Vondervan Audio Pages presents The Case for Christ
by Lee Strobel.
Prosecutors were convinced that the attempted murder case
against James Dixon was a dead-bang winner.
Open and shut.
Even a cursory examination of the evidence was
enough to establish that Dixon shot Police Sergeant
Richard Scanlon in the abdomen during a scuffle
on Chicago's South Side.
Piece by piece, item by item, witness by
witness, the evidence tightened a noose around Dixon's
neck.
There were fingerprints and a weapon, eyewitnesses and
a motive, a wounded cop and a defendant
with a history of violence.
Now the criminal justice system was poised to
trip the trapdoor that would leave Dixon dangling
by the weight of his own guilt.
The facts were simple.
Sergeant Scanlon had rushed to West 108th Place
after a neighbor called police to report a
man with a gun.
He arrived to find Dixon noisily arguing with
his girlfriend through the front door of her
house.
Her father emerged when she saw Scanlon, figuring
it was safe to come outside.
Suddenly, a fight broke out between Dixon and
the father.
The sergeant quickly intervened in an attempt to
break it up.
A shot rang out.
Scanlon staggered away, wounded in the abdomen.
Just then, two other squad cars screeched up
and officers ran over to restrain Dixon.
A .22 caliber gun belonging to Dixon, covered
with his fingerprints and with one bullet having
been fired, was found nearby where he had
apparently flung it after the shooting.
The father had been unarmed.
Scanlon's revolver remained in the holster.
Powder burns on Scanlon's skin show that he
had been shot at extremely close range.
While his wound wasn't life-threatening, it was
serious enough to earn him a medal for
bravery.
As for Dixon, his rap sheet showed he
had previously been convicted of shooting someone else.
Apparently, he had a propensity for violence.
And there I sat, almost a year later,
taking notes in a Chicago courtroom while Dixon
publicly admitted that, yes, he was guilty of
the shooting.
Criminal Court Judge Frank Mahala ordered Dixon in
prison, then wrapped his gavel to signal that
the case was closed.
Justice had been served.
I ambled downstairs toward the press room.
At the most, I figured my editor would
give me three paragraphs to tell the story
in the next day's Chicago Tribune.
Certainly, that's all it deserved.
This wasn't much of a tale, or so
I thought.
A couple of days later, I answered the
phone in the press room and recognized the
voice as one of my regular informants.
"'Lee, do you know the Dixon case?' he
asked.
"'Yeah, sure,' I replied, pretty routine.
"'Don't be so sure.
"'The word is that a few weeks before
the shooting, Sergeant Scanlon was at a party
showing off his pen gun.'" "'His what?' "'A
pen gun.
"'It's a .22-caliber pistol that's made to
look like a fountain pen.
"'They're illegal for anyone to carry, including cops.'"
When I told him I didn't see the
relevance of this, he said, "'Here's the thing.
"'Dixon didn't shoot Scanlon.
"'Scanlon was wounded when his own pen gun
accidentally went off in his shirt pocket.
"'He framed Dixon so he wouldn't get in
trouble for carrying an unauthorized weapon.
"'Don't you see?
"'Dixon is innocent.'" "'Impossible!' I exclaimed.
"'Check the evidence yourself,' came his reply.
"'See where it really points.'" I soon learned
that my informant had already passed along his
suspicions to the prosecutor's office.
Behind the scenes, a grand jury was being
convened to reconsider the evidence.
Amazingly, the once airtight case against James Dixon
was being reopened.
As I began investigating the evidence myself, the
strangest thing happened.
All of the new facts that I uncovered,
and even the old evidence that once pointed
so convincingly toward Dixon's guilt, snugly fit the
pen gun theory.
First, witnesses said that before Scanlon arrived on
the scene, Dixon had been pounding his gun
on the door of his girlfriend's house.
The gun discharged in a downward direction.
There was a chip in the cement of
the front porch that was consistent with the
bullet's impact.
This would account for the bullet that was
missing from Dixon's gun.
