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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lee Strobel
Read between
March 27 - August 1, 2019
The physician and historian Luke authored both the gospel bearing his name and the book of Acts,
Luke is very accurate as a historian,
archaeological discoveries are showing over and over again that Luke is accurate in what he has to say.”
there have been several instances, similar to the story about the harbor, in which scholars initially thought Luke was wrong in a particular reference, only to have later discoveries confirm that he was correct in what he wrote.
it’s extremely significant that Luke has been established to be a scrupulously accurate historian, even in the smallest details.
“If Luke was so painstakingly accurate in his historical reporting,” said one book on the topic, “on what logical basis may we assume he was credulous or inaccurate in his reporting of matters that were far more important, not only to him but to others as well?”4 Matters, for example, like the resurrection of Jesus, the most influential evidence of his deity, which Luke says was firmly established by “many convincing proofs” (Acts 1:3).
John, whose gospel was sometimes considered suspect because he talked about locations that couldn’t be verified. Some scholars charged that since he failed to get these basic details straight, John must not have been close to the events of Jesus’ life.
a fragment of a copy of John 18 that leading papyrologists have dated to about A.D. 125. By demonstrating that copies of John existed this early
the gospel of Mark, generally considered the first account of Jesus’ life to be written.
Atheist Michael Martin accuses Mark of being ignorant about Palestinian geography, which he says demonstrates that he could not have lived in the region at the time of Jesus.
“Archaeology has not produced anything that is unequivocally a contradiction to the Bible,”
skeptics have been asserting for a long time that Nazareth never existed during the time when the New Testament says Jesus spent his childhood there.
Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, by the apostle Paul, by the Talmud (although sixty-three other Galilean towns are cited), or by Josephus (who listed forty-five other villages and cities of Galilee, including Japha, which was located just over a mile from present-day Nazareth). No ancient historians or geographers mention Nazareth before the beginning of the fourth century.
“Is there any archaeological confirmation that Nazareth was in existence during the first century?”
when Jerusalem fell in A.D. 70, priests were no longer needed in the temple because it had been destroyed, so they were sent out to various other locations, even up into Galilee. Archaeologists have found a list in Aramaic describing the twenty-four ‘courses,’ or families, of priests who were relocated, and one of them was registered as having been moved to Nazareth.
archaeological digs that have uncovered first-century tombs in the vicinity of Nazareth, which would establish the village’s limits because by Jewish law burials had to take place outside the town proper.
remains found in 1955 under the Church of the Annunciation in present-day Nazareth, has managed to concede, “Such findings suggest that Nazareth may have existed in Jesus’ time, but there is no doubt that it must have been a very small and insignificant place.”
PUZZLE 3: SLAUGHTER AT BETHLEHEM
Herod the Great, the king of Judea, feeling threatened by the birth of a baby who he feared would eventually seize his throne, dispatches his troops to murder all the children under the age of two in Bethlehem.
The problem: there is no independent confirmation that this mass murder ever took place.
RIDDLE OF THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
one Dead Sea fragment is part of the earliest manuscript ever found of the gospel of Mark, dating back to a mere seventeen to twenty years after Jesus was crucified. However, many scholars continue to be skeptical of his interpretation.14
the New Testament must be accepted as a remarkably accurate source book.”
established the essential reliability of the New Testament documents,
confirmed their accurate transmittal through history,
corroboration by ancient historian...
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voting with colored beads on whether they thought Jesus said what the gospels quote him as saying.
In the end they concluded Jesus did not say 82 percent of what the gospels attribute to him.
“The Jesus Seminar represents an extremely small number of radical-fringe scholars who are on the far, far left wing of New Testament thinking. It does not represent mainstream scholarship.
want to rescue the Bible from fundamentalism and to free Americans from the ‘naive’ belief that the Jesus of the Bible is the ‘real’ Jesus.
they’re going directly to the masses instead of to other scholars.
what they have in mind is a totally new form of Christianity.”
Jesus first of all must be a naturalistic Jesus.
“In other words, whatever else is said about him, Jesus was a man like you or me. Maybe he was an extraordinary man, maybe he tapped into our inherent potential as nobody else ever has, but he was not supernatural.
“The Jesus Seminar paints itself as being on an unbiased quest for truth, as compared with religiously committed people—people like you—who have a theological agenda.”
“Their major assumption—which, incidentally, is not the product of unbiased scholarly research—is that the gospels are not even generally reliable.
“But these scholars go beyond that and say you don’t ever have to. They operate under the assumption that everything in history has happened according to their own experiences, and since they’ve never seen the supernatural, they assume miracles have never occurred in history.
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.
assumption that the supernatural can’t occur.
“Have there really been any new discoveries that change the way we should think about Jesus?”
John Dominic Crossan, perhaps the most influential scholar in the Jesus Seminar, has made some strong claims about a gospel called Secret Mark. In fact, he asserts that Secret Mark may actually be an uncensored version of the gospel of Mark, containing confidential matters for spiritual insiders.
Jesus was a bit mysterious about his identity, wasn’t he?”
“He tended to shy away from forthrightly proclaiming himself to be the Messiah or Son of God.
“So if someone were to say he was God, that wouldn’t have made any sense to them
he was very careful about what he said publicly.
a 1977 book by British theologian John Hick
charging that Jesus never thought of himself as God incarnate or the Messiah.
a clue that can be found in Jesus’ relationship with John the Baptist. “Jesus says, ‘Of all people born of woman, John is the greatest man on earth.’
he then goes even further in his ministry than the Baptist did—by doing miracles,
“And his relationship with the religious leaders is perhaps the most revealing.
