PDF Summary:The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel

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The Incompleteness of the Synoptic Gospels

When we pick up a biography in a bookstore, we expect the story to begin with the subject’s birth—or even before it—and proceed to the subject’s death (if the subject of the biography is already deceased). But the biographies offer only a partial account of Jesus’s life.

It’s important to remember that ancient biographies are quite different from the biographies we might buy in our local bookstore. In the ancient world, biographies had a didactic function: that is, they were meant to teach readers lessons rather than depict their subject’s entire life. So Mark, for example, felt no compunction about minimizing Jesus's early years in favor of the events leading up to Jesus's crucifixion.

There’s also a theological reason for the gospels’ selective approach to Jesus's life. Jesus's teachings derive their authority from his divinity—his death and resurrection, which provided atonement for the sins of humanity. Because this event is the most important part of Jesus's story, it stands to reason his biographers would concentrate on it.

The Question of Q

“Q” is scholars’ shorthand for “Quelle,” German for...

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A Second Objection

In early Christianity, it was common for Christians to believe Jesus was speaking to them from the spiritual world, and these “prophecies” would be considered on par with Jesus’s own teachings. Thus the gospels, as a blend of the pronouncements of Jesus and these prophecies, muddy the water in terms of what Jesus really said and did.

This objection betrays an ignorance of the text of the New Testament. In his letters, Paul is careful to distinguish early Christian prophecy from Jesus’s own words (for examples, see 1 Corinthians 7 and 1 Corinthians 14).

A second rebuttal to this objection consists in the fact that many of the controversies of the early Christian church—concerning circumcision, the relationship between Jew and Gentile, and divorce, among other topics—aren’t addressed in the gospels. If the gospels were indeed a mix of prophecy and direct reportage, the gospel writers would have included various “prophecies” concerning these topics. Because they didn’t, it stands to reason that they were only interested in Jesus’s own words.

Test 2: Authorial Ability

If one concedes that the gospel authors’ primary intent was the...

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1. There is a wealth of early New Testament material. When it comes to ancient texts, the lineage is typically sparse. Take the first-century historian, Josephus: In Greek, his native language, the only copies that exist date to the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries; the earliest version is a fourth-century Latin translation. The New Testament, on the other hand, boasts more than five thousand Greek manuscripts.
2. There is consistency among fragments in translation and from diverse geographical areas. In addition to the thousands of Greek fragments, early versions of the New Testament survive in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and other ancient languages. And in great numbers: For example, there are between 8,000 and 10,000 Latin Vulgate manuscripts.

According to another esteemed scholar of the New Testament, F.F. Bruce, the New Testament is unparalleled in terms of the textual evidence for its accuracy.

Discrepancies Among the Surviving Copies

There are certainly differences among the many ancient copies of the gospels (the highest estimates place the number of differences among the copies at 200,000). **But these differences are by and...

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Nevertheless, those that insist Jesus never existed are willfully distorting—or ignoring—the record. Josephus’s bona fides as a historian are well known: His accounts have been supported by archeological findings as well as the accounts of Tacitus, arguably the most important Roman historian of the period.

On Tacitus

Tacitus, too, mentions Jesus in his writings. In his account of Nero’s persecution of Christians in 115 AD, he explicitly references a “Christus,” who was crucified by Pontius Pilate and inspired an “immense multitude” to adhere to his teachings. The reasons Tacitus’s account is especially trustworthy are (1) he was generally unsympathetic to Christians, and so would have no reason to fabricate Christ’s existence, and (2) he establishes that Jesus attracted a large group of followers. Given that Jesus was executed using the most disgraceful method of the time—and so, under normal circumstances, would have been forgotten or disowned—the fact that he commanded a massive following of adherents who would rather die than renounce him at least implies his resurrection.

Further History

Josephus and Tacitus are merely the most famous of the...

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On John and Mark

John’s gospel, the last to have been written, has been doubted due to geographical inaccuracy as well—until it too was vindicated by relatively recent archeological discoveries.

For example, John describes Jesus healing an invalid at the Pool of Bethesda, which, in John’s telling, has five porticoes. Because no such pool had been found, many scholars doubted this part of John’s gospel (and, in turn, his gospel as a whole). But then, lo and behold, the pool was excavated from 40 feet below ground—and it matched John’s description precisely.

Mark, according to his gospel’s critics, was conspicuously ignorant of ancient Palestine’s geography. His mistakes are particularly troubling given that his gospel is widely accepted to be the first to have been written.

But are they really mistakes? Critics have fixated on Mark 7:31, wherein Jesus travels from Tyre through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee. Scholars of the geography of the time have pointed out that if Jesus were traveling from Tyre in the direction of Sidon, he would be moving away from the Sea of Galilee.** But these scholars fail to take into account the mountainous terrain and winding roads...