Second, Dixon said he didn't want to be
caught with the gun, so he hid it
in some grass across the street before the
police arrived.
I found a witness who corroborated that.
This explained why the gun had been found
some distance from the shooting scene, even though
nobody had ever seen Dixon throw it.
Third, there were powder burns concentrated inside, but
not above, the left pocket of Scanlon's shirt.
The bullet hole was at the bottom of
the pocket.
Conclusion?
A weapon had somehow discharged in the pocket's
interior.
Fourth, contrary to the police report, the bullet's
trajectory had been at a downward angle.
Below Scanlon's shirt pocket, there was a bloody
rip where the bullet had exited after going
through some flesh.
And fifth, Dixon's rap sheet hadn't told the
whole story.
Although he had spent three years in prison
for an earlier shooting, he had been freed
because he'd been wrongly convicted.
So much for his evidence of violence.
Finally, I put the crucial question to Dixon.
If you were innocent, why in the world
did you plead guilty?
It was a plea bargain, he said, referring
to the practice in which prosecutors recommend a
reduced sentence if a defendant pleads guilty and
thus saves everyone the time and expense of
a trial.
They said if I pleaded guilty, they would
sentence me to a year in prison.
I'd already spent 362 days in jail waiting
for my trial.
All I had to do was admit I
did it and I'd go home in a
few days.
But if I insisted on a trial and
the jury found me guilty, well, they'd throw
the book at me.
They'd give me 20 years for shooting a
cop.
It wasn't worth the gamble.
I wanted to go home.
And so, I said, you admitted doing something
that you didn't do?
Dixon nodded.
That's right.
In the end, Dixon was exonerated and he
later won a lawsuit against the police department.
Scanlon was stripped of his medal, indicted by
a grand jury, pleaded guilty to official misconduct,
and was fired from the department.
As for me, my stories were splashed across
the front page.
But much more important, I'd learned some big
lessons as a young reporter.
One was that evidence can be aligned to
point in more than one direction.
There had easily been enough proof to convict
Dixon of shooting the sergeant.
But the key questions were these.
Had the collection of evidence really been thorough?
And which explanation best fit the totality of
the facts?
Once the pen gun theory was offered, it
became clear that this scenario accounted for the
full body of evidence in the most optimal
way.
And there was another lesson.
One reason the evidence originally looked so convincing
to me was because it fit my preconceptions
at the time.
To me, Dixon was an obvious troublemaker, a
failure, the unemployed product of a broken home.
The cops were the good guys.
Prosecutors didn't make mistakes.
Looking through those lenses, all the original evidence
seemed to neatly fall into place.
Where there had been inconsistencies or gaps, I
naively glossed them over.
But when I changed those lenses, trading my
biases for an attempted objectivity, I saw the
case in a whole new light.
I allowed the evidence to lead me to
the truth, regardless of whether it fit my
original presuppositions.
The reason I've recounted this unusual case is
because, in a way, my spiritual journey was
a lot like my experience with James Dixon.
For much of my life, I was a
skeptic.
In fact, I considered myself an atheist.
To me, there was far too much evidence
that God was merely a product of wishful
thinking, mythology, or primitive superstition.
As for Jesus, didn't you know that he
never even claimed to be God?
He was a revolutionary, a sage, and a
cataclastic Jew.
But God?
No, that thought never even occurred to him.
I could point you to plenty of professors
who said so, and they could be trusted,
couldn't they?
Let's face it, even a cursory examination of
the evidence demonstrates convincingly that Jesus had only
been a human being, just like you and
me, although with unusual gifts of kindness and
wisdom.
But that's all I had ever really given
the evidence, a cursory look.
I had read just enough philosophy and history
to find support for my skepticism.
A fact here, a scientific theory there, a
pithy quote, a clever argument.
Sure, I could see some gaps and inconsistencies,
but I had a strong motivation to ignore
them, a self-serving and immoral lifestyle that
I would be compelled to abandon if I
were ever to become a follower of Jesus.
