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

by Lee Strobel

That doesn’t mean they have one-hundred-percent certainty, because we can’t have absolute proof about anything in life. In a trial, jurors are asked to weigh the evidence and come to the best possible conclusion.

Dr. Craig Blomberg, author of The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.

I wanted someone with integrity, someone who has grappled with the most potent critiques of the faith and who speaks authoritatively but without the kind of sweeping statements that conceal rather than deal with critical issues.

Blomberg’s books include Jesus and the Gospels; Interpreting the Parables; How Wide the Divide?; and commentaries on the gospel of Matthew and 1 Corinthians. He also helped edit volume six of Gospel Perspectives, which deals at length with the miracles of Jesus, and he coauthored Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. He contributed chapters on the historicity of the gospels to the book Reasonable

John is the only gospel about which there is some question about authorship.”

“the gospel is obviously based on eyewitness material, as are the other three gospels.”

Ancient Greek and Hebrew didn’t even have a symbol for quotation marks.

The Son of Man was a divine figure in the Old Testament book of Daniel who would come at

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.”

“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.”

Armstrong’s popular book A History of God.

“The standard scholarly dating, even in very liberal circles, is Mark in the 70s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s, John in the 90s. But listen: that’s still within the lifetimes of various eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, including hostile eyewitnesses who would have served as a corrective if false teachings about Jesus were going around.

But perhaps the most important creed in terms of the historical Jesus is 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul uses technical language to indicate he was passing along this oral tradition in relatively fixed form.”

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.

to generate doubts, to probe the soft and vulnerable spots of a witness’s story. They do this by subjecting the testimony to a variety of tests. The idea is that honest and accurate testimony will withstand scrutiny, while false, exaggerated, or misleading testimony will be exposed.

“One study suggested that in the ancient Middle East, anywhere from ten to forty percent of any given retelling of sacred tradition could vary from one occasion to the next. However, there were always fixed points that were unalterable, and the community had the right to intervene and correct the storyteller if he erred on those important aspects of the

“The community would constantly be monitoring what was said and intervening to make corrections along the way. That would preserve the integrity of the message,” he said. “And the result would be very different from that of a childish game of telephone.”

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.

“My own conviction is, 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

agreement over basic data and divergence of details suggest credibility, because fabricated accounts tend to be fully consistent and harmonized. “Every historian,” he wrote, “is especially skeptical at that moment when an extraordinary happening is only reported in accounts which are completely free of contradictions.”

“there are occasions when we may need to hold judgment in abeyance and simply say that since we’ve made sense out of the vast majority of the texts and determined them to be trustworthy, we can then give them the benefit of the doubt when we’re not sure on some of the other details.”

the longer people explore this, the more the details get confirmed,” Blomberg replied. “Within the last hundred years archaeology has repeatedly unearthed discoveries that have confirmed specific references in the gospels,

“Yet look at what his opponents did say. In later Jewish writings Jesus is called a sorcerer who led Israel astray—which acknowledges that he really did work marvelous wonders, although the writers dispute the source of his power.

The Bible considers it praiseworthy to have a faith that does not require evidence. Remember how Jesus replied to doubting Thomas: ‘You believe because you see; blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ And I know evidence can never compel or coerce faith. We cannot supplant the role of the Holy Spirit, which is often a concern of Christians when they hear discussions of this kind.

“But I’ll tell you this: there are plenty of stories of scholars in the New Testament field who have not been Christians, yet through their study of these very issues have come to faith in Christ. And there have been countless more scholars, already believers, whose faith has been made stronger, more solid, more grounded, because of the evidence—and that’s the category I fall into.”

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.’

“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.

“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.”

“For example, although the Gathas of Zoroaster, about 1000 B.C., are believed to be authentic, most of the Zoroastrian scriptures were not put into writing until after the third century A.D. The most popular Parsi biography of Zoroaster was written in A.D. 1278. “The scriptures of Buddha, who lived in the sixth century B.C., were not put into writing until after the Christian era, and the first biography of Buddha was written in the first century A.D. Although we have the sayings of Muhammad, who lived from A.D. 570 to 632, in the Koran, his biography was not written until 767—more than a full century after his death.

what would we be able to conclude about Jesus from ancient non-Christian sources, such as Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and others?”

