The Case For Christ

“Christianity was likewise based on certain historical claims that God uniquely entered into space and time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so the very ideology that Christians were trying to promote required as careful historical work as possible.” 

Dr. Craig Blomberg makes this statement as he walks Strobel through the evidence that proves the gospels were based on eyewitness testimony and written with an eye toward historical accuracy. Blomberg argues that without historical accuracy surrounding the miraculous events of Jesus’s life, there would be no reason for people to buy into the central tenets of Christianity so soon after Jesus’s death. In other words, Blomberg argues that historical accuracy was necessary to proving to Jesus’s contemporaries that he was who he claimed to be. 

“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.”

This quotation comes from Simon Greenleaf, a professor of law at Harvard and an expert on legal evidence. After analyzing the gospels and applying his knowledge of evidence, he determined that by legal standards, the eyewitness accounts would corroborate one another. The contradictory details are proof that the writers did not collaborate to establish a single narrative about Jesus, and the overall agreement of the stories suggests that the writers are telling the truth.

“Besides, these disciples had nothing to gain except criticism, ostracism, and martyrdom. They certainly had nothing to win financially. If anything, this would have provided pressure to keep quiet, to deny Jesus, to downplay him, even to forget they ever met him—yet because of their integrity, they proclaimed who they saw, even when it meant suffering and death.” 

Another of Dr. Craig Blomberg’s arguments, he points out that the writers of the gospel had nothing to gain by falsifying historical records or undermining the accuracy of the gospel’s events. By choosing to pen the gospels in the first place, the writers put themselves in significant danger since Christians were often persecuted for their beliefs. Since the writers had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Blomberg argues it supports the idea that the gospels are an accurate, historical recounting of the life of Jesus. 

“As a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I was a ‘document rat’—I spent countless hours rummaging through court files and sniffing for tidbits of news. It was painstaking and time consuming, but the rewards were worth it.”

Strobel reminds readers of his credentials in this quotation. Much like his investigation of the writers of the gospel, he wants to reaffirm to readers that he is qualified, experienced, and capable of conducting an in-depth investigation into the credibility of Christianity. Strobel wants readers to trust both his investigation and, later, his interpretation of the evidence. 

“When the pronouncement was made about the canon, it merely ratified what the general sensitivity of the church had already determined. You see, the canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books. These documents didn’t derive their authority form being selected; each one was authoritative before anyone gathered them together.” 

This quotation establishes the definition of the biblical canon, which is the collected group of books that Christian theologians believe are the essential texts of the Bible. One of Strobel’s questions to Dr. Metzger is how the canon is established, especially since the Bible as it exists today was compiled long after Jesus’s crucifixion. Metzger explains that scholars establish canon by examining the authority of each individual text; those that can be authenticated via a strict set of criteria make it into the canon, while other ancient texts that mention Jesus and his works will not.

“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ.” 

This is a selection from the writings of Josephus, a Jewish 1st-century historian. This passage comes from a passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum, where he discusses Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. Dr. Edwin M. Yamauchi presents this as an example of other ancient texts corroborating the existence of Jesus and other events mentioned in the New Testament. Throughout the rest of Chapter 4, Strobel and Yamauchi compile a list of contemporaneous sources that mention and/or support elements of the gospels, including Jesus’s miraculous works.

“Even if you were to throw away every last copy of the gospels, you’d still have a picture of Jesus that’s extremely compelling—in fact, it’s a portrait of the unique Son of God.” 

Dr. Yamauchi makes this statement after walking Strobel through a variety of ancient, non-canonical—and often, non-Christian—sources that discuss Jesus and his spiritual claims. This statement comes at the end of Chapter 4 and offers readers one interpretation of Yamauchi’s and Strobel’s historical evidence.

“In a sense, this is what archaeology accomplishes. The premise is that if an ancient historian’s incidental details check out to be accurate time after time, this increases our confidence in other material that the historian wrote but cannot be as readily cross-checked.” 

Strobel’s chapter on archaeology is the first where an expert explains that his field cannot directly confirm the divinity of Jesus, but it can support the accuracy of the Bible’s historical references. This quotation explains why finding archaeological proof of places, locations, and events is critical to the case for Christ: verifying the historical accuracy of the Bible lends credence to the Bible’s spiritual claims. 

“But there is one picture that they all agree with: Jesus first of all must be a naturalistic Jesus. In other words, whatever else is said about him, Jesus was a man like you or me.”