As far as I was concerned, the case
was closed.
There was enough proof to rest easy that
the divinity of Jesus was nothing more than
the fanciful invention of superstitious people.
Or so I thought.
It wasn't a phone call from an informant
that prompted me to re-examine the case
for Christ.
It was my wife.
Leslie stunned me in 1979 by announcing that
she had become a follower of Jesus.
I rolled my eyes and braced for the
worst.
But instead, in the ensuing months, I became
fascinated by the positive changes in her character,
her integrity, and her personal confidence.
Wanting to get to the bottom of these
subtle but significant shifts, I launched an all
-out investigation into the facts surrounding Christianity.
Setting aside my self-interest and prejudices as
best I could, I read books, interviewed experts,
asked questions, analyzed history, explored archaeology, studied ancient
literature, and for the first time in my
life, picked apart the Bible verse by verse.
I plunged into the case with more vigor
than any story I had ever pursued.
I applied the training I'd received at Yale
Law School as well as my experience as
legal affairs editor of the Chicago Tribune.
And over time, the evidence began to point
toward the unthinkable.
It was like the James Dixon case revisited.
Well, maybe you too have been basing your
spiritual outlook on the evidence you've observed around
you or gleaned long ago from books and
teachers or friends.
But is your conclusion really the best possible
explanation for the evidence?
If you were to dig deeper, to challenge
your preconceptions and systematically seek out proof, what
would you find?
That's what this book is about.
In effect, I've retraced and expanded upon the
spiritual journey that I took for nearly two
years.
I've crisscrossed the country to interview a dozen
respected scholars, to elicit their expert opinions, to
challenge them with the objections I had when
I was a skeptic, to force them to
defend their positions with solid data and cogent
arguments, and to test them with the very
questions that you might ask if given the
opportunity.
So who was Jesus, really?
Who did he claim to be?
And is there any credible evidence to back
up his assertions?
That's what we'll seek to determine as we
board a flight for Denver to conduct our
first interview concerning the eyewitness evidence for Jesus.
Now, every lawyer and every journalist knows that
eyewitness testimony is powerful.
One of the most dramatic moments in a
trial is when a witness describes in detail
the crime that he or she saw, and
then points confidently toward the defendant as being
the perpetrator.
An eyewitness testimony is just as crucial in
investigating historical matters, even the issue of whether
Jesus Christ is the unique Son of God.
But what eyewitness accounts do we actually possess?
And, equally important, how well would these accounts
withstand the scrutiny of skeptics?
To get solid answers, I arranged to interview
the nationally renowned scholar who literally wrote the
book on the topic, Dr. Craig Blomberg, author
of The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.
Blomberg is considered one of the country's foremost
authorities on the biographies of Jesus, which are
called the Four Gospels.
He received his master's degree from Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School and his doctorate in New Testament
from Aberdeen University in Scotland.
He later served as a senior research fellow
at Tyndall House at Cambridge University in England,
where he was part of an elite group
of international scholars that produced a series of
acclaimed works on Jesus.
He has authored several influential books, and for
the last dozen years has been a professor
of New Testament at Denver Seminary.
Since I sensed that Blomberg was a get
-to-the-point kind of a guy, I
decided to start my interview by cutting to
the core of the issue.
Tell me this, I said.
Is it possible to be an intelligent, critically
thinking person and still believe that the Four
Gospels were written by the people whose names
have been attached to them?
Blomberg set his cup of coffee on the
edge of his desk and looked intently at
me.
The answer is yes, he said.
He sat back and continued.
It's important to acknowledge that, strictly speaking, the
Gospels are anonymous, he added.
But the uniform testimony of the early church
was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the
tax collector and one of the twelve disciples,
was the author of the first Gospel in
the New Testament.
That John Mark, a companion of Peter, was
the author of the Gospel we call Mark.
And that Luke, known as Paul's beloved physician,
wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts
of the Apostles.
How uniform was the belief that they were
the authors, I asked.
