Jesus, I would say no doubt lived as a person, but to the extent of what he did,
I'm not sure.
If he comes walking into where I work, shows me the signs of the stigmata and
tells me he's a son of God, I might start believing.
I don't believe in God, first of all.
Maybe because I grew up in like an age of science.
I have a lot of different thoughts and theories on Jesus, but I don't think
coming back from the dead is really possible.
I just thought the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving creator of the
universe was just an absurd idea on the surface of it.
It wasn't even worth my time to check out.
As far as Jesus was concerned, I thought that if he existed, and I wasn't
sure whether or not he ever did, he was probably a nice guy.
He was probably an excellent teacher, but he certainly wasn't the Messiah.
And he certainly wasn't the son of God.
Now my wife was more in spiritual neutral.
She was more of an agnostic, whereas I was more antagonistic toward Christians.
I just didn't know where all the pieces fit together.
I didn't know who Jesus was or how he fit into the picture.
Lee was antagonistic towards God.
I was simply confused.
There really was no room for God in my relationship with Leslie when we were
dating and when we got married.
But you know what?
We were happy.
We didn't have any problem with that.
When I first started going to church, Lee responded very negatively.
He basically told me that this is not what he had signed up for.
That when we had gotten married, he had life planned in a way that did not
involve church.
My biggest fear with Leslie was that she was going to turn into some religious
prude or something.
And I thought nothing good can possibly come out of this.
But even though I had all these negative ideas of things that were going to happen,
in the ensuing months, I began to see positive changes in her character and in
her values and the way she related to me and the children.
And it was winsome and it was attractive.
And so when she invited me to go to church with her on January the 20th of 1980,
I thought, you know what?
I'm going to go.
Get her out of this cult, you know, that she's gotten involved in.
He did go in with his reporter's notebook so he could take notes and try to find the
scandal.
Well, the pastor gave a talk that day called Basic Christianity, and he just
systematically laid out what it is that Christians believe.
And I was, my mind was blown because I had all these misconceptions and he really did
straighten me out on a lot of things.
And I remember walking out that day saying two things.
First of all, I was still an atheist.
He didn't convince me that day that God exists.
But secondly, I realized if this is true, this has huge implications for my life.
Lee's approach was very different from mine.
Mine was mostly a heart issue.
I wanted to know that God was real and the way that was real for me was
experientially.
And for Lee, it was more about documentation, about being able to have
facts that proved it true.
Well, I was a journalist.
So there was really no problem with me picking up the phone and calling a scholar
and saying, hey, I'm Lee Strobel.
I'm with the Chicago Tribune.
I'd like some background information about the New Testament.
And so I would do that.
And I thought it was going to be so easy to expose the fallacious thinking behind
Christianity.
But as it turned out, it took me almost two years of my life to investigate these
issues.
It really was, in a sense, the most exciting story I'd ever pursued as a
journalist.
I think, unfortunately, because the documents, the New Testament specifically,
were written so far after Jesus' death, that it's really hard to say.
I don't know if myself that it was real, I was not there, but people were there at
that time.
So their account of things that happened back 2,000 years ago has been passed down.
As an attorney, I rely on evidence.
And so, you know, it would be tough to get evidence at this late date.
Well, I began my investigation by looking at the gospel accounts.
How did I know that the New Testament was telling me the truth when it talked about
Jesus?
Now, obviously, I didn't accept the New Testament as being the inspired word of
God.
I certainly didn't accept it as being inerrant.
But what I had to accept it as being, which it undeniably is, is a set of
ancient historical documents.
And I knew that historians had criteria that they could apply to determine whether
or not these documents are trustworthy.
So those are the kind of people who I pursued.
I went after the heavy hitters.
I went after the expert witnesses who could help me sort through these issues.
J.P.
Moreland, Biola University.
Mark Strauss, Bethel Seminary.
Craig Blomberg, Denver Seminary.
Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity College.
N.T.
Wright, Bishop of Durham, United Kingdom.
Over the last 250 years, it's been common coin in Western culture that, oh,
you can't believe what's said in the Gospels, you know.
It's even made into musicals.
The things that you're liable to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so.
And that's sort of, that skepticism has wormed its way into much modern culture
and indeed into many Christian circles, many church circles, where they'll say,
well, Matthew probably made this bit up or Luke just added this bit on the end of the
parable or whatever it is.
I and others have spent some of the best years of our lives researching what was
actually going on in Palestine in the first third of the first century A.D.
And trying to get inside the minds of first century Jews, first century Romans,
different Jewish parties and movements, et cetera, et cetera.
And the more that I have tried to do that, the more I've found that what you find in
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John comes up in three dimensions and says, my goodness,
this actually belongs.
It makes sense.
It fits.
It gives us very vivid portraits of who these people were and what they were
doing.
The New Testament Gospels are biographies of Jesus.
While the authors do not identify themselves in the text, from very early in
the Christian era, the Gospels have been attributed to Matthew, a disciple or
follower of Jesus, Mark, a colleague of Peter, also a disciple, Luke, a historian
and confidant of the Apostle Paul, and John, a disciple of Jesus.
Both Matthew and John were among the twelve, Jesus' closest followers and
constant companions throughout his ministry.
They would have personally observed most of the events they described in their
Gospels.
Mark and Luke were also contemporaries of Jesus and wrote their biographies based
upon information provided by many eyewitnesses.
I knew from my years as a legal journalist the importance of eyewitness testimony.
In fact, the first question that anybody asks is, how many eyeballs are there?
How many eyewitnesses do you actually have?
And I needed to determine whether or not contemporary scholars have ascertained
whether or not the Gospels are rooted in eyewitness testimony.
It's become evident to scholars of the first century that the Gospels were
actually attempts to write biographies of Jesus.
Not in the modern sense, because the Gospels are not particularly interested in
his early years.
But when it comes to Jesus' adult life and his activities, these are biographies.
They're very clearly attempts by eyewitnesses to describe exactly what
Jesus said and did.