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Advocates of a divide between a naturalistic Jesus and a mythological one often point to the historical context in which Jesus lived, a time when miracle workers were not uncommon and so-called “mystery religions” built around resurrections were in existence. When these facets of the ancient world are cited, there are two claims being made: (1) that Jesus’s supernatural qualities weren’t actually true to him, but rather imported from preexisting and obviously mythological sources; and (2) that if there were other similarly endowed figures around at the time as Jesus, Jesus isn’t uniquely deserving of worship.

The Jesus Seminar aims to develop a new Christianity, one free of fundamentalism and responsive to the situation of contemporary human beings. Scholars in the Jesus Seminar hold a variety of viewpoints on Jesus: Some see him as a religious zealot, others as a political revolutionary, still others as a proto-feminist or socialist.

Foundational Assumptions

Although the members of the Jesus Seminar portray themselves as lonely truth-tellers amid a sea of biased believers, their positions are actually undermined by their own biases.

For example, the scholars...

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• Jesus was crucified during Passover with a sign over his head that read “King of the Jews.” That sign wouldn’t have been there unless he made the claim himself or someone thought he had.

Jesus’s Miracles

The fact that Jesus performed miracles isn’t necessarily a token of his deity—his disciples later performed similar feats without claiming deity for themselves. Rather, it’s how he thought about his miracles that sets them apart.

For example, when Jesus would perform a miracle, he would situate it in a very specific context: as a sign of the coming of the Kingdom of God. Rather than view himself as simply a worker of miracles, Jesus saw himself as an emissary of God, through which God’s promises would come to pass. In short, he saw himself as transcendent.

Jesus’s Words

Some have latched onto the fact that Jesus was called “rabbi” by his followers to argue that he simply viewed himself as a religious instructor. But Jesus’s way of teaching and speaking distinguishes him from the rabbis of his time.

For example, Jesus refers to God as “abba,” a term of intimacy a son would use with a beloved father. Whereas most Jews of the time tried to avoid...

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The View of Jesus’s Contemporaries

Of course, our understanding of Jesus is based exclusively on the biblical and historical evidence. It’s a fact that many of Jesus’s contemporaries believed he was crazy. For example, in John 20:20, we read that the Jews of the time believed Jesus was possessed by a demon and “raving mad.”

Although Jesus’s countrymen did indeed question his sanity, their suspicion was prompted by Jesus’s uniqueness, not any evidence of mental disturbance. (In other words, they called him “insane” because his teachings were so unfamiliar.) And, unlike a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur, Jesus established his divinity through specific acts: for example, healing the sick or bringing the dead back to life.

(Skeptics have charged that Jesus’s “miracles” are likely less impressive than they seem. For example, many conditions in the ancient world were psychosomatic—that is, imagined—and so Jesus’s ability to heal was tantamount to the placebo effect: Because people believed Jesus was a healer, they simply willed themselves better once he administered to them.

**The problem with this argument is that death is not a psychosomatic...

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• An “Emptied” Jesus
  • This solution grows out of Philippians 2, which finds Paul telling the reader that, because Jesus didn’t want to “exploit” his equality with God, he “emptied” himself. There have been various interpretations of what Paul meant here, the most compelling of which is that Jesus relinquished the independent use of his divine powers. That is, while incarnated, Jesus only acted as God when God the Father commanded it.

For Carson’s part, though, the quest for an exhaustive explanation misses the point. Incarnation—the event of spirit becoming flesh—is a miraculous process that can’t help but be mysterious. It is an act of God, and so it should come as no surprise that mortals have difficulty comprehending it.

Nevertheless, there is clear textual evidence that Jesus satisfied all five of the key attributes of God:

1. Jesus is omnipresent (in Matthew 28:20, he says “and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”).
2. Jesus is omniscient (in John 16:30, the author admits, “Now are we sure that thou knowest all things”).
3. Jesus is omnipotent (Matthew 28:18: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth,”...

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After an epiphany he experienced while camping in the Mojave Desert, during which God spoke to him and told him Jesus was the Messiah, Lapides swore off drugs and accepted Jesus into his life. He married a Jewish woman who was also a follower of Christ and joined a church (which, coincidentally, was led by the pastor who’d given him the Bible that sparked his curiosity about Jesus).

Challenges to the Prophecies

Many Jews, like Lapides himself, are simply oblivious to the fact that the prophets of the Old Testament anticipate Jesus’s arrival; once they do the necessary reading—of the Bible and the relevant secondary sources—the facts of the case become undeniable.

That said, there are a number of possible objections to Jesus’s being the Messiah of the Old Testament.

Sheer Coincidence

Isn’t it possible that the parallels between Jesus and the Messiah described in the Old Testament are just the product of chance?

The simple answer is no. Mathematician Peter Stoner calculated the odds that a single person would fit even just eight prophecies at one-in-one-hundred-million-billion. The odds of fitting all 48 prophecies of Jesus? **One of out of many trillions of...

