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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lee Strobel
Read between
March 27 - August 1, 2019
an investigative journalist
probes with bulldog-like tenacity the evidence for the truth of biblical Christianity.
eyewitness testimony can be compelling and convincing.
no bias or ulterior motives,
And eyewitness testimony is just as crucial in investigating historical matters—even the issue of whether Jesus Christ is the unique Son of God.
But what eyewitness accounts do we possess?
eyewitness accounts from the mists of distant time could help resolve the most important spiritual issue of
the biographies of Jesus, which are called the four gospels.
Blomberg speaks with the precision of a mathematician (yes, he taught mathematics too, earlier in his career), carefully measuring each word out of an apparent reluctance to tread even one nuance beyond where the evidence warrants.
“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?”
“Mark and Luke weren’t even among the twelve disciples.
Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter’s eyewitness observations.
Mark—he doesn’t talk about the birth of Jesus or really anything through Jesus’ early adult years.
he focuses on a three-year period and spends half his gospel on the events leading up to and culminating in Jesus’ last week.
“So Mark in particular, as the writer of probably the earliest gospel,
Because of similarities in language and content, it has traditionally been assumed that Matthew and Luke drew upon Mark’s earlier gospel in writing their
In addition, scholars have said that Matthew and Luke also incorporated some material from this mysterious Q, material that is absent from Mark.
sayings or teachings of Jesus, which once may have formed an independent, separate document.
if Q existed before Matthew and Luke, it would constitute early material about Jesus. Perhaps, I thought, it can shed some fresh light on what Jesus was really like.
Q was a collection of sayings, and therefore it didn’t have the narrative material that would have given us a more fully orbed picture of Jesus,”
Mark was indeed basing his account on the recollections of the eyewitness Peter,”
“Only a handful of the major stories that appear in the other three gospels reappear in John, although that changes noticeably when one comes to Jesus’ last week.
“There also seems to be a very different linguistic style.
“John makes very explicit claims of Jesus being God, which some attribute to the fact that he wrote later than the others and began embellishing things,”
Matthew, Mark, and Luke each have very distinctive theological angles that they want to highlight:
“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.”
“Some scholars say the gospels were written so far after the events that legend developed and distorted what was finally written down,
The apostle Paul never met Jesus prior to Jesus’ death, but he said he did encounter the resurrected Christ and later consulted with some of the eyewitnesses to make sure he was preaching the same message they were.
focuses on Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection.
transformed Paul from being a persecutor of Christians into becoming history’s foremost Christian missionary,
Christ, who was equal to God yet took the form of a man, of a slave, and suffered the extreme penalty, the Crucifixion.
Paul’s letters are an important witness to the deity of Christ—he calls Jesus ‘the Son of God’ and ‘the image of God.’ ”
the “apostolic fathers,” who were the earliest Christian writers after the New Testament.
these writings attest to the basic facts about Jesus, particularly his teachings, his crucifixion, his resurrection, and his divine nature.
the seven letters of Ignatius as being among the most important of the writings of the apostolic fathers.
he emphasized both the deity of Jesus and the humanity of Jesus,
he wrote in one letter, on his way to being executed, that Jesus was truly persecuted under Pilate, was truly crucified, was truly raised from the dead, and that those who believe in him would be raised, too.”14
persuasive evidence that corroborates all the essentials found in the biographies of Jesus.
my faith in the essential trustworthiness of the gospels and the rest of the New Testament.
the historical evidence has reinforced my commitment to Jesus Christ as the Son of God who loves us and died for us and was raised from the dead. It’s that simple.”
The Verdict of History, which I had reread in preparation for my interview. In it historian Gary Habermas details a total of thirty-nine ancient sources documenting the life of Jesus,
more than one hundred reported facts concerning Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection.15
Seeking to test whether he would overstate the influence of archaeology, I decided to open our interview by asking him what it can’t tell us about the reliability of the New Testament.
“Archaeology has made some important contributions,”
“but it certainly can’t prove whether the New Testament is the Word of God.
Spiritual truths cannot be proved or disproved by archaeological discoveries.”
exploring what it can tell us about the New Testament.
In a sense, this is what archaeology accomplishes. 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.
“Does archaeology affirm or undermine the New Testament when it checks out the details in those accounts?”
the credibility of the New Testament is enhanced,”