In this quotation, Dr. Gregory Boyd is explaining the central belief of the Jesus Seminar. Their assertion that Jesus was a man, not a divine incarnation of God, fuels their scholarship—Boyd explains that they research to disprove Jesus’s alleged divinity, not to take a holistic look at the evidence. Thus, much of the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions are fueled by a desire to show that the Jesus that existed was fully mortal, and that the stories in the gospel are nothing more than myths.

“The Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith: the Jesus Seminar believes there’s a big gulf between the two. In its view the historical Jesus was a bright, witty, countercultural man who never claimed to be the Son of God, while the Jesus of faith is a cluster of feel-good ideas that help people live right but are ultimately based wishful thinking.” 

Strobel sums up the tension between the Jesus seminar and mainstream Christian theologians. The Jesus Seminar believes the “Jesus of history” likely existed, but that he likely was not divine. This stands in stark contrast to the beliefs of Christianity, which believe that Jesus was God made flesh. By the end of the chapter, Dr. Gregory Boyd sums up the mainstream Christian belief as both “a Jesus of history and a Jesus of faith” (168), which he proves by countering each of the Jesus Seminar’s core assertions. 

“So if someone were to say [Jesus] was God, that wouldn’t have made any sense to them and would have been seen as clear-cut blasphemy. And it would have been counterproductive to Jesus in his efforts to get people to listen to his message.”

Dr. Ben Witherington explains to Strobel why Jesus rarely called himself the Son of God in his public preaching. Witherington believes Jesus wanted to prioritize his message over his divinity, even though he also tells Strobel that Jesus was much clearer about his role as the Son of God in private with his disciples. 

“Did Jesus believe he was the Son of God, the anointed one of God? The answer is yes. Did he see himself as the Son of Man? The answer is yes. Did he see himself as the final Messiah? Yes, that’s the way he viewed himself. Did he believe that anybody less than God could save the world? No, I don’t believe he did.”

Witherington offers this summary to Strobel to cap his argument that Jesus fully believed himself to be the Son of God. This quotation walks the reader through each of Witherington’s earlier points in chronological order and allows him to draw one final conclusion from the evidence: the “historical Jesus” of the gospels is also “the living Lord” (189). 

“Might Jesus have sometimes healed by suggestion? I have no problem with that. Sometimes people can have a psychologically induced illness, and if they get a new purpose for living, a new direction, they don’t need the illness anymore. […] And when people came to Jesus, they believed he could heal them, so he did. But the fact remains: regardless of how he did it, Jesus did heal them.”

This quotation offers readers a look at an important argumentative technique: the concession. Dr. Gary Collins recognizes that the placebo effect—i.e., the idea that mental suggestion can heal illnesses—is a documented medical fact. He also recognizes that some of Jesus’s miraculous healing can be attributed to the placebo effect. Collins’s recognition of that possibility concedes the point; in other words, he recognizes that the skeptical perspective could be the correct one. But by conceding the technicalities of Jesus’s ability to heal the sick, he actually makes a stronger argument for the larger—and more important—point: that no matter how Jesus accomplished his miracles, they did happen. 

“In the meantime my talk with Gary Collins prompted me to spend time that night carefully rereading the discourses of Jesus. I could detect no sign of dementia, delusions, or paranoia. On the contrary, I was moved once more by his profound wisdom, his uncanny insights, his poetic eloquence, and his deep compassion.” 

Throughout the book, Strobel includes his own perspective on the expert evidence. Sometimes his remarks are as simple as saying that he found an argument convincing, but he also includes longer discussions that surround his own research. Strobel includes moments like the one above for two reasons. First, it contributes to the book’s transparency, thus making its argument more believable. Second, it allows him an avenue to show how the evidence affects him and moves him toward a personal belief in Christianity.

“Theologians can come up with explanations that seem to make sense, even though they might not be able to explain every nuance about the Incarnation. In a way, that seemed logical. If the Incarnation is true, it’s not surprising that finite minds couldn’t totally comprehend it.” 

Strobel discusses an instance where close reasoning cannot reveal the whole truth of a religious problem. In this case, theologians—despite centuries of effort—cannot fully explain every aspect of how Jesus can be both man and God. This is an important quotation because it starts to reveal one of the fundamental problems with a project like Strobel’s: if the validity of Christianity could be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, a book like The Case for Christ wouldn’t need to exist. But even the most insightful scholars cannot answer every question of the Bible beyond the shadow of a doubt, so one’s belief in Christianity must always involve some measure of faith. 