And the consensus of New Testament scholarship has moved in that direction.
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled
among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were
eyewitnesses and servants of the word.
Luke chapter 1, verses 1 and 2.
Luke's Gospel begins with a prologue.
It's actually one of the finest Greek sections in the whole New Testament.
Luke was clearly a literary artist.
But in that prologue, he points out that he has carefully investigated the material
that he presents in the Gospels, that he's checked with eyewitness
accounts, those who are actually present.
If you read that prologue and you see, this is the work of a historian.
This was someone who has done his research.
Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the
beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you,
most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have
been taught.
Luke chapter 1, verses 3 and 4.
You have to understand that people in the first century valued eyewitness testimony.
And this is why, from the second century on, it was important to the early church
fathers that the people who were alleged to have written the Gospels actually wrote
them and that they were eyewitnesses of the things they wrote.
We have actually very early attestation of the authorship of the Gospels.
The early church father Papias, for example, as recorded by the church
historian Eusebius, identifies Mark's Gospel as essentially the eyewitness
account of Peter.
Well Papias was a disciple of the Apostle John, so we are only one generation
removed from Jesus himself.
That's a pretty close testimony and strongly suggesting that in fact the
Gospels are based on eyewitness accounts.
Now, of course, it's not what you would have seen if you had a video camera there,
because after all, if you put a video camera on a street corner, even in
Washington, you'd get politicians coming to and fro.
You wouldn't actually have a story that would make sense.
You'd have a string of random, unsorted events.
That doesn't mean that none of it happened, that it's all made up.
It's just to acknowledge what is blindingly obvious, that it has been
edited and no doubt shaped by the needs of the community, because people tell the
sort of stories that they want to tell, because this matters to us urgently here
and now.
Most historians date Jesus' birth between the years 7 and 4 BC, and his death no
later than AD 33.
Jesus' public ministry began with the choosing of his disciples, and lasted
approximately three years, culminating in the Passion Week, and his trial and death.
Scholars generally agree that the Gospel of Mark was written first, sometime
between the years 60 and 75 in the first century.
Matthew and Luke were probably authored shortly after, followed by the Gospel of
John.
The New Testament Gospels are by far our earliest and most reliable records of
Jesus of Nazareth.
All of the New Testament Gospels were written in the first century.
Not only are they remarkably close to the events themselves, but in fact,
eyewitnesses are still around.
If they were passing on untruths, if they were not passing on reliable
history, then we would expect eyewitnesses to say, wait a minute, this isn't what
happened.
But eyewitnesses are around.
Eyewitnesses could confirm what they said.
All of the Gospel writers either were eyewitnesses or interviewed eyewitnesses
to gain the information that they gained about Jesus Christ.
As I scrutinized the Gospel accounts even further, I realized that it was important
to find out not just whether or not the information was rooted in direct and
indirect eyewitness testimony, but I needed to know, was this information
reliably preserved during the time period before it was finally written down?
We have to put ourselves into the ancient world without modern media, without even a
print-based culture in which the only and the standard way of preserving information
was through oral tradition, most of which was memorized.
Young rabbis were often forbidden to comment on a passage of Scripture until
they had memorized it perfectly.
In fact, it was not uncommon for rabbis of Jesus' time to commit the entire Torah to
memory.
I've sometimes heard people say, look, I've been in a situation where I
whisper something to someone, they whisper it to someone else, and it goes through 10
or 11 people, and by the time the last person tells what was said, it's totally
different from what I told the first person.
And we can't trust the Gospels for the same reason, because it was transmitted
over a long period of time.
That illustration is really a bad analogy, and you have to understand that the first
century apostles who passed on information about Jesus were deeply concerned to get
this information correct, because they saw it as sacred, holy tradition.
It wasn't about what Joe was eating for dinner last Wednesday night.
In our day of instant media, and everything has to be on film or tape
recorded, we are more skeptical of oral tradition, but we don't really understand
the nature of oral tradition.
Oral tradition is a community event.
A story is passed down by individuals within that community.
Well, if they get it wrong, you've got an entire community that's going to correct
them.
So it is self-correcting all the way.
These stories were passed on reliably because they were passed on by the
community of disciples.
In fact, we now have scholarly studies that have been done of oral cultures,
and we know that through several generations, oral tradition can be
preserved and passed on without changing a thing.
Even though I became convinced that ancient cultures could pass along oral
tradition reliably over time, I still had an obvious objection to the New Testament,
and that was, isn't it really filled with contradictions?
One of the issues people often raise is the question of apparent contradictions
between the synoptic Gospels, where there's a parallel story.
For example, Matthew tells the story of two blind men being healed, whereas in
Mark's account there's only one blind man.
How can we get this contradiction?
The vast majority of these apparent contradictions, however, are quite easily
resolved.
Mark describes only one of the two blind men, the one who is most prominent,
obviously, or perhaps even the one who became a disciple of Jesus and became
prominent in the later church.
So most of these apparent contradictions are quite easily resolved.
Had every single account given us exactly the same detail, we might have accused
them of some form of collusion, of having gotten together and carefully
planned out how they were always going to tell the story with the exact number of
details.
But then one doesn't have independent testimony at all.
It's natural when you have multiple eyewitnesses to the same event,
you're going to get different perspectives.
And that's okay.
You want that.
What you're looking for is a core to the testimony that's the same, that's
consistent, even though there may be some variation in the incidental details.
If you're in a court of law and you have multiple witnesses come in and testify to
the exact same thing, the first objection that's brought up is to say collusion.
They got together.
They orchestrated their testimony and their credibility is shot.
The earliest known copies of the Gospels were written on sheets of papyrus and
scrolls made of animal skins.
They are among the oldest existing manuscripts of antiquity.
The Codex Sinaiticus was authored between A.D.
330 and 350.
It contains almost all of the New Testament and a significant portion of the
Old, while the Codex Vaticanus from the same era is a nearly complete Greek copy
of the entire Bible.
