The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  “And you disagree?”

  “I certainly do. Hebrews 5:7 doesn’t specify that Jesus was crying out to God at his death. It says Jesus offered prayers ‘with loud cries and tears…during the days of Jesus’ life on earth.’ In fact, the previous verse says he was ‘a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.’ What do priests do? They pray on behalf of other people! So Ehrman is connecting dots that are illegitimate to connect.”

  Wallace then added one last point to seal his case. “Even if the original text says Jesus died ‘apart from God,’ this doesn’t change anything theologically,” he said. “How is this any different from Jesus saying on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It means the same thing. So again, we’re not being given a new picture of Jesus.”

  “THAT’S JUST LOONY!”

  Wallace had brought balance and perspective to the issue of whether the New Testament’s text can be trusted. While scholars cannot pin down every single word with absolute confidence, there was no dispute over the fundamentals. As for Jesus, there was nothing that would compel a new perspective on his life, character, miracles, or resurrection.

  I glanced at my watch; it was getting late. I had one more issue I wanted to raise, but I didn’t relish asking Wallace about it. This wasn’t a critique by a reputable scholar, but claims made by three authors whose book has been discredited by historians in so many ways. Still, I believe its widespread popularity—with millions of copies being sold—made it worth addressing.

  “Let me ask you about an assertion made in the bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” I said.

  Wallace rolled his eyes, but I pushed ahead. “The authors claim that in AD 303, Emperor Diocletian destroyed all Christian writings that could be found. That’s why there are no New Testament manuscripts prior to the fourth century. Later, Emperor Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, which allowed the ‘custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit, and rewrite their material as they saw fit.’ It was at this point that ‘most of the crucial alterations in the New Testament were probably made and Jesus assumed the unique status he has enjoyed ever since.’”30

  Wallace looked exasperated. “Good grief!” he exclaimed. “That’s just loony! Do these authors know anything about history at all? Diocletian did not destroy all the Christian manuscripts. He did destroy several, but mostly in the East and South. As far as having no manuscripts prior to the fourth century—well, we have more than four dozen in Greek alone that are prior to the fourth century. And these manuscripts have numerous passages—John 1:1; John 1:18; John 20:28; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8; 2 Peter 1:1—that affirm the deity of Jesus. So it’s nonsense to say Jesus’ deity wasn’t invented until the fourth century when you’ve already got the evidence in earlier manuscripts.

  “Besides, we still have lots and lots of quotations by church fathers prior to the fourth century. Ignatius in about AD 110 calls Jesus ‘our God’ and then says, ‘the blood of God,’ referring to Jesus. Where does he get this idea if it wasn’t invented for more than two hundred years? And you have a steady march from Ignatius right through the rest of the patristic writers—I mean, you can’t make that kind of a claim and be any kind of a responsible historian. No historian would ever even entertain that kind of stupidity.”

  “Yet apparently millions of people believe it,” I said. “What does that do to you as a scholar?”

  “It’s disturbing that when it comes to the Christian faith, people don’t really want—or know how—to investigate the evidence,” he replied. “Christians are not being led into proper historical research by their pastors. I have been saying for some time that I don’t think the evangelical church has fifty years left of life to it until it repents.”

  “In what way?”

  “First, we have to quit marginalizing scripture,” he said. “We can’t treat the Bible with kid gloves. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it. And second, we need to quit turning Jesus into our buddy. He’s the sovereign Lord of the universe, and we need to understand that and respond accordingly.”

  “After years of studying these issues in depth, what has surprised you about the manuscripts you’ve analyzed?”

  “The most remarkable thing to me is the tedium of looking at manuscript after manuscript after manuscript that just don’t change,” he answered. “Yes, there are differences, but they’re so minor. When I teach textual criticism every year, my students spend about a third of their workload transcribing manuscripts—and invariably they marvel at how little the manuscripts deviate.

  “Now, I don’t want to give a false impression that they don’t deviate at all. But the vast majority of differences involve a spelling error or a moveable nu. You don’t see a line out of the blue where a scribe said, ‘Oh, I’m gonna make some kind of bizarre statement here.’ So the bottom line to me is how steady the copies of the manuscripts have been over the centuries.”

  “Do you believe that God has accurately preserved enough for us to know him and his truth?”

  “Absolutely. Do we have all the essentials? Yes. Do we have all the particulars? No. But that’s the task of a textual critic: to try to get back to the original. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking at manuscripts—transcribing them, photographing them, and publishing them. We still won’t recover the original wording in every single place. But I hope by the end of my life we’ll be a little bit closer—and that’s a worthy goal.”

  DOCTOR-FATHER

  My interview with Wallace provided strong affirmation that my confidence in the New Testament text was abundantly warranted. Nothing produced by Ehrman even came close to changing the biblical portrait of the real Jesus in any meaningful way.

