The Case for Christ

by Lee Strobel

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.

“The other thing that needs to be said is that the definition of memorization was more flexible back then. In studies of cultures with oral traditions, there was freedom to vary how much of the story was told on any given occasion—what was included, what was left out, what was paraphrased, what was explained, and so forth.

“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.”

“In a similar way, in the ancient world it was perfectly understood and accepted that actions were often attributed to people when in fact they occurred through their subordinates or emissaries—in this case through the elders of the Jewish people.”

“Well, don’t shut the case yet,” Blomberg chuckled. “Here’s one possible solution: one was a town; the other was a province.”

“Luke, then, would have traced the genealogy through Mary’s lineage. And since both are from the ancestry of David, once you get that far back the lines converge.

“Within the last hundred years archaeology has repeatedly unearthed discoveries that have confirmed specific references in the gospels, particularly the gospel of John—ironically, the one that’s supposedly so suspect!

“In addition, we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life.

Obtaining secret corporate memos is one thing; verifying their authenticity is another.

“But what the New Testament has in its favor, especially when compared with other ancient writings, is the unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived.”

“Well, the more often you have copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different geographical areas, the more you can cross-check them to figure out what the original document was like. The only way they’d agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that represents the descent of the manuscripts.”

“In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early time—into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic.

“Because even if we had no Greek manuscripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually reproduce the contents of the New Testament. In addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters, and so forth of the early church fathers.”

“how many New Testament Greek manuscripts are in existence today?” Metzger’s eyes got wide. “More than five thousand have been cataloged,” he said with enthusiasm, his voice going up an octave.

That was a mountain of manuscripts compared to the anthills of Tacitus and Josephus!

“There are now ninety-nine fragmentary pieces of papyrus that contain one or more passages or books of the New Testament.

“The most significant to come to light are the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, discovered about 1930.

At this point the gap between the writing of the biographies of Jesus and the earliest manuscripts was extremely small.

“That would be a fragment of the gospel of John, containing material from chapter eighteen. It has five verses—three on one side, two on the other—and it measures about two and a half by three and a half inches,” he said.

“He concluded it originated between A.D. 100 to 150.

Deissmann was convinced that it goes back at least to the reign of Emperor Hadrian, which was A.D. 117–138, or even Emperor Trajan, which was A.D. 98–117.”

“We have what are called uncial manuscripts, which are written in all-capital Greek letters,” Metzger explained. “Today we have 306 of these, several dating back as early as the third century. The most important are Codex Sinaiticus, which is the only complete New Testament in uncial letters, and Codex Vaticanus, which is not quite complete. Both date to about A.D. 350.

Eyeglasses weren’t invented until 1373 in Venice,

“Meaning it makes a whale of a difference in English if you say, ‘Dog bites man’ or ‘Man bites dog’—sequence matters in English. But in Greek it doesn’t. One word functions as the subject of the sentence regardless of where it stands in the sequence; consequently, the meaning of the sentence isn’t distorted if the words are out of what we consider to be the right order.

“Yes, yes, that’s correct, and scholars work very carefully to try to resolve them by getting back to the original meaning.

It was time to turn to the question of the “canon,” a term that comes from a Greek word meaning “rule,” “norm,” or “standard” and that describes the books that have become accepted as official in the church and included in the New Testament.

“Basically, the early church had three criteria,”

“First, the books must have apostolic authority—

“Second, there was the criterion of conformity to what was called the rule of faith.

And third, there was the criterion of whether a document had had continuous acceptance and usage by the church at large.”

Even so, I pointed out that some New Testament books, notably James, Hebrews, and Revelation, were more slowly accepted into the canon than others. “Should we therefore be suspicious of them?” I asked. “To my mind, that just shows how careful the early church was,” he replied. “They weren’t ‘gung ho,’ sweeping in every last document that happened to have anything about Jesus in it. This shows deliberation and careful analysis.

“Interpolations—would you define what you mean by that?” “That means early Christian copyists inserted some phrases that a Jewish writer like Josephus would not have written,” Yamauchi said.

“Tacitus recorded what is probably the most important reference to Jesus outside the New Testament,” he said. “In A.D. 115 he explicitly states that Nero persecuted the Christians as scapegoats to divert suspicion away from himself for the great fire that had devastated Rome in A.D. 64.”

Pliny the Younger,

“That’s right. He was the nephew of Pliny the Elder, the famous encyclopedist who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Pliny the Younger became governor of Bithynia in northwestern Turkey. Much of his correspondence with his friend, Emperor Trajan, has been preserved to the present time.”

They also declared that the sum total of their guilt or error amounted to no more than this: they had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately amongst themselves in honor of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath, not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery….

“Very important. It was probably written about A.D. 111, and it attests to the rapid spread of Christianity, both in the city and in the rural area, among every class of persons, slave women as well as Roman citizens, since he also says that he sends Christians who are Roman citizens to Rome for trial.

This phenomenon, evidently, was visible in Rome, Athens, and other Mediterranean cities. According to Tertullian… it was a “cosmic” or “world event.” Phlegon, a Greek author from Caria writing a chronology soon after 137 A.D., reported that in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (i.e., 33 A.D.) there was “the greatest eclipse of the sun” and that “it became night in the sixth hour of the day [i.e., noon] so that stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were overturned in Nicaea.”

“Jews, as a whole, did not go into great detail about heretics,” he replied. “There are a few passages in the Talmud that mention Jesus, calling him a false messiah who practiced magic and who was justly condemned to death. They also repeat the rumor that Jesus was born of a Roman soldier and Mary, suggesting there was something unusual about his birth.”

“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. “So the situation with Jesus is unique—and quite impressive in terms of how much we can learn about him aside from the New Testament.”

Because he 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.

I interrupted by saying, “The fact that Paul, who came from a monotheistic Jewish background, worshiped Jesus as God is extremely significant, isn’t it?” “Yes,” he said, “and 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.

“What is significant about Ignatius,” said Yamauchi, “is that 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.”

Put all this together—Josephus, the Roman historians and officials, the Jewish writings, the letters of Paul and the apostolic fathers—and you’ve got persuasive evidence that corroborates all the essentials found in the biographies of Jesus.

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.”

Although Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, claimed that his Book of Mormon is “the most correct of any book upon the earth,” 16 archaeology has repeatedly failed to substantiate its claims about events that supposedly occurred long ago in the Americas.

Boyd first clashed with the Jesus Seminar in 1996, when he wrote a devastating critique of liberal perspectives of Jesus, called Cynic Sage or Son of God? Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revisionist Replies.

“Here’s the truth,” he said. “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.”

“Their major assumption—which, incidentally, is not the product of unbiased scholarly research—is that the gospels are not even generally reliable.

“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. That’s not a presumption based on history; now you’re doing metaphysics.