The Case for Christ: Eyewitness
Part 1
Last night I started reading Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ". So far I'm really enjoying it. Stobel is a Lawyer and a Journalist who started researching the subject of Jesus when his wife was converted to Christianity. He was afraid at first that she would go "weird" on him, but in fact he was pleasantly surprised by the subtle changes that began to take place in her life. Being a very logical thinker and an atheist, he decided to put his experience and expertise in the area of law to good use, in order to discover for himself who this person was that had changed his wife's life for the better.
He records hard hitting interviews with scholars, historians, scientists, theologians and other experts, and argues with the tenacity of a court case prosecutor the case against Jesus as a real man, and more importantly, cross-examines them to ascertain the plausability of His many outrageous claims.
Lee Stobel became a Christian when researching for this book. Through the course of his search for truth he became convinced beyond reasonable doubt that The Case for Christ is not as open-and-shut as it at first might seem to an untrained eye. All the things he KNEW that shed reasonable doubt on the subject had always been enough to convince him that the claims held no water. He knew for example that the Gospels were not historically accurate enough to conclude that Jesus even existed, that the very idea of God was completely ridiculous in the light of scientific discoveries, and that if Jesus really did exist then he was pretty wacko to claim that He was the son of God. He KNEW this, he was convinced of the logic of the evidence all pointing to one conclusion: ludicrous.
But after he had taken the decision NOT to throw the baby out with the bathwater, not to gloss over those things that he just assumed about Jesus, after he had taken the decision to really SEARCH for truth, with no pre-conceptions, no bias, then he came to find that astonishingly the evidence points to the exact opposite.
The first couple of chapters deal with the reliability of the eyewitnesses, the writers of the gospels. Of course I'm not going to tell you everything that was written there, if anything I can only give you a taster, whet your apetite to find out more FOR YOURSELF.
One of the points made was about the fact that the gospels were probably written 60 years after Jesus' death. The scholar being interviewed points out that documents that chart the life of Alexander the Great were probably written 500 years after his death, meaning that even if the gospels WERE written 60 years after (although there is evidence to suggest that they were actually written as little as two years later) then by ancient historical standards, that's about as reliable as you can get! There is in fact more evidence for the historical existence of Jesus than there is for the historical existence of Alexander!
There are many other doubts raised, including the fact that the gospels may not have been written by the people whose names they have been given, that two of the gospels draw on the words of a third, that one of the gospels is completely different and seemingly inconsistent with the other three. However, consistently, systematically, every doubt is dispelled with evidence from history and long years of research into the subject.
If you want to find out the explanations for all these and more... then you know what to do!
I'll even make it easy for you, because I'm nice like that: Go buy it!
It's totally worth reading if you don't believe in Jesus as Christ (so that you can be better informed before making your judgement) and if you are already a believer. As you know I believe in Jesus very firmly, but doubts had flickered in my brain. The good thing is that they are leading me to a solution. To delve deeper and find out the answers. Doubts should always lead to an ardent search for truth!