  “When a comparison of the variant readings of the New Testament is made with those of other books which have survived from antiquity, the results are little short of astounding,” said biblical expert Norman Geisler, the author or editor of more than fifty books explaining and defending Christianity. “The evidence for the integrity of the New Testament is beyond question.”31

  As I drove away from Wallace’s house, my mind flashed back to my interview several years earlier with a scholar who’s universally acknowledged as the greatest textual critic of his generation. In fact, Bruce M. Metzger was Ehrman’s mentor at Princeton. Ehrman even dedicates Misquoting Jesus to him, calling him “Doctor-Father” and saying he “taught me the field and continues to inspire me in my work.”32

  At the time we chatted, Metzger was eighty-three years old. He died in 2007, ten years later. What was fascinating to me was how much his remarks during our interview reflected what Wallace was now telling me years later. For instance, I remember asking Metzger, “So the variations [between manuscripts], when they occur, tend to be minor rather than substantive?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s correct,” Metzger replied, adding: “The more significant variations do not overthrow any doctrine of the church.”

  Then I recall asking him how his many decades of intensely studying the New Testament’s text had affected his personal faith. “Oh,” he said, sounding happy to discuss the topic, “it has increased the basis of my personal faith to see the firmness with which these materials have come down to us, with a multiplicity of copies, some of which are very ancient.”

  “So,” I started to say, “scholarship has not diluted your faith—”

  He jumped in before I could finish my sentence. “On the contrary,” he stressed, “it has built it. I’ve asked questions all my life, I’ve dug into the text, I’ve studied this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well placed.”

  He paused while his eyes surveyed my face. Then he added, for emphasis, “Very well placed.”33

  FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION

  More Resources on This Topic

  Geisler, Norman, and William Nix. From God to Us: How We Got Our Bible. Chicago: Moody, 1980.

  Komoszewski, J. Ed, M. James Sawyer, and D
aniel B. Wallace. Reinventing Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 2006.

  Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Fourth edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Patzia, Arthur G. The Making of the New Testament. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1995.

  Wegner, Paul D. The Journey from Texts to Translations. Grand Rapids. Mich.: Baker, 1999.

  Wegner, Paul D. A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2006.

  CHALLENGE #3

  PART ONE:

  “NEW EXPLANATIONS HAVE REFUTED JESUS’ RESURRECTION”

  Only one conclusion is justified by the evidence: Jesus is dead.

  Atheist Richard C. Carrier1

  Jesus was placed into a common grave, and covered over…. In a very short time only some unmarked bones remained. Even the bones were gone before too long. Nature rather efficiently reclaims its own resources.

  Retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong2

  Outside a Chicago hospital on a humid summer night, a gunshot victim was unloaded from an ambulance and wheeled on a gurney into the emergency room. The teenager gestured toward his abdomen as he was rolled past reporters. “It doesn’t even hurt!” he said with a nervous laugh, as if everyone were old friends. “It doesn’t even hurt!”

  A few hours later, he was dead.

  A reporter on the streets of Chicago soon develops more than a passing acquaintance with death. Often the people directly embroiled in an unfolding tragedy—the car accident, the gang fight, the convenience store robbery gone awry—are too bewildered and disoriented to fully comprehend their predicament. But from the detached perspective of the reporter, the grim outcome is much more foreseeable. And when death finally does seize its victims, when their eyes stare blankly, then all hope is gone. They’ve spoken their last word, they’ve breathed their last breath, and their time is done—they won’t be coming back.

  That’s why all this talk of Jesus’ resurrection seemed so strange to me. It’s staggering how quickly the body of a deceased person is reduced to a mere shell. The idea that it could somehow become reanimated, especially after three days, could never quite get past my journalistic skepticism when I was an atheist.

  As I documented in The Case for Christ, it was my investigation of the historical evidence that eventually convinced me that the resurrection of Jesus really happened.3 In the succeeding years, however, the resurrection has been subjected to new and more contentious attacks. Do any of these updated objections, I wondered, manage to crack this central pillar of Christianity?

  Religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill certainly thinks so. “After years of studying,” he said, “I finally came to the conclusion that everything I had previously thought about the historical evidence of the resurrection was absolutely wrong.”4 The graduate of the conservative Moody Bible Institute and the evangelical Wheaton College is now an avowed agnostic.

  Skepticism about the resurrection was bolstered by a pre-Easter 2007 television documentary—followed by a popular book—which claimed that the burial site of Jesus and his family had been accidentally uncovered by an Israeli construction crew in 1980. According to the film, the “bone boxes” of “Jesus, son of Joseph,” Mary, Joseph, Mary Magdelene, and even “Judah, son of Jesus” were found in the Talpiot Tomb. The discovery threatened to amplify doubts about whether Jesus really had returned from the dead in bodily form.