There are no known competitors for these three
Gospels, he said.
Apparently it was just not in dispute.
Even so, I wanted to test the issue
further.
Excuse my skepticism, I said, but would anyone
have had a motivation to lie by claiming
that these people wrote these Gospels when they
really didn't?
Blomberg shook his head.
Probably not.
Remember these were unlikely characters.
Mark and Luke weren't even among the twelve
disciples.
Matthew was, but as a former hated tax
collector, he would have been the most infamous
character next to Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.
Contrast this with what happened when the fanciful,
apocryphal Gospels were written much later.
People chose the names of well-known and
exemplary figures to be their fictitious authors.
Philip, Peter, Mary, James.
Those names carried a lot more weight than
those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
So there would not have been any reason
to attribute authorship to these three less respected
people if it weren't true.
However, he was conveniently leaving out one of
the Gospel writers.
What about John, I asked.
He was extremely prominent.
In fact, he wasn't just one of the
twelve disciples, but he was one of Jesus'
inner three along with James and Peter.
Yes, he's the one exception, Blomberg conceded with
a nod.
And interestingly, John is the only Gospel where
there is some question about authorship.
The name of the author isn't in doubt,
it's certainly John.
The question is whether it was John the
Apostle or a different John.
You see, the testimony of a Christian writer
named Papias, dated about A.D. 125, refers
to John the Apostle and John the Elder.
And it's not clear from the context whether
he's talking about one person from two perspectives
or two different people.
But, granted that exception, the rest of the
early testimony is unanimous that it was John
the Apostle, the son of Zebedee, who wrote
the Gospel.
And, I said, you're convinced that he did?
Yes, I believe the substantial majority of the
material goes back to the Apostle, he replied.
However, if you read the Gospel closely, you
can see some indication that its concluding verses
may have been finalized by an editor.
Personally, he said, I have no problem believing
that someone closely associated with John may have
functioned in that role, putting the last verses
into shape and potentially creating the stylistic uniformity
of the entire document.
But, in any event, he stressed, the Gospel
is obviously based on eyewitness material, as are
the other three Gospels.
While I appreciated Blomberg's comments so far, I
wasn't ready to move on yet.
I finished off my coffee and put the
cup on his desk.
With my pen poised, I prepared to dig
deeper.
Let's go back to Mark, Matthew, and Luke,
I said.
What specific evidence do you have that they
were the authors of those Gospels?
Again, said Blomberg, the oldest and probably most
significant testimony comes from Papias, who in about
A.D. 125 specifically affirmed that Mark had
carefully and accurately recorded Peter's eyewitness observations.
In fact, he said Mark made no mistake
and did not include any false statement.
And Papias said Matthew had preserved the teachings
of Jesus as well.
Then Irenaeus, writing about A.D. 180, confirms
the traditional authorship.
In fact, here, he said, reaching for a
book, he flipped it open and read the
words of Irenaeus.
Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews
in their own tongue when Peter and Paul
were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding
the church there.
After the departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter
of Peter, himself handed down to us in
writing the substance of Peter's preaching.
Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in
a book the Gospel preached by his teacher.
Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who
also leaned on his breast, himself produced his
Gospel while living at Ephesus in Asia.
In addition to the four Gospels, scholars often
refer to what they call Q, which stands
for the German word for source.
Because of similarities in language and content, it
has traditionally been assumed that Matthew and Luke
drew upon Mark's earlier Gospel in writing their
own.
In addition, scholars have speculated that Matthew and
Luke also incorporated some material from this mysterious
Q, which is absent from Mark.
What exactly is Q?
I asked Blomberg.
It's nothing more than a hypothesis, he replied.
With few exceptions, it's just sayings or teachings
of Jesus, which once may have formed an
independent, separate document.
You see, it was a common literary genre
to collect the sayings of respected teachers, sort
of like we compile the top music of
a singer and put it in a best
-of album today.
Q may have been something like that, he
said.
But if Q predated Matthew and Luke, it
would constitute very early material about Jesus.
