The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  But Copan didn’t stop there. “On the other hand, I can understand J. P.’s reaction. When a worldview declines to make moral judgments, when it sees all beliefs as being contextual, when it says we can’t talk about absolute truth or what is right, when it claims we cannot know things for sure, well, that can be a dangerous—yes, cowardly—philosophy,” he said.

  “And, of course, the claim that we can’t know is itself a claim to knowledge! There are some things we definitely can know—in fact, it’s incredibly important that we do know them. God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ so that we can know the Father through the Son. We can know of his love, because Jesus laid down his life for us. First John says we can have confidence about certain matters: ‘I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.’50 Galatians and Romans say we can have confidence that we’re the adopted sons and daughters of God if we receive forgiveness through Christ—and this confidence goes against the spirit of postmodernism.

  “So can we learn some lessons from postmodernism? Yes—we have a certain historical context, we don’t always see things clearly, and so forth. But even though we may not know everything, we can know some things—indeed, some very important and life-changing things. We can know enough to encounter and experience the real Jesus.”

  “Then who is he?” I asked. “If the authentic Jesus can’t be found in the cobbled-together beliefs of syncretism, then who is he, really?”

  “We cannot separate the Jesus of history from what some people call the Christ of faith. They are one and the same,” Copan answered. “We need to put Jesus back into his first-century context. If we disconnect him from history or come up with some sort of New Age Jesus who is detached from the cross or the resurrection, we’ve lost his real identity. The same goes with anti-Semitism in the name of a Jesus whose first-century Jewishness has been ignored or suppressed. How are we going to sort out the real Jesus from the fake, unless we have Jesus anchored in the historical Gospels?”

  As he spoke, my mind flashed to the countless people who have disconnected Jesus from reality and then manufactured their own version of him—a Jesus who teaches them what they want to hear rather than what they desperately need to know. This Jesus is anemic—powerless and pale, because he exists only in their imaginations. All the while, the authentic Jesus—with his love and strength, his miraculous power and saving grace—stands patiently by.

  I began to feel a sense of sadness. “Isn’t it a shame,” I said to Copan, “that so many people are creating a Jesus who matches their preconceptions about what they think he should be like, but in the process they’re missing the real Jesus?”

  Copan nodded in agreement. “Ironically, they’re often talking about a ‘radical new Jesus’ they’ve discovered. Radical?” he repeated, incredulous. “No, these are silly or watered-down portrayals of Jesus. He’s more than a good buddy, more than a social revolutionary, more than a Gnostic teacher. The real Jesus is the Jesus of orthodox Christianity: He’s no less than God incarnate. God breaks into the world scene with Jesus. He conquers sin, Satan, and death through Jesus. He’s bringing history to a climax through Jesus. This is what humankind has been waiting for.

  “If you want a spectacular Jesus, or a hero for the ages, or a Jesus who shatters all expectations and pours out love beyond comprehension—there he is,” he declared, thumping the table with his hand.

  “How in the world can you get more radical than that?”

  FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION

  More Resources on This Topic

  Beckwith, Francis J. and Gregory Koukl. Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1998.

  Carson, D. A., gen. ed. Telling the Truth. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2000.

  Copan, Paul. How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong? Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2005.

  ———. Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion. St. Louis: Chalice, 2007.

  ———. That’s Just Your Interpretation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2005.

  ———. True for You, but Not for Me. Minneapolis: Bethany, 1998.

  Edwards, James R. Is Jesus the Only Savior? Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005.

  Kimball, Dan. They Like Jesus, but Not the Church. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2007.

  Köstenberger, Andreas, gen. ed. Whatever Happened to Truth? Wheaton: Crossway, 2005.

  CONCLUSION

  DISCOVERING THE REAL JESUS

  I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this [Jesus]? Was he who he said he was, or was he just a religious nut?… That’s the question.

  Bono1

  It doesn’t matter what I believe. It only matters what I can prove.

  Tom Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men

  She was brought up Catholic, but by the age of eighteen she had left the church and abandoned her belief in God. Two years later, she married a fervent atheist. Soon she became not just a published novelist, but one of the best-read authors in America, penning a succession of stories about vampires and witches—unaware at the time that her books “reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God.”

  Anne Rice, author of Interview with a Vampire and the Mayfair Witches series, spent thirty years as an atheist. Then she began studying the Bible during her frequent periods of depression. Her faith rekindled, she decided in 2002 to “give myself utterly to the task of trying to understand Jesus himself and how Christianity emerged.” She consecrated her subsequent book on Jesus—and herself—to him. And that’s when she discovered something very curious.

