that cannot be reconciled—it’s two different places. Case closed.” “Well, don’t shut the case yet,” Blomberg chuckled. “Here’s one possible solution: one was a town; the other was a province.”

“It gets more complicated than that,” I said. “Gerasa, the town, wasn’t anywhere near the Sea of Galilee, yet that’s where the demons, after going into the swine, supposedly took the herd over the cliff to their deaths.” “OK, good point,” he said. “But there have been ruins of a town that have been excavated at exactly the right point on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The English form of the town’s name often gets pronounced ‘Khersa,’ but as a Hebrew word translated or transliterated into Greek, it could have come out sounding something very much like ‘Gerasa.’ So it may very well have been in Khersa—whose spelling in Greek was rendered as Gerasa—in the province of Gadara.”

He opened the lid to reveal the ashes of an RSV Bible that had been torched in a 1952 bonfire during a protest by a fundamentalist preacher. “It seems he didn’t like it when the committee changed ‘fellows’ of the King James Version to ‘comrades’ in Hebrews 1:9,” Metzger explained with a chuckle. “He accused them of being communists!”

He was thoroughly kind, surprisingly modest and self-effacing, with a gentle spirit that made me want to someday grow old with the same mellow kind of grace.

“The last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.”

??

“First let me say this: Eyeglasses weren’t invented until 1373 in Venice, and I’m sure that astigmatism existed among the ancient scribes. That was compounded by the fact that it was difficult under any circumstances to read faded manuscripts on which some of the ink had flaked away.

What about allegations that church councils squelched equally legitimate documents because they didn’t like the picture of Jesus they portrayed?

“It was, if I may put it this way, an example of ‘survival of the fittest.’ In talking about the canon, Arthur Darby Nock used to tell his students at Harvard, ‘The most traveled roads in Europe are the best roads; that’s why they’re so heavily traveled.’ That’s a good analogy. British commentator William Barclay said it this way: ‘It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.’

“The Gospel of Thomas ends with a note saying, ‘Let Mary go away from us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus is quoted as saying, ‘Lo, I shall lead her in order to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ ” Metzger’s eyebrows shot up as if he were surprised at what he had just uttered. “Now, this is not the Jesus we know from the four canonical gospels!” he said emphatically.

“You have to understand that the canon was not the result of a series of contests involving church politics. The canon is rather the separation that came about because of the intuitive insight of Christian believers. They could hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in the gospel of John; they could hear it only in a muffled and distorted way in the Gospel of Thomas, mixed in with a lot of other things.

“That the passage in Josephus probably was originally written about Jesus, although without those three points I mentioned. But even so, Josephus corroborates important information about Jesus: that he was the martyred leader of the church in Jerusalem and that he was a wise teacher who had established a wide and lasting following, despite the fact that he had been crucified under Pilate at the instigation of some of the Jewish leaders.”

“There is overwhelming evidence that Jesus did exist, and these hypothetical questions are really very vacuous and fallacious.

Elaborate

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstitution, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome. . . . Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty: then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.7

“How can you explain the spread of a religion based on the worship of a man who had suffered the most ignominious death possible? Of course, the Christian answer is that he was resurrected. Others have to come up with some alternative theory if they don’t believe that. But none of the alternative views, to my mind, are very persuasive.”

Apparently, some found the need to try to give it a natural explanation by saying it was an eclipse.”

Why wouldn’t they? That makes a whole lot more sense.

The Quest Study Bible, which was designed for people who are asking intellectual questions about the Christian faith.

They say they want a Jesus who’s relevant for today. One of them said that the traditional Jesus did not speak to the needs of the ecological crisis, the nuclear crisis, the feminist crisis, so we need a new picture of Jesus. As another one said, we need ‘a new fiction.’ “One of the twists is that they’re going directly to the masses instead of to other scholars. They want to take their findings out of the ivory tower and bring them into the marketplace to influence popular opinion. And what they have in mind is a totally new form of Christianity.”

I don’t exactly see a problem here.

Boyd turned in his seat to face me. “Ah, but that’s not what’s really going on,” he insisted. “The participants of the Jesus Seminar are at least as biased as evangelicals—and I would say more so. They bring a whole set of assumptions to their scholarship, which of course we all do to some degree.

“So I grant that. But what I can’t grant is the tremendous presumption that we know enough about the universe to say that God—if there is a God—can never break into our world in a supernatural way. That’s a very presumptuous assumption.

“One is called double dissimilarity,” he replied. “This means they can believe Jesus said something if it doesn’t look like something a rabbi or the later church would say. Otherwise they assume it got into the gospels from a Jewish or Christian source. “The obvious problem is that Jesus was Jewish and he founded the Christian church, so it shouldn’t be surprising if he sounds Jewish and Christian!

I can see the danger in this. Always assuming the worst - is a huge problem.

“You know the evidence as well as I do,” I said to Boyd. “Here’s someone from the first century who was said to have healed people and to have exorcised demons; who may have raised a young girl from the dead; and who appeared to some of his followers after he died. People point to that and say, ‘Aha! If you’re going to admit that the Apollonius story is legendary, why not say the same thing about the Jesus story?’

“As for Q, it’s not a discovery but a theory that has been around for one and a half centuries, which tries to account for the material that Luke and Matthew have in common. What’s new is the highly questionable way that left-wing scholars are using their presuppositions to slice this hypothetical Q into various layers of legendary development to back up their preconceived theories.”

He’s making an argument against “left wing” conspiracy theorists. Completely unnecessary!

“So Secret Mark is a nonexistent work cited by a now nonexistent text by a late second-century writer who’s known for being naive about these things. The vast majority of scholars don’t give this any credibility. Unfortunately, those who do get a lot of press, because the media love the sensational.”

And now an offhand remark about “the media” and their love of sensationalism.

“Everyone concedes that this gospel has been significantly influenced by Gnosticism, which was a religious movement in the second, third, and fourth centuries that supposedly had secret insights, knowledge, or revelations that would allow people to know the key to the universe. Salvation was by what you knew— gnosis is Greek for ‘know,’ ” he said.

“Generally speaking, they define the Jesus of faith this way: there are religious symbols that are quite meaningful to people—the symbol of Jesus being divine, of the cross, of self-sacrificial love, of the Resurrection. Even though people don’t really believe that those things actually happened, they nevertheless can inspire people to live a good life, to overcome existential angst, to realize new potentialities, to resurrect hope in the midst of despair—blah, blah, blah.”

Again… the “blah blah blah” here is just ridiculous.