Perhaps, I thought, it could shed some fresh
light on what Jesus was really like.
If you isolate just the material from Q,
I said, what kind of picture of Jesus
do you get?
Blomberg pondered the question for a moment.
Well, you have to keep in mind that
Q was a collection of sayings, and therefore
it didn't have the narrative material that would
have given us a more fully-orbed picture
of Jesus, he replied.
Even so, a significant scholarly book has argued
recently that if you isolate all the sayings
of Q, one actually gets the same kind
of picture of Jesus, of someone who made
audacious claims about himself, as you find in
the Gospels more generally.
I wanted to push him further on that
point.
Would he have been seen as a miracle
worker, I asked?
Again, he replied, you have to remember that
you wouldn't get many miracle stories per se,
because they're normally found in the narrative, and
Q is primarily a list of sayings.
He stopped to reach over to his desk.
Pick up a leather-bound Bible and rustle
through its well-worn pages.
But, for example, Luke 7, verses 18 through
23, and Matthew 11, verses 2 through 6,
say that John the Baptist sent his messengers
to ask Jesus if he really was the
Christ, the Messiah they were waiting for.
Jesus replied, in essence, tell them to consider
my miracles.
Tell them what you have seen, the blind
see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, and
the poor have good news preached to them.
So, even in Q, he concluded, there is
clearly an awareness of Jesus' ministry of miracles.
Feeling satisfied with Blomberg's answer concerning the first
three Gospels, which are called the Synoptics because
of their similarities, next I turned my attention
to John's Gospel.
Anyone who reads all four Gospels will immediately
recognize that there are obvious differences between the
Synoptics and John.
But I was curious.
Does this necessarily mean that there are irreconcilable
contradictions between them?
Could you clarify the differences, I asked Blomberg.
His eyebrows shot up.
Huge question, he exclaimed.
After I assured him I was only after
the essentials of the issue, he settled back
into his chair.
Well, it's true that John is more different
than similar to the Synoptics, he began.
Only a handful of the major stories that
appear in the other three Gospels reappear in
John, although that changes noticeably when one comes
to Jesus last week.
From that point forward, the parallels are much
closer.
There also seems to be a very different
linguistic style.
In John, Jesus uses different terminology.
He speaks in long sermons.
And there seems to be a higher Christology,
that is, more direct and more blatant claims
that Jesus is one with the Father, God
himself, the way, the truth, and the life,
the resurrection and the life.
I asked, what accounts for those differences?
Well, for many years the assumption was John
knew everything that Matthew, Mark, and Luke had
written, and so he saw no need to
repeat it.
And he consciously chose to supplement them.
More recently, it has been assumed that John
is largely independent of the other three Gospels,
which would account not only for the different
choices of material, but also the different perspectives
on Jesus.
There are some theological distinctives to John, I
observed.
No question, he said, but do they deserve
to be called contradictions?
I think the answer is no, and here's
why.
For almost every major theme or distinctive in
John, you can find parallels in Matthew, Mark,
and Luke, even if they're not as plentiful.
That was a bold assertion, and I decided
to test it by raising perhaps the most
significant issue of all concerning the differences between
the synoptics and John.
John makes very explicit claims of Jesus being
God, which some attribute to the fact that
he wrote later than the others and began
embellishing things, I said.
Can you find this theme of deity in
the synoptics?
Well, yes, I can, he said.
It's more implicit, but you find it there.
Think of the story of Jesus walking on
the water, found in Matthew 14, verses 22
through 33, and Mark 6, verses 45 through
52.
Most English translations hide the Greek by quoting
Jesus as saying, Fear not, it is I.
Actually, the Greek literally says, Fear not, I
am.
Those last two words are identical to what
Jesus said in John 8, 58, when he
took upon himself the divine name, I am,
which is the way God revealed himself to
Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3,
14.
So Jesus is revealing himself as the one
who has the same divine power over nature
as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.
Well, that's one example I said.
Do you have any others?