“Every attribute of God, says the New Testament, is found in Jesus Christ.” 

This sentence introduces the five attributes of God that Strobel outlines at the end of this chapter: omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, eternality, and immutability. Strobel concludes that because Jesus meets and/or manifests these five criteria, Jesus supports his case for being the Son of God.

“So convincing were the fulfilled prophecies that Lapides started telling people that he thought Jesus was the Messiah.”

This is the critical turning point for Lapides in his journey to converting to Christianity. He works his way through the Jewish prophesies that he learned as a child and compares them to Jesus’s life as laid out in the gospels. What he finds is convincing evidence that Jesus is the Jewish messiah. This is especially important because Lapides gives readers a glimpse into the emotional side of Christianity, especially those that come with becoming a Christian. It serves as an important counterpoint to the logical and ethical arguments that Strobel has presented readers with thus far. 

“Stoner also computed that the probability of fulfilling forty-eight prophesies was one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!” 

In this passage, Strobel is referencing research done by Peter W. Stoner, a former professor at Pasadena City College. He calculated the statistical likelihood that Jesus accidentally fulfilled all the prophesies laid out in the Old Testament and came up with this astronomical number. Strobel cites this to back up Louis Lapides’s earlier statement that the chance of just eight prophesies being fulfilled is “one in one hundred million billion” (246). Additionally, this serves as another piece of convincing logical evidence in favor of Jesus’s claims of being the messiah. 

“As the nineteenth century dawned, Karl Bahrdt, Karl Venturini, and others tried to explain away the Resurrection by suggesting that Jesus only fainted from exhaustion on the cross, or he had been given a drug that made him appear to die, and that he had later been revived by the cool, damp air of the tomb.” 

This sums up the counterargument to the Christian idea that Jesus was literally raised from the dead. This theory is often referred to as the swoon theory, and Strobel dedicates Chapter 11 to examining whether that would have been possible given the medical realities of Jesus’s crucifixion. 

“‘Is there any possible way—any possible way—that Jesus could have survived this?’ Metherell shook his head and pointed his finger at me for emphasis. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said.” 

Dr. Alexander Metherell offers a matter-of-fact conclusion after presenting a macabre medical view of the process of crucifixion. Metherell is impressed that Jesus survived as long as he did, given how badly beaten he was before being nailed to the cross, and he can see no conceivable medical reality where Jesus would have fainted only to recover days later in his tomb.

“The careful historian, unlike the philosopher, doesn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. He says, ‘This suggests that there is a historical core to this story that is reliable and can be depended upon, however conflicting the secondary details might be.’” 

This quotation shows readers an alternative way to view conflicting facts. Instead of immediately assuming that discrepancies mean a story is untrue, Dr. William Craig argues that context is key. If the discrepancies come in the minor details but the major facts are the same, it is more likely that the stories are dependable. The quotation above also implicitly discusses bias; in this case, the ways in which people are trained to think—and their own skepticism—can affect their ability to accurately interpret an event.

“At times they touched Jesus of ate with him, with the texts teaching that he was physically present. The appearances occurred over several weeks. And there are good reasons to trust these accounts—for example, they’re lacking in many typical mythical tendencies.” 

Dr. Gary Habermas says this as he explains why Strobel should interpret the resurrection as a literal reviving of Christ, not a metaphorical resurrection of the soul. Additionally, Habermas points out that Jesus’s literal, physical resurrection is more than witnessed—it is fully experienced as people interacted with Jesus once again. Lastly, this quotation speaks to the importance of corroborative evidence. Jesus did not limit his appearances to his disciples, who might have been motivated to fabricate his resurrection. Rather, he appeared to hundreds of people so that the reality his return would be beyond doubt. 

“The cumulative facts and data pointed unmistakably toward a conclusion that I wasn’t entirely comfortable in reaching.”

The conclusion marks Strobel’s transition from narrative nonfiction—or a story-based, factual narrative—to memoir, which is a set of personal recollections about an event. As Strobel researches Christianity, he also finds himself on his own spiritual journey. This quotation is a pivotal moment in Strobel’s own spiritual testimony. It marks the moment where, after evaluating the evidence, he concludes that Christianity is true.