  An inveterate researcher, Rice prides herself on the accuracy of the historical world she creates for her novels. To prepare for writing about Jesus, she spent more than two years delving deeply into first-century Palestine, which included reading books on the New Testament era written by skeptical and liberal historians.

  “I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud,” she wrote. Surprisingly, the opposite occurred:

  What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments—arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts—lacked coherence…. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

  In short, she found the nondivine and impotent Jesus of liberal circles to be based on “some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’ve ever read.” She was stunned that “there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise” the Jesus whom they spend their entire lives studying. “Some pitied him as a hopeless failure,” she said. “Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books.”

  In the end, she became “disillusioned with the skeptics and with the flimsy evidence for their conclusions.” Instead, she discovered that the research and arguments from a wide range of other highly credentialed scholars—Richard Bauckham, Craig Blomberg, N. T. Wright, Luke Timothy Johnson, D. A. Carson, Larry Hurtado, and others—were more than enough to establish the early dating and first-person witness of the Gospels.2

  If I were to sum up the lesson from her experience—which is quite similar to my own—I’d put it like this: “The emperors of radical scholarship have no clothes!”

  For years, skeptical and left-wing historians have bedazzled the public with flashy new theories about Jesus—he’s really a Gnostic imparter of secret wisdom; he’s actually a reworking of the ancient myths about Mithras; he’s a messianic pretender who fails the test of the ancient prophecies; he’s buried in Galilee outside the city of Tsfat; or he’s whatever anyone wants him to be in today’s cacophony of postmodernism.

  Didn’t you know that the Christian idea of baptism comes from the sinking of the coffin of th
e pagan god Osiris in the Nile River? Or that Jesus held initiation rites with young men in the middle of the night? Or that the first century was a cauldron of radically different views about Jesus, but the real story—which is that Jesus wants us to know we’re all divine—was suppressed by the power-hungry church? Or that scribes have irretrievably contaminated the text of the New Testament? Or that Jesus wrote a secret letter to the Jewish authorities clarifying that he never claimed to be God’s Son? Or that Jesus didn’t utter most of what’s recorded in the Gospels?

  “These skeptical scholars,” said Rice, “seemed so very sure of themselves.”3

  Very sure—but as it turns out, surely wrong. The truth is that skepticism does not equal scholarship.4 Finally, other scholars are beginning to speak up to expose the leaps of logic, special pleading, biased interpretations, and tissue-thin evidence that underlies these outrageous claims about Jesus.

  RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION

  Not long ago, Craig A. Evans had enough. With the same righteous indignation that prompted Ronald Nash to debunk the theory that Christianity stole its beliefs from the pagan mystery religions, Evans set out to demonstrate the sloppy scholarship that has confused the public about the real Jesus in recent years.

  Coming from someone of Evans’s impressive caliber, this was highly significant. Few Jesus scholars are as universally respected by both liberals and conservatives as Evans, the distinguished professor of New Testament and director of the graduate program at Acadia Divinity College in Canada and the first expert I interviewed in my quest for the real Jesus.

  Evans looked at the current controversies swirling around Jesus—was he a mystic or Gnostic; did he fake his death; has his grave been found; did he deny his divinity; are the four Gospels unreliable; are there better sources about his life than the New Testament; is there a grand conspiracy to suppress the truth; did Jesus ever really exist at all?—and shook his head in disbelief.

  “When I first began academic study of Jesus and the Gospels some thirty years ago, I could never have guessed that I or anyone else would find it necessary to write a book addressing such questions,” he said. “Surely no one in all seriousness would advance such theories. Surely no credible publishers would print them. Yet, all of that has happened.”5

  Evans knows the sweep of historical evidence. He’s well aware of what conclusions it reasonably supports and what it can’t. And he was aghast at what he was reading in popular books about Jesus.

