The Case for Christ

by Lee Strobel

most of ancient history is based on single sources.

They’re failing to recognize that an increasing number of scholars are expressing serious reservations about the theory that Matthew and Luke used Mark. With this line of thinking, you can see why it’s extremely difficult to prove multiple attestation.”

“Second, the radical nature of his miracles distinguishes him.

“Third, Jesus’ biggest distinctive is how he did miracles on his own authority.

Apollonius of Tyana.

“OK. Well, first, his biographer, Philostratus, was writing a century and a half after Apollonius lived, whereas the gospels were written within a generation of Jesus.

The closer the proximity to the event, the less chance there is for legendary development, for error, or for memories to get confused.

“Another thing is that we have four gospels, corroborated with Paul, that can be cross-checked to some degree with nonbiblica...

“On top of that, Philostratus was commissioned by an empress to write a biography in order to dedicate a temple to Apollonius. She was a follower of Apollonius, so Philostratus would have had a financial motive to embellish the story and give the empress what she wanted.

The gospels have a very confident eyewitness perspective, as if they had a camera there. But Philostratus includes a lot of tentative statements, like ‘It is reported that…’ or ‘Some say this young girl had died; others say she was just ill.’ To his credit, he backs off and treats stories like stories.

“And here’s a biggie: Philostratus was writing in the early third century in Cappadocia, where Christianity had already been present for quite a while. So any borrowing would have been done by him, not by Christians.

For one thing, given the timing involved, if you’re going to argue for borrowing, it should be from the direction of Christianity to the mystery religions, not vice versa.

“Also, the mystery religions were do-your-own-thing religions that freely borrowed ideas from various places. However, the Jews carefully guarded their beliefs from outside influences. They saw themselves as a separate people and strongly resisted pagan ideas and rituals.”

“Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That’s concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened ‘once upon a time.’

I asked Boyd for his opinion. “Why shouldn’t Thomas be given that kind of honor?” “Everyone concedes that this gospel has been significantly influenced by Gnosticism, which was a religious movement in the second, third, and fourth centuries that supposedly had secret insights, knowledge, or revelations that would allow people to know the key to the universe. Salvation was by what you knew— gnosis is Greek for ‘know,’” he said.

“But listen: Jesus is not a symbol of anything unless he’s rooted in history. The Nicene Creed doesn’t say, ‘We wish these things were true.’ It says, ‘Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and the third day he rose again from the dead,’ and it goes on from there.

“The theological truth is based on historical truth. That’s the way the New Testament talks. Look at the sermon of Peter in the second chapter of Acts. He stands up and says, ‘You guys are a witness of these things; they weren’t done in secret. David’s tomb is still with us, but God has raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore we proclaim him to be the Son of God.’

“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.”

I felt the same way he did: If the Jesus of faith is not also the Jesus of history, he’s powerless and he’s meaningless. Unless he’s rooted in reality, unless he established his divinity by rising from the dead, he’s just a feel-good symbol who’s as irrelevant as Santa Claus.

“Actually,” he said, “Jesus taught in a radical new way. He begins his teachings with the phrase ‘Amen I say to you,’ which is to say, ‘I swear in advance to the truthfulness of what I’m about to say.’ This was absolutely revolutionary.”

Oddly enough, the concept of an artist’s drawing can provide a rough analogy that can help us in our quest for the truth about Jesus. Here’s how: The Old Testament provides numerous details about God that sketch out in great specificity what he’s like. For instance, God is described as omnipresent, or existing everywhere in the universe; as omniscient, or knowing everything that can be known throughout eternity; as omnipotent, or all-powerful; as eternal, or being both beyond time and the source of all time; and as immutable, or unchanging in his attributes. He’s loving, he’s holy, he’s righteous, he’s wise, he’s just.

Of course, the Resurrection was the ultimate vindication of his identity. But of the many things he did, one of the most striking to me is his forgiving of sin.”

“Having said that, hell is not a place where people are consigned because they were pretty good blokes but just didn’t believe the right stuff. They’re consigned there, first and foremost, because they defy their Maker and want to be at the center of the universe. Hell is not filled with people who have already repented, only God isn’t gentle enough or good enough to let them out. It’s filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in their God-defying rebellion.

“The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system.