A papyrus fragment from the 18th chapter of John dates to A.D.
125, less than a single generation after the Gospel was originally written.
When I found out that we have no original survivors of the manuscripts of the New
Testament, I became very skeptical.
Because if all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies,
then how do we know that what we possess today bears any resemblance to what the
originals said?
We have better manuscript attestation for the New Testament than any other ancient
document.
For example, the Bible of the Greeks, Homer's Iliad, is preserved in maybe 600
manuscripts.
The oldest of them a thousand years after the document was actually written.
The New Testament, we have something like 5,000 Greek manuscripts.
So everyone agrees, whether liberal or conservative, that we have an incredibly
reliable New Testament.
We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament.
We also have virtually the entire New Testament preserved in the quotations of
the Church Fathers in the first four centuries, so that if we had no copies of
the New Testament, we could reconstruct the New Testament from quotations from the
early Church Fathers.
Following the pattern of my investigation, my next step was to determine whether or
not there was any evidence outside the New Testament that corroborates what the New
Testament tells us.
Jesus, of course, wasn't the emperor of the Roman Empire.
He wasn't some autocrat that had conquered half of the world.
But he did leave an impact in his own environment and created a movement that
grew from there.
And there is a remarkable amount of documents and corroboration.
Josephus refers to him.
The Roman historian Tacitus refers to him.
Suetonius, the political writer, refers to him.
Critics refer to him.
And so it's like a stone thrown into a pond.
The ripples go out and out and everywhere are felt.
It's a very impressive record taken as a whole.
In AD 93, the Jewish historian Josephus published his work, Antiquities of the
Jews.
Scholars generally agree that the following text accurately records
Josephus' record of Jesus.
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, for he was a doer of wonderful
works.
A teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure.
He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles.
When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned
him to the cross, those that loved him first did not forsake him.
And the tribe of Christians, so named for him, are not extinct to this day.
In a court of law, the rebuttal case is an opportunity for the other side to present
their evidence.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of books and articles about
the so-called Gnostic Gospels.
And I wanted to figure out, does this represent the mainstream of academic
scholarship?
The Gnostic Gospels are a collection of religious writings from the 2nd and 3rd
centuries.
They blend the teachings of Jesus with a variety of ancient philosophical beliefs.
According to the tenets of Gnosticism, the universe was the creation of a flawed
and wicked God.
Therefore, all matter was evil.
Salvation from this world could only be attained through secret knowledge about
the spiritual nature of man.
There has been a lot of talk about the Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Mary
Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas.
These documents are almost universally recognized to be much later than the New
Testament Gospels and not to record historically reliable material related to
Jesus.
Well, the New Testament Gospels give us a portrait of an early 1st century
Palestinian Jesus of Nazareth.
The Gospels from the 2nd century, which are mostly Gnostic Gospels,
such as the Gospel of Judas, or the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Philip,
or the Gospel of Mary, they give us a very different Jesus.
Now you can pick and choose if you want.
You can say, well, I like the 2nd century Gnostic Jesus better.
Others might want the early 1st century Palestinian Jesus.
But if you're going to be a scholar about it, and you're going to talk about,
well, which Gospels really do give us earlier traditions that more reliably
reflect the actual historical Jesus, you've got to go with the New Testament
Gospels every time.
There's a view among some that there were all of these different competing views of
Jesus Christ and that the one that won out became the Orthodox perspective of Christ
reflected in the Gospels.
All the evidence runs contrary to that.
Jesus was a 1st century Jewish teacher who revealed and demonstrated himself to be
the Messiah.
That's the presentation we get in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the New Testament
Gospels.
These later Gospels, these Gnostic Gospels, present a very different Jesus,
almost a Greek philosopher, an esoteric Gnostic Jesus that's clearly not the
authentic historical Jesus.
What I've come to discover is that the Gospels in the New Testament, Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John are our best sources for Jesus.
And I've also found that they are reliable.
And that from these sources we can form a picture that I believe is very accurate,
that tells us about Jesus, what he taught, how he was perceived by his
contemporaries, and what his life was really all about.
Everything from Jesus' parables, to his healings, to his controversies,
to his warnings, and all of that, the reason they were telling this stuff is
that not just it was good advice for them in their own day, but that it actually
mattered, that it actually happened.
And if it hadn't happened, you're into a totally different worldview, a worldview
which is about ideas, which is about self-realization, hugely popular in our
culture just now, discovering who I really am.
For goodness sake, Jesus didn't come to help me discover who I really am.
He came to tell me who he knew I really was, and to do something about it.
And that's much better news.
After a while, as the evidence would accumulate more and more, it was like
there were these scales and they began to tip increasingly.
And I began to go from a hard-hearted, cynical atheist to someone who was still
skeptical, but who was more open-minded, maybe more of a spiritual seeker,
someone who was willing to follow the evidence wherever it took me.
This whole time I was on this investigative journey, Leslie and her
friends behind the scene were praying, because they knew that I was checking in
the evidence, I was looking into these issues for myself, and they just wanted me
to be open-minded about the evidence that I found.
I was feeling like my whole world was opening up into something new and way more
exciting and fulfilling than what we had been on.
And it was that frustration of trying to help him to recognize that that was the
case.
Leslie tried several things during this period to try to spur me on in my
investigation.
It didn't help very much.
For instance, she would leave Bible tracts around the house, or she would take a
Christian book and highlight certain passages and leave it open on a coffee
table, things like that.
It really didn't help.
I told her it was not helping, and she understood that.
But I think sort of the whole time she was holding her breath, because this was not a
very smooth investigation.
He would take two steps forward, three steps back.
Sometimes it looked like he was really getting it, and other times he would just
turn into an angry, frustrated person again.
And so it was a very frustrating time for both of us.
I believe Jesus was a real person.
I believe he did live.
I guess there are some exaggerations in the Bible, I'd have to say.
I don't believe we'll ever know if Jesus was really what everyone thinks he is.
