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by
Lee Strobel
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January 24 - February 4, 2025
and seventh,
not only can the contours of Jesus’ life be reconstructed apart from the Bible, but there’s even more that can be gleaned about him from material so old that it actually predates the gospels themselves.
The apostle Paul
began writing his New Testament letters years before the gospels were written down, they contain extremely early reports concerning Jesus—so early that nobody can make a credible claim that they had been seriously distorted by legendary development.
“There’s no question that Paul’s writings are the earliest in the New Testament,” he said, “and that they do make some very significant references to the life of Jesus.”
he refers to the fact that Jesus was a descendant of David, that he was the Messiah, that he was betrayed, that he was tried, crucified for our sins, and buried, and that he rose again on the third day and was seen by many people—including James, the brother of Jesus who hadn’t believed in him prior to his crucifixion.
“Paul also corroborates some important aspects of the character of Jesus—his humility, his obedience, his love for sinners, and so forth. He calls Christians to have the mind of Christ
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 fact that Paul, who came from a monotheistic Jewish background, worshiped Jesus as God is extremely significant,
it undermines a popular theory that the deity of Christ was later imported into Christianity by Gentile beliefs. It’s just not so. Even Paul at this very early date was worshiping Jesus as God.
the “apostolic fathers,”
were the earliest Christian writers after the New Testament.
authored the Epistle of Clement of Rome, the Epistles of Ignatius, the Epistle of Polycarp, the Epistle of Barnabas, and others. In many places these writings attest to the basic facts about Jesus, particularly his teaching...
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Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch in Syria, was martyred during the reign of Trajan before A.D. 117.
he emphasized both the deity of Jesus and the humanity of Jesus, as against the docetic heresy, which denied that Jesus was really human. He also stressed the historical underpinnings of Christianity; 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
the alternative explanations, which try to account for the spread of Christianity through sociological or psychological reasons, are very weak.” He shook his head. “Very weak.” Then he added, “For me, 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,
historian Gary Habermas details a total of thirty-nine ancient sources documenting the life of Jesus, from which he enumerates more than one hundred reported facts concerning Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection.15
twenty-four of the sources cited by Habermas, including seven secular sources and several of the earliest creeds of the church, specifically concern the divine nature of Jesus. “These creeds reveal that the church did not simply teach Jesus’ deity a generation later, as is so often repeated in contemporary theology, because this doctrine is definitely present in the earliest church,” Habermas writes. His c...
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former Green Beret and emergency room physician
MacDonald, whose story was masterfully recounted by Joe McGinniss in the best-seller and TV movie Fatal Vision, was cocky enough to think that his alibi would help him get away with murder.
There’s a wide variety of scientific evidence that’s commonly used in trials, ranging from DNA typing to forensic anthropology to toxicology.
Scientific evidence can also make important contributions to the question of whether the New Testament accounts of Jesus are accurate. While serology and toxicology aren’t able to shed any light on the issue, another category of scientific proof—the discipline of archaeology—has great bearing on the reliability of the gospels.
Sometimes called the study of durable rubbish, archaeology involves the uncovering of artifacts, architecture, art, coins, monuments, documents, and other remains of ancient cultures. Experts study these relics to learn what life was like in the days when Jesus walked the dusty roads of ancient Palestine.
Hundreds of archaeological findings from the first century h...
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did they undermine or undergird the eyewitness sto...
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Spiritual truths cannot be proved or disproved by archaeological discoveries.”
Once we had set some boundaries for what archaeology can’t establish, I was anxious to begin exploring what it can tell us about the New Testament.
archaeology has repeatedly failed to substantiate its claims about events that supposedly occurred long ago in the Americas.
the Smithsonian Institute
archaeologists see “no direct connection between the archaeology of the New World and the subject matter of the book.”
“In other words, no Book of Mormon cities have ever been located, no Book of Mormon person, place, nation, or name has ever been found, no Book of Mormon artifacts, no Book of Mormon scriptures, no Book of Mormon inscriptions . . . nothing which demonstrates the Book of Mormon is anything other than myth or invention has ever been found.”17
However, the story is totally different for the New Testament.
“Those who know the facts now recognize that the New Testament must be accepted as a remarkably accurate source book.”18
“People pick up a magazine or newspaper, read the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar, and assume that this represents the mainstream of New Testament scholarship,” I said. “But is that really the case?”
“No,” he said, looking as if he had just bitten into something sour. “No, no, that’s not the case. But you’re right—people get that impression.”
“Do you think that impression is an accident?” I asked.
“Well, the Jesus Seminar certainly portrays itself that way,” Boyd replied. “In fact, this is one of its most irritating facets, not just to evangelicals but to other scholars as well.
the Jesus Seminar calls its translation of the Bible ‘The Scholars Version’—well, what does that imply? That other versions aren’t scholarly?”
“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. “And ironically, they have their own brand of fundamentalism. They say they have the right way of doing things, period.” He smiled. “In the name of diversity,” he added with a chuckle, “they can actually be quite narrow.”
“the participants in the Jesus Seminar have been very up-front about their goals,
in saying they 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 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.’
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.”
this Jesus that people from the Jesus Seminar have discovered,” I said. “What’s he like?”
Some think he was a political revolutionary, some a religious fanatic, some a wonder worker, some a feminist, some an egalitarian, some a subversive—there’s a lot of diversity,” he said. Then he zeroed in on the key issue. “But there is one picture that they all agree with: Jesus first of all must be a naturalistic Jesus.
“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.”
“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.
“Their major assumption—which, incidentally, is not the product of unbiased scholarly research—is that the gospels are not even generally reliable. They conclude this at the outset because the gospels include things that seem historically unlikely, like miracles—walking on water, raising the dead. These things, they say, just don’t happen. That’s naturalism, which says that for every effect in the natural or physical world, there is a natural cause.”
“Here’s what they do: they rule out the possibility of the supernatural from the beginning, and then they say, ‘Now bring on the evidence about Jesus.’ No wonder they get the results they do!”
To come up with their conclusion that Jesus never spoke most of the words in the gospels, members of the Jesus Seminar used their own set of assumptions and criteria. But are these standards reasonable and appropriate? Or were they loaded from the outset, like dice that are weighted so they yield the result that was desired all along?