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As for the flogging itself, which breached Jesus’s skin and opened profusely bleeding wounds, it would have caused Jesus to go into hypovolemic shock. This is when a rapid and dangerous loss of blood causes weakness, fainting, and/or acute thirst. We see all three as Jesus carries the cross up to Calvary.

The Crucifixion Itself

Given the viciousness of the whipping Jesus received before reaching the execution site, he was likely already in critical condition when he was crucified.

The stages of crucifixion were routinized: First, Jesus would have been laid on top of the patibulum—the horizontal beam of the cross—and nailed to this beam through the wrists. He would then have been hoisted in the air and the patibulum attached to a vertical stake. Once the two beams were attached, Jesus’s feet would have been nailed to the vertical stake. It’s likely that Jesus’s shoulders would have been dislocated once the patibulum was affixed to the vertical beam, thereby fulfilling the prophecy articulated in Psalm 22 that the Messiah’s bones would be “out of joint.”

Those executed by crucifixion would typically die of asphyxiation. The crucified position causes the...

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The Case of Joseph of Arimathea

Those skeptical of Jesus’s burial often highlight the implausibility that Joseph of Arimathea would have arranged for the honorable interment of Jesus’s body. This is because Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish leaders that voted unanimously to execute Jesus.

The gospel of Luke accounts for this twist with the addition of a key detail: Joseph of Arimathea wasn’t present at the vote to kill Jesus. Thus he may have been less indisposed toward Jesus than the rest of the Sanhedrin.

But there are other reasons to believe that this unlikely figure did indeed give Jesus an honorable burial. First of all, given early Christians’ anger toward the Jews for their role in Jesus’s death, it’s unlikely that an author of the time period would give credit to a member of the Sanhedrin if it wasn’t due. A second reason is that, for all the accounts of Jesus in both historical and Christian documents, there’s no alternate story of Jesus’s burial.

The Tomb

Interestingly, the biblical creed of the Resurrection (Corinthians 15:3–10) never mentions an empty tomb—it only reports that Jesus was resurrected...

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1. Scholars have dated the writing of 1 Corinthians to between 55 and 57 AD, and Paul likely gave the creed to the church at Corinth prior to 51 AD. Which is to say, the creed was being promulgated a mere twenty years after Jesus’s death. (And possibly even earlier: Habermas himself agrees with the minority of scholars who trace the creed to between 32 and 38 AD—within two to three years of the Resurrection.) If early Christians or their critics took issue with Paul’s account, there were plenty of eyewitnesses still living whom they could have questioned.
2. Paul was initially a committed skeptic of Jesus. That means that he would have had to have an especially good reason—for example, Jesus’s appearing to him after his death on the cross—to become a believer.
3. Paul learned about Jesus’s appearing to the other witnesses when he visited Jerusalem himself. During this trip, Paul interviewed Peter and James in person with the aim of establishing a factual account of the Resurrection (in Galatians 1:18, Paul uses the Greek word historeo—signifying an “investigative inquiry”—to describe his trip to Jerusalem).
4. In 1 Corinthians 15:11, Paul states that...

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Piece #2: The Skeptics’ Conversion

A powerful rejoinder to the notion that the Resurrection was a conspiracy cooked up by Jesus’s followers is the fact that Jesus’s skeptics saw him, too.

In the gospels, we learn that Jesus’s family, including his brother James, were embarrassed by him. But through Josephus, the first-century historian, we learn that Jesus’s brother James later became a leader of the Jerusalem church and was executed for his faith. And Paul, who, as Saul of Tarsus, was known even to execute Christians himself, later became one of Jesus’s most devoted disciples and a major contributor to the New Testament.

Their reason for this miraculous 180-degree turn? Seeing Jesus alive after his death on the cross. If they hadn’t truly seen him, the remarkable change in their worldview simply doesn’t make sense.

Piece #3: The Revolution in Jewish Society

At the time of Jesus’s teaching, Jews, as they had been for centuries, were persecuted for their beliefs. Due to this interminable abuse, they’d developed extremely resilient religious traditions, and they clung to them even as they were enslaved, tortured, dispersed, and murdered. They did so...

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The Jesus Seminar has attempted to distinguish between a naturalistic Jesus and the mythological Jesus featured in the gospels, but its scholars rely on a number of specious sources to make their case. The evidence for the gospels’ account is far more robust and convincing than for the Jesus Seminar’s theories.

Jesus believed he was the son of God.

Some skeptics have argued that Jesus didn’t actually believe he was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. However, the numerous references Jesus makes to his own provenance and deity confirm he did in fact believe he was the Christ, sent to redeem the world.

There is no evidence to suggest Jesus was mentally disturbed.

Those with paranoid schizophrenia or other mental illnesses exhibit an array of symptoms beyond delusions of grandeur, including antisociality and trouble expressing emotion. Jesus exhibited none of these symptoms, and he supported his claims of divinity by performing independently verified miracles.

Jesus exhibited all the traits of God.

Although some believe Jesus voluntarily limited his divine powers when he was incarnated, the New Testament shows that he possessed...