I think it's a lot of folklore.
I think it's a lot of historical misrepresentations.
I think it's a lot of wishful thinking.
But I don't think we know, and I don't think we'll ever know, and I don't think
there's any way to prove what has been claimed about Jesus for all these years.
The biographies of Jesus in the New Testament gave me a lot of information
about him.
But Christians were saying that he is the Son of God.
That's a huge step to take, to believe that.
And so I sought out more scholars so I could pose to them this question.
Who was Jesus?
Michael Rydelnik, Moody Bible Institute.
Ben Witherington, Asbury Seminary.
Now this is one of the things I love about Jesus, and it says something to us.
His identity is complex.
He can't be pigeonholed.
He fits no one formula.
There's a lot of aspects to who he is.
But always he presents himself as a challenge to the status quo, to
precondition thinking about what Son of God, what Messiah must be.
He's carving out his own niche.
He's doing his own thing.
Like a great and creative artist, he is not simply replicating anything from
the past.
He is taking bits and pieces of prophecies and ideas and wisdom literature and law
and you name it, and he's made a whole new gumbo.
And he's serving it up.
And people don't know what to think.
He goes in a synagogue and says some of this stuff and they go, wow, a new
teaching and with authority.
Shazam.
Amazingly, people say, you know, no one teaches like him because he spoke
with his own authority.
Our sages, our rabbis always thought that you have to teach in the name of someone
else.
You know, rabbi so and so says in the name of rabbi so and so.
That's the way rabbis were taught to teach.
Yeshua came and said, you've heard it said, but not what my rabbi taught me,
but I say unto you.
And he would clarify, even overrule in some ways, the Old Testament law.
Well, this law was given by God himself for Jesus to say, I am the authoritative
interpreter of the law.
I am the one who has come to fulfill the law.
That's an extraordinary claim, a claim to essentially the authority of
God.
The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me because the Lord has anointed me to preach
good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim freedom to the
captives.
Isaiah 61, 1.
It's interesting because when Yeshua went into the synagogue, that was the passage
he read.
And he says, this day, this verse is fulfilled in your hearing.
And basically he's saying, I'm the servant that's described here.
I'm the one who fulfills this.
Philip comes to Jesus and asks him to show us the Father.
And Jesus says, the one who has seen me has seen the Father.
Jesus clearly presents himself as the self-revelation of God.
Those who meet Jesus are, in fact, meeting God.
When Jesus is brought before Caiaphas, the high priest, and some of the Sanhedrin
members that have gathered the evening that Jesus is arrested, they're trying to
find incriminating evidence.
They're trying to find incriminating testimony, and they're not doing real
well.
And finally, the high priest asks Jesus directly, tell us plainly, are you the
Messiah, the Son of God?
And Jesus says, I am.
And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand, coming with the clouds of
heaven.
And there Jesus has combined phrases from Daniel 7 and Psalm 110.
Jesus sees himself as this heavenly figure.
More than 80 times in the New Testament Gospels, Jesus is identified as the Son of
Man.
While the human connotations of the phrase are obvious, a broader interpretation is
found in an Old Testament scripture written by the Jewish prophet Daniel.
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a Son of
Man coming with the clouds of heaven.
He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.
Daniel 7.13.
Many Christians and non-Christians hear the phrase Son of Man, they think Son of
God refers to his deity and Son of Man refers to his humanity.
That's in part true, but in fact Son of Man has a much greater significance than
that as well.
The title Son of Man, Jesus draws that title from Daniel chapter 7, where a
glorious messianic figure comes before the Ancient of Days, a reference to God.
And he is given all glory and power and majesty.
That portrait of this glorious messiah is the one that Jesus identifies himself
with.
He is the Son of Man.
So Son of Man doesn't just mean a human being.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom
is one that will never be destroyed.
Daniel 7.14.
Actually the phrase Son of Man refers to his humanness and his more than humanness.
Because no human being can rule forever unless he is a forever person in some kind
of way.
In addition to the claims that Jesus makes about himself in the New Testament,
there are also reports that he performed the miraculous, that he walked on water
and healed the sick and turned water into wine and raised the dead and did
exorcisms.
And so I had to know, is there evidence that these miracles are a result of his
divine nature?
Jesus' contemporaries, that is people who liked him, people who were indifferent,
neutral, and people who opposed him, all acknowledged he did extraordinary
things.
Now of course the people who liked Jesus and believed in him and followed him said,
Jesus did these powerful works because of the spirit of God.
People who opposed him would say, well I admit he does these amazing things
but it's because the devil is helping him.
The Talmud actually speaks of some of these things.
In some of the passages that deal with Yeshua, it has him as a magician.
Now why do they describe him as a magician?
It's not flattering.
There is a historical recognition here that when Yeshua came he did miracles just
as Isaiah 35 indicates in the messianic age.
When the Messiah comes he'll be able to make the blind see and the lame walk.
The New Testament Gospels record at least 40 separate miracles performed by Jesus
during the course of his ministry.
They include healings, exorcisms, mastery over nature, and even raising of
the dead.
Christian theology has always held that these miracles are part of a total picture
that displays the attributes of God himself.
Unlimited power, total knowledge, ever present, unchanging, eternal.
There's no question that the biographies of Jesus describe him as a worker of
mighty deeds.
But I wanted to know, does this make him any different than the other miracle
workers and magicians of the ancient world?
Miracle workers that we find occasionally in the first century are magicians.
They use incantations, they use spells, they try to coerce gods or divine figures
to work on their behalf.
That's very different than Jesus' miracles.
Jesus' miracles were to demonstrate the power of the kingdom of God.
When he healed the sick, he pointed back to Isaiah's prophecies that when God's
kingdom would come, when God's salvation would come, the lame would walk,
the blind would see.
This was the demonstration that God's kingdom was arriving.
He's an exorcist.
You don't find any of those in the Old Testament.
People were not looking for messianic exorcists.