Legislation didn’t change him. Reasoning didn’t change him. Emotional appeals didn’t change him. He’ll tell you that God changed him from the inside out—decisively, completely, permanently.

“I realized that if I were to accept Jesus into my life, there would have to be some significant changes in the way I was living,” he explained. “I’d have to deal with the drugs, the sex, and so forth. I didn’t understand that God would help me make those changes; I thought I had to clean up my life on my own.”

“When you interpret Daniel 9:24–26, it foretells that the Messiah would appear a certain length of time after King Artaxerxes I issued a decree for the Jewish people to go from Persia to rebuild the walls in Jerusalem,” Lapides replied. He leaned forward to deliver the clincher: “That puts the anticipated appearance of the Messiah at the exact moment in history when Jesus showed up,” he said. “Certainly that’s nothing he could have prearranged.”

hematidrosis.

“What this did was set up the skin to be extremely fragile so that when Jesus was flogged by the Roman soldier the next day, his skin would be very, very sensitive.”

hypovolemic shock.”

This crossbar was called the patibulum,

“The pain was absolutely unbearable,” he continued. “In fact, it was literally beyond words to describe; they had to invent a new word: excruciating. Literally, excruciating means ‘out of the cross.’

the order of words in ancient Greek was determined not necessarily by sequence but by prominence. This means that since there was a lot more blood than water, it would have made sense for John to mention the blood first.”

Second, his gospel basically consists of short anecdotes about Jesus, more like pearls on a string than a smooth, continuous narrative.

“Michael Martin is a philosopher, not a historian, and I don’t think he understands the historian’s craft. For a philosopher, if something is inconsistent, the law of contradiction says, ‘This cannot be true, throw it out!’ However, the historian looks at these narratives and says, ‘I see some inconsistencies, but I notice something about them: they’re all in the secondary details.’

“No, this doesn’t hurt our case one iota, because science is all about causes and effects.

“Third, you’re forgetting that the 1 Corinthians 15 creed predates any of the gospels, and it makes huge claims about the appearances. In fact, the claim involving the biggest number—that he was seen alive by five hundred people at once—goes back to this earliest source! That creates problems for the legendary-development theory. The best reasons for rejecting the legend theory come from the early creedal accounts in 1 Corinthians 15 and Acts, both of which predate the gospel material.”

Hallucinations are individual occurrences. By their very nature only one person can see a given hallucination at a time. They certainly aren’t something which can be seen by a group of people. Neither is it possible that one person could somehow induce an hallucination in somebody else. Since an hallucination exists only in this subjective, personal sense, it is obvious that others cannot witness

Habermas laughed. “You know, one of the atheists I debated, Antony Flew, told me he doesn’t like it when other atheists use that last argument, because it cuts both ways. As Flew said, ‘Christians believe because they want to, but atheists don’t believe because they don’t want to!’

“However, the apostles were willing to die for something they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands. They were in a unique position not to just believe Jesus rose from the dead but to know for sure. And when you’ve got eleven credible people with no ulterior motives, with nothing to gain and a lot to lose, who all agree they observed something with their own eyes—now you’ve got some difficulty explaining that away.”

people won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false.

Moreland didn’t bite. “Let’s take a look at Muhammad’s conversion,” he said with confidence in his voice. “No one knows anything about it. Muhammad claims he went into a cave and had a religious experience in which Allah revealed the Koran to him. There’s no other eyewitness to verify this. Muhammad offered no publicly miraculous signs to certify anything.

“And someone easily could have had ulterior motives in following Muhammad, because in the early years Islam was spread largely by warfare. Followers of Muhammad gained political influence and power over the villages that were conquered and ‘converted’ to Islam by the sword. “Contrast that with the claims of the early followers of Jesus, including Paul. They claimed to have seen public events that other people saw as well. These were things that happened outside their minds, not just in their minds. “Furthermore, when Paul wrote 2 Corinthians—

“However, we still see Jews today, while we don’t see Hittites, Perizzites, Ammonites, Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, and other people who had been living in that time. Why? Because these people got captured by other nations, intermarried, and lost their national identity.

“But five weeks after he’s crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion. And get this: they’re willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such importance both sociologically and theologically.”

“First,”

“Second,

“Third,

“Fourth,

“And fifth,