Well, yes, I could go along those same
lines, Blomberg said.
For instance, Jesus' most common title for himself
in the first three Gospels is the Son
of Man.
And I raised my hand to stop him.
Hold on, I said.
Reaching into my briefcase, I pulled out a
book and leafed through it until I located
the quote that I was looking for.
I said, Karen Armstrong, the former nun who
wrote the bestseller, A History of God, says
that it seems that the term Son of
Man simply stressed the weakness and mortality of
the human condition.
And so by using it, Jesus was merely
emphasizing that he was a frail human being
who would one day suffer and die.
Now, if that's true, I said, then when
Jesus called himself the Son of Man, that
doesn't sound very much like a claim of
deity.
Blomberg's expression turned sour.
Look, he said firmly.
Contrary to popular belief, Son of Man does
not primarily refer to Jesus' humanity.
Instead, it's a direct allusion to Daniel 7,
verses 13 and 14.
He opened the Old Testament and read those
words of the 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.
He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power.
All people, nations, and men of every language
worshipped him.
His dominion is like an everlasting dominion that
will not pass away, and his kingdom is
one that will never be destroyed.
Blomberg shut the Bible.
So look at what Jesus is doing by
applying the term Son of Man to himself,
he continued.
This is someone who approaches God himself in
his heavenly throne room and is given universal
authority and dominion.
That makes Son of Man a title of
great exaltation, not mere humanity.
In fact, in the words of another scholar
I would interview later, Dr. William Lane Craig,
the Son of Man was a divine figure
in the Old Testament who would come at
the end of the world to judge mankind
and rule forever.
Thus, the claim to be the Son of
Man would be, in effect, a claim to
divinity.
Blomberg continued.
In addition, Jesus claims to forgive sins in
the Synoptics, and that's something only God can
do.
Jesus accepts prayer and worship.
Jesus says, whoever acknowledges me, I will acknowledge
before my Father in heaven.
Final judgment is based on one's reaction to
who?
This mere human being?
No, that would be a very arrogant claim.
Final judgment is based on one's reaction to
Jesus as God.
So as you can see, there's all sorts
of material in the Synoptics about the deity
of Christ that then merely becomes more explicit
in John's Gospel.
Now, in authoring the last Gospel, John did
have the advantage of being able to mull
over theological issues for a longer period of
time.
So I asked Blomberg, doesn't the fact that
John was writing with a more theological bent
mean that his historical material may have been
tainted and therefore less reliable?
I don't believe John is more theological, Blomberg
stressed.
He just has a different cluster of theological
emphases.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke each have very distinctive
theological angles that they want to highlight.
Luke, the theologian of the poor and of
social concern.
Matthew, the theologian trying to understand the relationship
of Christianity and Judaism.
Mark, who shows Jesus as a suffering servant.
You can make a long list of the
distinctive theologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
I interrupted because I was afraid that Blomberg
was missing my broader point.
Okay, but don't those theological motivations call into
question their ability and their willingness to accurately
report what happened, I asked?
Isn't it likely that their theological agenda would
color and twist the history that they recorded?
It certainly means that, as with any ideological
document, we have to consider that as a
possibility, he said.
There are people with axes to grind who
distort history to serve their own ideological ends.
But unfortunately, people have concluded that always happens,
which is a mistake.
He went on to say this.
In the ancient world, the idea of writing
dispassionate, objective history merely to chronicle events with
no ideological purpose was unheard of.
Nobody wrote history if there wasn't a reason
to learn from it.
I suppose you could say that makes everything
suspect, I suggested.
Yes, at one level it does, he replied.
But if we can reconstruct reasonably accurate history
from all kinds of other ancient historical sources,
we ought to be able to do that
from the Gospels, even though they too are
ideological.
Blomberg thought for a moment, then said, here's
a modern parallel from the experience of the
Jewish community that might clarify what I mean.
Some people, usually for anti-Semitic purposes, deny
or downplay the horrors of the Holocaust.