He carves out his own niche.
He reveals his identity in his own way.
It becomes clear that he is somebody who can take on the powers of darkness himself
and win.
What kind of person is that?
And he doesn't have to use recipes and formulas like other ancient exorcists.
He can just call the demon by name and that boy's out of there.
One of the most astonishing things that Jesus did was when he claimed to forgive
sins in Mark's Gospel, chapter 2, a man is brought to him, a paralyzed man,
and the crowds around him are expecting Jesus to heal him.
But instead, the first thing Jesus said is, your sins are forgiven.
Only God forgives sins.
Now some might say, well, Jesus may have been forgiving sins on behalf of God.
But in fact, that's not the way his listeners understood him because
immediately the religious leaders responded to that.
Who is this that forgives sins?
Only God forgives sins, they claim.
But Jesus claims the ability to forgive sins.
And to confirm that he has that authority, he then heals the man.
And so a very obvious question arises.
That is, is Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One, the one sent
by God to be the Savior of Israel and the world?
Christians told me that there are dozens and dozens of ancient prophecies contained
in the Old Testament of the Bible, and that they predict the coming of this
Messiah, and that Jesus, against all mathematical odds, fulfilled those
prophecies.
And I thought, you know, this is a little bit like the fingerprint evidence you see
in a court of law.
I remember covering one particular case where the murderer went through the purse
of the victim, and he left one thumbprint on the cellophane wrapper of a package of
cigarettes.
And it was that thumbprint that led to his conviction for murder.
And I thought, in an analogous way, could it be that these ancient prophecies
are sort of like that thumbprint on the cellophane?
Do they create a thumbprint that only Jesus Christ, in all of history,
manages to match?
This is Yashiyahu 53.6, or Isaiah 53.6.
All of us, like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.
But the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all.
I had a friend who wrote this out on a piece of paper.
He typed it up on his computer, without any verse notations.
And he took it around to everyone in his office.
He worked in a big office for a motor vehicle bureau in one of the big states in
our country.
And he showed it to everyone in the motor vehicle bureau, and in the state capitol.
And he said, just tell me who this is, and where it comes from.
And every single person that looked at it, Jew or Gentile alike, it didn't matter.
Everyone that looked at it, read it, and he said, who is this?
They said, it's obviously Jesus of Nazareth.
That's who it is.
And it's from the New Testament.
And then my friend would say, but no, it's not from the New Testament.
It's from the Hebrew Bible.
It was written eight centuries before Jesus came.
Can you believe this?
And he showed it to them from Isaiah.
And people really had a hard time.
Because if you read this passage without any kind of presuppositions or bias,
you will read it, and it will be really clear that this is the life of Yeshua.
Now, could he have fabricated this, or is this just a big coincidence?
In the Old Testament, you really have two kinds of prophecies.
We have prophecies that are fulfilled uniquely in Christ, and prophecies that
are fulfilled typologically in Christ.
And I do think we need to distinguish between the two.
Those that are fulfilled uniquely in Christ were once and for all fulfilled by
Jesus.
And those are the ones that we can really point to, to have apologetic value.
That is to demonstrate that Jesus was the only person who could have possibly
fulfilled this.
His birth in Bethlehem is one of those prophecies.
His role as the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is one of those prophecies.
His entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey from Zechariah chapter 9.
These are clear evidence that Jesus is fulfilling the Old Testament.
The most amazing part of Isaiah's prophecies is in Isaiah 9, it speaks about
the son of David coming to be the king, to sit on the throne of David and have an
eternal righteous kingdom.
And everyone knows it from Handel's Messiah.
Unto us a son is born, unto us a child is given.
And the idea of this verse is that the Messiah will actually be born,
physically born.
And then it says,
In other words, he's the creator, the author of time.
Some skeptics have said that Jesus could have engineered the fulfillment of these
prophecies.
Of course, Jesus could not have determined where he was going to be born.
So to be born in Bethlehem, obviously he could not have engineered that.
Also, as the suffering servant, it would have been difficult for him to
engineer such a specific fulfillment of Isaiah 53.
But on the other hand, the fact that Jesus performed certain actions that in fact
fulfilled prophecies only demonstrates that he was indeed the Messiah.
Anyone who enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey, an obvious fulfillment of
Zechariah 9.9 is saying, Yes, I am the Messiah.
So we certainly have a glimpse in that fulfilled prophecy of the
self-consciousness of Jesus, that he truly believed that he was the Messiah.
Scholars have determined that Jesus fulfilled at least four dozen major
prophecies, each written a minimum of three centuries before his birth.
Their content ranged from specific details about his life to the symbolic
implications of his death.
Psalm 22 gives a poetic picture by David, written in the first person, of what the
Messiah will be like in his suffering.
And one of the things he says is that they will pierce my hands and my feet.
David wrote before crucifixion was known, probably by about 300 years.
Isaiah 53 says he was pierced through.
It gives us the reason for his death.
He was pierced through for our iniquities.
So there's a purpose.
He dies not just because he's a martyr, but because he's a substitution for sin.
A college professor of mathematics and science named Dr. Peter Stoner wanted to
determine what the odds were that any human being throughout history could
fulfill the Messianic prophecies.
So he had his students come up with very conservative estimates of the likelihood
of any human being fulfilling certain of these predictions.
And then they just ran the numbers.
And what they determined is that the odds of any human being fulfilling 48 of these
ancient prophecies would be one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion,
trillion, trillion.
It is mathematically virtually impossible.
To me, just as significant as all of those unique prophecies that were fulfilled in
Christ is the complete drama of the Old Testament.
The fact that the Old Testament is the story, the narrative of God's redemptive
movement.
His movement to deliver and save humanity.
And Jesus is the climax of that movement.
He is the climax of salvation history.
The one who brings it off to fulfillment.
You read the Old Testament, it's building, building, building.
Jesus arrives on the scene and he is the fulfillment.
And he recognizes himself clearly as the climax of God's plan of salvation for all
humanity.