  At the forefront of the most recent challenges to the resurrection have been Muslims, who clearly understand that discrediting the resurrection means nothing less than disproving the truth of Christianity. Muslims interpret the Qur’an as saying that Jesus never actually died on the cross, much less returned from the dead.5

  A leading Muslim apologist, Shabir Ally, has said that the Messiah was expected to be victorious, and therefore “a crucified Messiah is as self-refuting as a square circle, a four-sided triangle, or a married bachelor.”6 Ayman al-Zawahri, the deputy leader of Al Qaeda, even took time out from excoriating George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI in a 2006 videotape to urge all Christians to convert to Islam, which, he said, correctly believes that Jesus was never put to death, never rose from the dead, and was not divine.7

  Muslims aren’t alone. A prominent Hindu leader declared in a 2007 speech that Jesus never died on the cross. “He was only injured and after treatment returned to India where he actually died,” insisted K. S. Sudarshan, leader of a nationalist Hindu organization in India.8

  Atheists, meanwhile, have been mounting ever-more-intense critiques of the resurrection. In 2005, Prometheus Books published an ambitious 545-page anthology called The Empty Tomb, in which such skeptics as Michael Martin and Richard Carrier set forth their alternative explanations for the Easter event. The Jesus Seminar’s Robert M. Price is emphatic in the introduction: “Jesus,” he declared, “is dead.”9

  Reflecting the public’s ongoing curiosity about Jesus, two books attacking the resurrection landed on the New York Times bestsellers list in 2006. In his book The Jesus Papers, Michael Baigent charged that Pontius Pilate didn’t want to kill Jesus because Jesus had been urging people to pay their taxes to Rome. “How could Pilate try, let alone condemn, such a man who, on the face of it, was supporting Roman policy?” asked Baigent. “Pilate would himself be charged with dereliction of duty should he proceed with the condemnation of such a supporter.”10

  That’s when Pilate hatched a plot, Baigent said. He publicly ordered Jesus crucified to placate the religious authorities who wanted him dead, but at the same time he conspired to ensure that Jesus secretly came down from the cross alive. After all, Baigent said, it’s not impossible to survive a crucifixion.11

  James D. Tabor, who holds a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Chicago and is currently chair of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, offered his own theory in The Jesus Dynasty, a book that New Testament professor Arthur J. Droge said “may very well inaugurate a new phase in the quest for the historical Jesus.”12

  Tabor postulated that Jesus’ tomb was empty not due to a resurrection but because Jesus’ body had been moved and then interred elsewhere by members of his own family. In a stunning assertion, Tabor even revealed where Jesus might be buried—in Galilee outside the city of Tsfat.13

  For Tabor, the suggestion of a resurrection could be ruled out from the beginning. “Dead bodies don’t rise—not if one is clinically dead—as Jesus surely was,” he said. “So if the tomb was empty the historical conclusion is simple—Jesus’ body was moved by someone and likely reburied in another location.”14

  A DROPPING OF DOMINOES

  While these attacks on the resurrection have been garnering widespread media publicity, Christians have been equally busy producing books to defend the return of Jesus from the dead as being historically credible. N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham in England, who has taught at both Cambridge and Oxford universities, offered his 817-page seminal book The Resurrection of the Son of God in 2003. His conclusion: “The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity.”15

  At about the same time, Richard Swinburne, a Fellow of the British Academy and professor at Oxford from 1985–2002, published The Resurrection of God Incarnate, in which he explored how the character of God and the life of Jesus support the probability of Jesus’ return from the dead.

  Sometimes the clash between resurrection skeptics and supporters became more direct. Resurrection expert Gary R. Habermas, author of The Historical Jesus, and William Lane Craig, who has doctorates from the University of Birmingham in England and the University of Munich, are among the Christian apologists who have clashed with atheists in debates on the issue in recent years.

  For example, Habermas and Skeptic magazine rel
igion-editor Tim Callahan tangled in a nationally televised encounter on whether the idea of the resurrection has its roots in ancient mythology,16 but more fascinating was Habermas’s give-and-take with the world-renowned philosopher Antony Flew, which resulted in the 2005 book Resurrected? An Atheist and Theist Dialogue. This was a reprise of a famous debate between the pair in the 1980s, after which four independent judges declared Habermas the victor and one called the contest a draw. Concluded one previously skeptical judge: “I would think it was time I began to take the resurrection seriously.”17

  Incidentally, I had a rare opportunity in 2006 to conduct a lengthy interview with the eighty-three-year-old Flew about his recently announced decision to abandon atheism because he now believes in a Creator.18 Though he said he’s not a Christian at this point, I pointed out to him that now that he believes in a supernatural Creator, a miraculous event like the resurrection becomes more plausible. He replied, “I’m sure you’re right about this, yes.”19

  Craig, author of Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, debated Ehrman on the resurrection in 2006.20 Earlier, Craig sparred with New Testament scholar and atheist Gerd Lüdemann, then a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, who contended: “The risen Christ is the skeleton in the closet of the church. In other words, everybody seems to know that Christ didn’t rise, but for some strange reason we decide not to be radical but instead to live within the traditional Christian framework.”21

  That debate spawned the book Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment?— a title that cuts to the core of the issue. Does history really support the reality of the resurrection, or have scholars succeeded in establishing that the post-mortem appearances of Jesus are the product of hallucinations, legends, or wishful thinking?