But it has been the Jewish scholars who've
created museums, written books, preserved artifacts, and documented
testimony by eyewitnesses concerning the Holocaust.
Now, they have a very ideological purpose, namely
to ensure that such an atrocity never occurs
again.
But they have also been the most faithful
and objective in their reporting of historical truth.
Christianity, likewise, was based on certain historical claims
that God uniquely entered into space and time
in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
So that the very ideology the Christians were
trying to promote required as careful historical work
as possible.
However, I was thinking to myself, it's one
thing to say that the Gospels are rooted
in direct or indirect eyewitness testimony.
It's another to claim that this information was
reliably preserved until it was written down years
after the life of Jesus.
This, I knew, was a major point of
contention, and I wanted to challenge Blomberg with
this issue as forthrightly as I could.
Again, I picked up Armstrong's book, A History
of God.
Listen to something else she wrote, I said,
as I read this excerpt to Blomberg.
We know very little about Jesus.
The first full-length account of his life
was St. Mark's Gospel, which was not written
until about the year 70, some 40 years
after his death.
By that time, historical facts had been overlaid
with mythical elements, which expressed the meaning that
Jesus had acquired for his followers.
It is this meaning that St. Mark primarily
conveys, rather than a straightforward historical portrayal.
Tossing the book back into my briefcase, I
turned to Blomberg and continued.
Some scholars say the Gospels were written so
far after the events of Jesus' life that
legend developed and distorted what was finally written
down, turning Jesus from merely a wise teacher
into the mythological Son of God.
Is this a reasonable hypothesis?
Or is there good evidence that the Gospels
were recorded earlier than that, before legend could
totally corrupt what was ultimately recorded?
Blomberg's eyes narrowed, and his voice took on
an adamant tone.
There are two separate issues here, and it's
important to keep them separate, he said.
I do think there's good evidence for suggesting
early dates for the writing of the Gospels.
But even if there wasn't, Armstrong's argument doesn't
work anyway.
Why not, I asked.
The standard scholarly dating, even in very liberal
circles, is Mark in the 70s, Matthew and
Luke in the 80s, and John in the
90s.
But listen, he said, that's still within the
lifetimes of various eyewitnesses to the life of
Jesus, including hostile eyewitnesses who would have served
as a corrective if false teachings about Jesus
were going around.
Consequently, these late dates for the Gospels really
aren't all that late.
In fact, we can make a comparison that's
very instructive.
The two earliest biographies of Alexander the Great
were written by Arian and Plutarch more than
400 years after Alexander's death in 323 B
.C., and yet historians consider them to be
generally trustworthy.
Yes, legendary material about Alexander did develop over
time, but it was only in the centuries
after these two writers.
In other words, the first 500 years kept
Alexander's story pretty much intact.
Legendary material began to emerge over the next
500 years.
And so, whether the Gospels were written 60
years or 30 years after the life of
Jesus, the amount of time is negligible by
comparison.
It's almost a non-issue.
I could see what Blomberg was saying.
At the same time, it seemed intuitively obvious
to me that the shorter the gap between
an event and when it was written about,
the less likely those writings would be corrupted
by legend or fall victim to faulty memories.
Let me concede your point for the moment,
but let's get back to the dating of
the Gospels, I said.
You indicated that you believe they were written
sooner than the dates you mentioned.
Yes, sooner, he said.
And we can support that by looking at
the book of Acts, which was written by
Luke.
Acts ends apparently unfinished.
Paul is the central character of the book,
and he's under house arrest in Rome.
With that great climactic pause, the book abruptly
halts.
What happens to Paul?
We don't find out from Acts, probably because
the book was written before Paul was put
to death.
That means Acts cannot be dated any later
than A.D. 62.
Having established that, we can then move backwards
from there.
Since Acts is the second of a two
-part work, we know that the first part,
the Gospel of Luke, must have been written
earlier than that.
And since Luke incorporates some parts of the
Gospel of Mark, that means Mark is even
earlier.