This whole case was sort of like one of those jigsaw puzzles where you don't know
what the ultimate picture is going to be.
You just put together the pieces.
And as I was putting together all of the evidence, it started to take shape.
And I sort of stepped back and I could see that it was a portrait of Jesus Christ.
This was not just an intellectual journey.
There was a very real emotional component to this.
Because I would find things along the way that would challenge me and my worldview
on a very deep level.
And I would recoil from it and I wouldn't want to believe it.
I mean, there were so many reasons why I didn't want there to be a God.
Because I did not want to be held accountable for my life.
I didn't know at the time why Lee was so angry.
I thought it was just being stubborn.
He says, after coming through it, that it was conviction.
It seemed that the more Leslie's values were changing and her character was being
transformed and the way she related to me and the children was changing,
it would highlight the contrast with my life.
I was feeling fearful and angry as well that he was being affected by it in the
way that he was.
I mean, the truth is, I felt like I was losing Leslie.
She was being pulled away from me into this Christian subculture.
I didn't fit in there.
I'm the atheist.
I'm the skeptic.
And yet I felt like she was being pulled away and I loved her.
I didn't want to lose her.
And it got to the point where I was so angry over the whole thing.
One day I just reared back and I kicked a hole in our living room wall.
Just out of rage over the situation.
It was a very ugly scene right in front of Leslie, right in front of our little girl.
They were crying and I just... I didn't want to lose her.
Jesus' body was never found.
And they predicted it.
He talked about it and it was predicted and it happened.
I mean, it's as simple as that.
We just tend to complicate it, man.
No, not physically.
Not his physical body.
So when they came the following morning and rolled back the great stone in front
of the tomb and he wasn't there...
No, no, it must have been dark in there.
I don't know.
They must have missed him.
No, I don't think physically a physical body can rise.
I don't think that he was yanked out of that... well, physically walked out and
walked down the street and met with him.
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
For more than a year I'd investigated the historical record for the reliability of
the New Testament.
I'd looked at the identity of Jesus.
But now it was time to look at the ultimate evidence for who he really was.
The purported resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
And for that I went to the best scholars that I could track down.
Michael Lacona, North American Mission Board.
You see, while Jesus was on earth, he made some really radical claims.
He claimed to be the uniquely divine servant of God.
And he claimed that the only way that we could get to God would be through him.
Now, I submit to you that if one of your professors made some claims like that,
you would think that he or she was a few french fries short of a happy meal.
Those are some really audacious claims.
Well, a lot of Jesus critics responded to him the same way that you or I would
respond to someone making those claims today.
Oh yeah, pal?
You really think that's who you are?
Well, tell you what, why don't you show it to us?
Why don't you give us a sign?
Show us a miracle or something.
And Jesus said, well, I'll give you one miracle, one sign.
My resurrection from the dead.
The resurrection of Jesus really is the pivotal event of history.
Anybody can claim to be the son of God, as Jesus clearly did.
The question is, can you back it up?
What evidence is there to support your claim?
What credentials do you have?
And if Jesus really did return from the dead, that's excellent evidence that he is
who he claimed to be, the one and only son of God.
To weigh the validity of Jesus' resurrection, we must first consider his
death.
Many skeptics have proposed that Jesus merely fainted on the cross, or was
drugged, and later escaped as part of a conspiracy.
By contrast, the four gospel narratives collectively describe the events of his
public beating, death by crucifixion, and burial.
Pilate had Jesus flogged and handed him over to be crucified.
Mark 15, 15.
Chances of surviving crucifixion were extremely bleak.
Crucifixion and the tortures that normally preceded it was the worst way to die in
antiquity.
A person was scourged to the point usually that their intestines, arteries,
and veins were laid bare.
And then after that, a person was dragged out where they were impaled to a cross or
a tree, and then left hanging there in excruciating pain.
In fact, the word excruciating comes from the Latin, out of the cross.
Jesus was being tried and executed as a rebel leader.
Now, in the Roman army, if you were responsible for looking after one prisoner
of war, even if he was a rather insignificant prisoner of war,
if you let him get away, your life would be forfeit in place of his, and life was
very cheap.
If you were looking after the execution of a rebel leader, and you let him get away,
you're in deep trouble.
You're not going back home to your wife and kids.
No way.
Game over.
The Romans were very, very good at killing people.
They specialized in it.
They prided themselves on it.
Perhaps the most definitive statement of Jesus' death at the hands of the Romans is
recorded in the Gospel of John.
One of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of
blood and water.
Medical experts have concluded that this account from John, an eyewitness of the
crucifixion, is evidence that as he suffocated on the cross, Jesus' heart had
ruptured.
There came a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph.
Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his
own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock.
All four Gospels tell us that Jesus was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
That's a remarkable statement, and certainly a historical statement.
The evidence for that is, first of all, Joseph of Arimathea is identified as a
member of the council, the Sanhedrin, that condemned Jesus.
The presence of Joseph of Arimathea in the empty tomb narrative indicates that this
is a historically reliable account of what really happened.
His name would have been known to people in those days very much like a United
States senator would be known today.
It would have been very clear where his tomb was, so that there would have been no
question about the location of Jesus' burial.
It also, I think, indicates that the burial account of Jesus could not have
been made up.
It is highly unusual to find that the person who alone has the courage to go to
Pilate and give Jesus an honorable burial is not members of his family, faithful
disciples who followed him to the end.
Instead, it is a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, the very high court,
all of whom, Mark says, had condemned Jesus of Nazareth to the cross.
The fact that it is Joseph of Arimathea who is the person responsible for giving
Jesus an honorable burial is an awkward and embarrassing fact for the early
church, and yet this tradition is faithfully preserved in almost all of the
traditions that we have about the burial of Jesus.
If Jesus really was killed by the Romans, if his body really was buried in the tomb
of Joseph of Arimathea, then the next focus of my investigation became obvious.