Then he went on, raising a finger to emphasize each point. “We would know that first, Jesus was a Jewish teacher; second, many people believed that he performed healings and exorcisms; third, some people believed he was the Messiah; fourth, he was rejected by the Jewish leaders; fifth, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; sixth, despite this shameful death, his followers, who believed that he was still alive, spread beyond Palestine so that there were multitudes of them in Rome by A.D. 64; and seventh, all kinds of people from the cities and countryside—men and women, slave and free—worshiped him as God.”

seven letters of Ignatius as being among the most important of the writings of the apostolic fathers. Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch in Syria, was martyred during the reign of Trajan before

When scholars and students study archaeology, many turn to John McRay’s thorough and dispassionate 432-page textbook Archaeology and the New Testament.

Spiritual truths cannot be proved or disproved by archaeological discoveries.”

The premise is that if an ancient historian’s incidental details check out to be accurate time after time, this increases our confidence in other material that the historian wrote but that cannot be as readily cross-checked.

“The general consensus of both liberal and conservative scholars is that Luke is very accurate as a historian,” McRay replied. “He’s erudite, he’s eloquent, his Greek approaches classical quality, he writes as an educated man, and archaeological discoveries are showing over and over again that Luke is accurate in what he has to say.”

Again archaeology had answered another challenge to Luke. And given the large portion of the New Testament written by him, it’s extremely significant that Luke has been established to be a scrupulously accurate historian, even in the smallest details. One prominent archaeologist carefully examined Luke’s references to thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities, and nine islands, finding not a single mistake.3

Jesus’ response was an allusion to Isaiah 35. But for some reason Jesus included the phrase “the dead are raised,” which is conspicuously absent from the Old Testament text. This is where 4Q521 comes in.

This nonbiblical manuscript from the Dead Sea collection, written in Hebrew, dates back to thirty years before Jesus was born. It contains a version of Isaiah 61 that does include this missing phrase, “the dead are raised.”

“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,

“The theological truth is based on historical truth.

want reality, and the Christian faith has always been rooted in reality. What’s not rooted in reality is the faith of liberal scholars. They’re the ones who are following a pipe dream, but Christianity is not a pipe dream.”

“It’s like this: if you love a person, your love goes beyond the facts of that person, but it’s rooted in the facts about that person. For example, you love your wife because she’s gorgeous, she’s nice, she’s sweet, she’s kind. All these things are facts about your wife, and therefore you love her. “But your love goes beyond that. You can know all these things about your wife and not be in love with her and put your trust in her, but you do. So the decision goes beyond the evidence, yet it is there also on the basis of the evidence. “So it is with falling in love with Jesus. To have a relationship with Jesus Christ goes beyond just knowing the historical facts about him, yet it’s rooted in the historical facts about him. I believe in Jesus on the basis of the historical evidence, but my relationship with Jesus goes way beyond the evidence. I have to put my trust in him and walk with him on a daily basis.”

bringing about something unprecedented—the coming of God’s dominion,” replied Witherington. “He doesn’t merely see himself as a worker of miracles; he sees himself as the one in whom and through whom the promises of God come to pass. And that’s a not-too-thinly-veiled claim of transcendence.”

“So here is someone who considered himself to have authority above and beyond what the Old Testament prophets had. He believed he possessed not only divine inspiration, as King David did, but also divine authority and the power of direct divine utterance.”

although I do believe he had points of identity confirmation,” the professor replied. “At his baptism, at his temptation, at the Transfiguration, in the Garden of Gethsemane—these are crisis moments in which God confirmed to him who he was and what his mission was.

‘A text without a context becomes a pretext for a prooftext.’

“The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We’ve all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was to have a ‘revolutionary man’ followed by the ‘new man.’ Trouble is, they never found the ‘new man.’ They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn’t mean the peasants were suddenly free—they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human

Omniscience? In John 16:30 the apostle John affirms of Jesus, “Now we can see that you know all things.” • Omnipresence? Jesus said in Matthew 28:20, “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” and in Matthew 18:20, “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” • Omnipotence? “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” Jesus said in Matthew 28:18. • Eternality? John 1:1 declares of Jesus, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” • Immutability? Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”