If you allow maybe a year for each
of those, you end up with Mark no
later than about A.D. 60, maybe even
in the late 50s.
If Jesus was put to death in A
.D. 30 or 33, then we're talking about
a maximum gap of 30 years or so.
He sat back in his chair with an
air of triumph.
Historically speaking, especially compared to Alexander the Great,
he said, that's like a news flash.
Indeed, that was impressive, closing the gap between
the events of Jesus' life and the writing
of the Gospels to the point where it
was negligible by historical standards.
However, I still wanted to turn the clock
back as far as I could to get
the very earliest information about Jesus.
Let's see if we can go back even
further, I said.
How early can we date the fundamental beliefs
in Jesus' atonement, his resurrection, and his unique
association with God?
Well, it's important to remember that the books
of the New Testament are not in chronological
order, he began.
The Gospels were written after almost all of
the letters of Paul, whose writing ministry began
in the late 40s.
Most of his major letters appeared during the
50s.
To find the earliest information, one goes to
Paul's epistles and then asks, are there signs
that even earlier sources were used in writing
them?
We find that Paul incorporated some creeds, confessions
of faith, or hymns from the earliest Christian
church.
These go way back to the dawning of
the church soon after the resurrection.
The most famous creeds include Philippians chapter 2,
verses 6 through 11, which talks about Jesus
being in the very nature of God.
And Colossians chapter 1, verses 15 through 20,
which describes him as being the image of
the invisible God who created all things and
through whom all things were reconciled with God
by making peace through his blood shed on
the cross.
Those are certainly significant in explaining what the
earliest Christians were convinced about Jesus.
But perhaps the most important creed in terms
of the historical Jesus is 1 Corinthians 15,
where Paul uses technical language to indicate he
was passing along this oral tradition in a
relatively fixed form.
Blomberg located the passage in his Bible and
read it to me.
For what I received, I passed on to
you as of first importance, that Christ died
for our sins according to the Scriptures, that
he was buried, that he was raised on
the third day according to the Scriptures, that
he appeared to Cephas, or Peter, and then
to the twelve.
After that he appeared to more than 500
of the brothers at the same time, most
of whom are still living, though some have
fallen asleep.
Then he appeared to James, then to all
the apostles.
And here's the point, Blomberg said, if the
crucifixion was as early as A.D. 30,
then Paul's conversion was about 32.
Immediately Paul was ushered into Damascus, where he
met with a Christian named Ananias, and with
some other disciples.
His first meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem
would have been about A.D. 35.
At some point along there, Paul was given
this creed, which had already been formulated, and
which was being used in the early church.
Now, here you have the key facts about
Jesus' death for our sins, plus a detailed
list of those to whom he appeared in
resurrected form, all dating back to within two
to five years of the events themselves.
That's not later mythology, as Armstrong suggested, from
40 or more years down the road.
A good case can be made for saying
that Christian belief in the resurrection, though not
yet written down, can be dated back to
within two years of that very event.
This is enormously significant, he said.
Now you're not comparing 30 or 60 years
with the 500 years that's generally acceptable for
other data.
Now you're talking about two.
I couldn't deny the importance of that evidence.
It certainly seemed to take the wind out
of the charge that the resurrection, which is
cited by Christians as the crowning confirmation of
Jesus' divinity, was merely a mythological concept that
developed over long periods of time as legends
corrupted the eyewitness accounts of Christ's life.
For me, this struck especially close to home,
because as a skeptic, that was one of
my biggest objections to Christianity.
But even though this was important evidence, the
time had come for me to subject all
of this eyewitness material to the kind of
tests that a lawyer or journalist would use
to expose its weaknesses or underscore its strength.
There are eight tests I'd like to ask
you about, I said to Blomberg as we
sat down after a 15 minute break.
Blomberg picked up a fresh cup of coffee
and leaned back.
Go ahead, he said.
You are listening to The Case for Christ
by Lee Strobel.
This concludes this side.
Please turn the tape over for the continuation
of the program.
Thank you.