On the first Sunday after the crucifixion, was the tomb of Jesus Christ really empty?
On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices
they had prepared and went to the tomb.
Luke 24, 1.
The empty tomb story also has a very embarrassing feature of it that is
preserved in the memory of the early church, namely the discovery of the empty
tomb by women.
Now, in order to appreciate this, you have to understand something of the
status of women in Palestinian Jewish society.
In that society, which was a patriarchal society, women were frankly second-class
citizens.
If you were going to invent an account about an empty tomb, then why on earth
would you invent witnesses, primary witnesses, whom no one would believe?
In fact, they would scoff at that later on.
Supposing you were inventing the story of the resurrection of Jesus.
Many people have said, oh, this was all just dreamed up later on.
Well, how would you have done that?
The one thing you wouldn't have done would have been to have not only a woman,
but a woman who's got nobody quite knows what, but a fairly shady past as your
prime witness.
And yet there she is, Mary Magdalene in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and particularly in
John.
And already by the middle of the second century, the pagans are sneering,
oh, this is just based on the testimony of hysterical women, you can't believe that.
But the early Christians stuck to their story, they stuck to their guns,
they stuck to the women.
They said, this is how it was.
Now, they just would never have made that up.
And that actually has enormous ramifications.
If this is how the story was, and they didn't change it to airbrush Mary out,
then this really must have been what happened on that first Easter day.
The chief priests devised a plan.
They gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, you are to say,
his disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.
Matthew 28, 12, and 13.
Matthew reports that the Jewish authorities were claiming that the
disciples of Jesus had stolen his corpse.
And this is verified by Justin and Tertullian a little bit later on,
saying that the Jewish leaders were still saying the same thing in their day.
Now, here's the question.
If the body is still in the tomb, why are you saying that the disciples had
stolen it?
Well, if you think about that, the claim that the body was stolen
confirms that Jesus' enemies acknowledged that the tomb was empty.
If you've got a stolen body, you must have an empty tomb.
If the tomb was not empty, Jesus' opponents would surely have gone and got
the body and shown it as soon as the disciples began proclaiming the
resurrection.
I found the evidence for the empty tomb very convincing, but you know what,
that didn't tell me what happened to Jesus.
Is it true that hundreds of people really saw him alive after the crucifixion?
My research took me to a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to the Church at
Corinth, and it contains the earliest passage of all about what happened to the
resurrected Jesus.
1 Corinthians 15, 4-8 Paul, who is a first-generation Christian, having met and
seen the resurrected Jesus, describes resurrection appearances to Peter,
to the Apostles, to James, and finally to himself.
And he also mentions 500 people who saw Jesus alive.
So we have eyewitness firsthand account of someone who himself saw Jesus alive and
knows of 500 people or so who saw Jesus alive.
That's extraordinarily strong evidence.
These people, Paul tells us, were still alive at the time that he was telling the
Corinthians about it.
And his implication is, we have hundreds of people who actually saw Jesus risen
from the dead.
If you don't believe me, you can ask them about it because they're still alive.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul tells the Corinthian church that he passed on what
he received.
He uses the language, actually, of a formal transfer of tradition.
What he received, and then he describes the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the
resurrection appearances.
This confirms for us that the accounts of the resurrection were creedal tradition
that were passed on to Paul.
So if 1 Corinthians was written in the early to mid 50s of the first century,
these traditions were much earlier than that.
Going back to the period of Paul's conversion in the 30s.
So that pushes the accounts of the resurrection to a very, very early date.
Paul seems to think that the best argument for this text is that he received it from
trustworthy persons.
I gave you what I was given.
The answer's right.
I went to the right people.
And critics believe that Paul got this material, generally they say he received
it in Jerusalem, about 35 AD.
First of all, he's early.
He's writing within 20 to 35 years of the purported event itself.
Because he's quoting from a creed, an oral formula, tradition that predates
the writing of the New Testament.
For which most scholars state to between 3 to 5 years of the crucifixion itself.
1 Corinthians 15, 3-7 provides evidence that belief in the resurrection was
already present among Jews within 2 to 3 years after Jesus was killed.
That means that the resurrection stories aren't something that evolved over 30,
40, 50 years after the crucifixion of Jesus.
So we have the empty tomb, we have the eyewitnesses, we have the early accounts.
The question is, are there any other additional facts, circumstantial evidence
to support the resurrection?
While the Apostle Paul described hundreds of eyewitnesses to the resurrected Jesus,
the full impact of the event is perhaps best measured by the subsequent growth of
the early Christian church in the face of intense persecution.
In the 2nd century, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, Nero inflicted the most
exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by
the populace.
Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty at
the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous
superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea,
but even in Rome.
Even the most critical, skeptical scholars recognized that the earliest disciples at
least believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
In fact, they pinned nearly everything on it.
Without belief in Jesus' resurrection, the early Christian movement could never
have come into being.
They recognized in Jesus something special, but they wondered if they were
mistaken when he died.
They didn't anticipate that.
Suffer maybe, but die at the hands of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor?
In fact, even when the first reports of his resurrection reached their ears,
they were still doubtful and skeptical.
But when they met the risen Lord, their skepticism was transformed into a
very confident faith, a great joy, and a determination to preach the good
news to everyone else.
And I think that's the part that's awfully hard to refute, because we have this
turnabout, this transformation of a discouraged and bewildered following on
the basis of the good news.
Somehow you have to explain the explosion from scared followers who run away to,
let's worship him, let's sing to him, let's pray to him.
If there was no resurrection, and more to the point, if there was no resurrection
appearances of Jesus, to those who doubted and were discouraged and denied and
betrayed Jesus, we would not be sitting here talking about this today.
Other messianic figures had risen in the past, had claimed to be somebody,
and had been suppressed and killed by the Romans.
Yet no movement arose around those dead messiahs.
But these disciples of Jesus were willing to go to the ends of the earth proclaiming
the gospel message, were willing to suffer and die for that.
The transformation from a bunch of defeated cowards to boldly, fearlessly
proclaiming the gospel, even to the point of death, to me confirms that something
happened on that first Easter morning.
I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more
severely, and been exposed to death again and again.
2 Corinthians 11.23.
After Jesus' crucifixion, the disciples lived lives of hardship for 20,
30, 40 years, suffered greatly in their ministries, and eventually suffered
martyrdom and execution without recanting for their belief that they had seen Jesus
risen from the dead.
I mean, what were they gaining?
Were they becoming rich?
They're running around the countryside.
They're, in some cases, abandoning their family for periods of time so they can
preach.
What they got for their efforts is death in many cases.
You also have to remember that the disciples died not just for something they
believed was true.
They died for something they actually saw with their own eyes.
It's much more difficult to explain that away than it is for someone who dies for a
belief and they're sincerely wrong.
I came across a bit of evidence I really found fascinating.
James was a half-brother of Jesus, and he was not a believer in Jesus during
Jesus' lifetime, but he later died the death of a martyr as a leader of the local
church.
In a similar way, Saul of Tarsus was a persecutor of Christians, and yet he later
becomes the Apostle Paul, this incredible missionary.
So, I had to ask myself, what led to this radical transformation of these skeptics?
Sometimes people will come to believe something they wish to be true.
If you believe hard enough that a person is loving and kind, you can talk yourself
into believing that even though the person is not loving and kind.
It's very, very difficult, however, to explain people coming to believe
something that they're actually standing against.
Now, in the case of James and Paul, they did not believe in Jesus before his
crucifixion.
In fact, they thought he was deranged, and they did not accept what he said and
what he taught.
James, the brother of Jesus, is a skeptic who doesn't come to Jesus until he meets
the risen Lord.
Critics allow that.
Paul's a persecutor until he meets the risen Jesus.
That's not the kind of testimony of someone who all gets together and say,
hey, let's just cook this thing up.
One of the certainties, it seems to me, related to the testimony of the Apostles
is that they truly believed that Jesus was who he claimed he was.
And they truly believed that he had risen from the dead because they were willing to
die for that.
Very few people are willing to die for something they don't really believe in or
something even worse that they know to be a lie.
When Jesus was executed, his disciples were rightly afraid.
They scattered.
They were fearful for their own life.
Their hopes had been dashed because they had believed Jesus was the promised one
who was going to usher a new day in for Israel.
Turned out he wasn't because he was murdered by crucifixion under the
authority of the Roman Empire.
And yet, shortly thereafter, we find them taking a stand in Jerusalem proclaiming
that Jesus was the Messiah, the very Son of God.
How do we explain that?
How do we explain the fact that they were even willing to propagate this the rest of
their lives and go to martyr's deaths for their belief?
The only rational explanation is that something happened to them between the
death of Jesus and three days later.
And according to their own words, it was that they saw Jesus risen from the
dead for themselves.
People have often said, and I think it's a perfectly fair position, that,
OK, there aren't actually any good alternative hypotheses for how you explain
the rise of early Christianity.
But because we know as an absolute fact, which we're not prepared to let go of,
that nobody ever rises from the dead, then there must, in fact, be some other
alternative hypothesis.
And I want to say, OK, if you want to make the absoluteness of bodily death the
cornerstone of your entire worldview, I actually can't stop you.
If you choose to say, no, here I stand, death is the end, and nobody ever comes
back from it, and that's just the way it is, well, that's where a lot of people
were in the ancient world.
It's where a lot of people are in the modern world.
I think that that worldview is radically challenged by the strong evidence which
points to the resurrection of Jesus.
But it's up to somebody what they do with that challenge.
The evidence accumulated over time until November the 8th of 1981, which is sort of
when I reached a critical mass.
I remember going alone in my room, and I took a yellow legal pen and put a
line down the middle.
And on one side, I started to list all of the evidence I had encountered for Jesus
Christ being the Son of God.
And on the other side, all the negative evidence against that.
And I wrote, and I wrote page after page, and finally I put my pen down and I said,
wait a minute.
In light of this avalanche of evidence pointing toward the truth of Christianity,
it would require more faith for me to maintain my atheism than to become a
follower of Jesus Christ.
And so that's the moment that I decided, consistent with the evidence, the most
logical, the most rational step I could take was a step of faith in the same
direction the evidence was pointing and put my trust in Jesus.
And after I did that, I thought, you know, maybe Leslie would like to hear
about this.
I thought it was too good to be true.
My heart was pounding.
I was in tears.
I was so excited.
I just threw my arms around him and kissed him and hugged him and told him how I'd
been praying and how lots of people had been praying that this day would come.
And she threw her arms around me and she said, you hard-hearted son of a Baptist.
She said, I've been telling you this for two years.
I mean, come on.
And that began a transformational process for me where over time, my philosophy and
my attitudes, relationships, parenting, worldview, all of that began to change
over time for good, really for good.
When Lee became a Christian, his whole life started to change to the extent that
our five-year-old daughter, who also saw those changes, went to her Sunday school
teacher and told her that she wanted Jesus to do in her life what he had done in her
daddy's life.
Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.
And you know, that's my story.
It was someone who said, I'm going to investigate this stuff with an open mind.
Let it take me wherever the evidence will take me.
And what I discovered in the end is Jesus made the claim that he is the truth,
that everything hinges on his identity.
In fact, everything hinges on the resurrection because anybody can claim to
be the son of God.
If Jesus really did return from the dead, then he is who he claimed to be.
And that changes everything.
But what about your own journey?
I'd really encourage you, if you've never done it, to investigate the evidence for
yourself, but make three resolutions up front.
Number one, make it a front burner issue in your life.
Number two, resolve to have an open mind, to go wherever the evidence takes you,
even if it takes you to the very uncomfortable conclusion that Jesus is who
he claimed to be.
And then finally, resolve that once the evidence is in, you will reach a verdict
in the case for Christ.
Thank you.