  “We live in a strange time that indulges, even encourages, some of the strangest thinking,” he wrote in the introduction to his well-titled book Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. “What I find particularly troubling is that a lot of the nonsense comes from scholars. We expect tabloid pseudo-scholarship from the quacks, but not from scholars who teach at respectable institutions of higher learning.”6

  Nevertheless, what he found were “daring theories that run beyond the evidence,” distortions or neglect of the four Gospels, misguided suspicions, unduly strict critical methods, questionable texts from later centuries, anachronisms, exaggerated claims, and “hokum history”—all resulting in “the fabrication of an array of pseudo-Jesuses.”7

  In sum, he said, “Just about every error imaginable has been made. A few writers have made almost all of them.”8

  Evans is hardly alone in his assessment. Numerous other New Testament luminaries also have started to publicly condemn the way the public is being duped by ill-supported assertions concerning Jesus.

  James H. Charlesworth, the highly regarded professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary and an expert on Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, decried “the misinformed nonsense that has confused the reading public over the past few years.”

  James D. G. Dunn, professor emeritus at the University of Durham in England, agreed. “The quest of the historical Jesus has been seriously misled by much poor scholarship and distorted almost beyond recognition by recent pseudo-scholarship,” he said.

  Equally adamant was John P. Meier, professor at the University of Notre Dame, who wrote A Marginal Jew, the widely acclaimed multivolume work on the historical Jesus. “For decades now,” he said, “the unsuspecting public has been subjected to dubious academic claims about the historical Jesus that hardly rise above the level of sensationalistic novels.”

  Gerald O’Collins, professor emeritus of the Gregorian University in Rome, warned of the “sensationalist claims about Jesus that quickly turn out to be based on mere wishful thinking.” Gerd Theissen, professor at the University of Heidelberg, bemoaned “sensational modern approaches in Jesus research that do not live up to the standards of academic research.”9

  “Readers should beware of shocking new claims about Jesus or his earliest followers based on flimsy evidence,” said New Testament professor Ben Witherington III in his 2006 book What Have They Done with Jesus?10 Unfortunately, he added, Americans have been “prone to listen to sensational claims…even when there is little or no hard evidence to support such conjectures.”11

  Meanwhile, scholars have been breaking new ground in academic research that flatly contradicts many of the recent radical assertions about Jesus, including the claims that his divinity was the product of legendary development and that the four Gospels lack eyewitness support.

  Larry W. Hurtado, professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, demonstrated in a 746-page volume that the exaltation of Jesus wasn’t a later development. Rather, he said, “an exalted significance of Jesus appears astonishingly early in Christian circles.”12 He pointed out that early Christians defined and portrayed Jesus as God’s “Son,” “Christ/Messiah,” “Word,” and “Image.”13

  “Well within the first couple of decades of the Christian movement [or AD 30–50] Jesus was treated as a recipient of religious devotion and was associated with God in striking ways,” Hurtado concluded.14

  Where would the monotheistic Jews of the early church come up with the idea of Jesus’ divinity after his death if he had not made the claim himself during his ministry and then backed it up with his resurrection?

  In a 2006 scholarly book that N. T. Wright called “a remarkable piece of detective work,” Richard Bauckham, professor of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, meticulously documents how the four Gospels are closely based on the eyewitness testimony of those who personally knew Jesus.15 That might not sound controversial to many people, but it dramatically deflates revisionist theories that say the Gospels are unreliable and disconnected from first-hand accounts.

  In short, the four Gospels—once denigrated and mocked by skeptics—are making a powerful comeback. “When put to the test,” summarized Evans, “the original documents hold up quite well.”16

  ANSWERING THE CHALLENGES

  After traveling a total of 24,000 miles on my mission to investigate six of the most current and controversial objections to the traditional view of Jesus, I went alone to my office, sat down in a comfortable chair, and flipped through reams of notes, transcripts, and articles.

  In the end, none of these seemingly daunting challenges turned out to be close calls. One by one, they were systematically dismantled by scholars who backed up their positions not with verbal sleights of hand or speculation, but with facts, logic, and evidence:

  Are scholars discovering a radically different Jesus in ancient documents just as credible as the four Gospels? No, the alternative texts that are touted in liberal circles are too late to be historically credible—for instance, the Gospel of Thomas was written after AD 175 and probably closer to 200. According to eminent New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, the Thomas gospel has “no significant new light to shed on the historical Jesus.”17 The Secret Gospel of Mark, with its homoerotic undercurrents, turned out to be an embarrassing hoax that fooled many liberal scholars too eager to buy into bizarre theories about J
esus, while no serious historians give credence to the so-called Jesus Papers. The Gnostic depiction of Jesus as a revealer of hidden knowledge—including the teaching that we all possess the divine light that he embodied—lacks any connection to the historical Jesus.

  Is the Bible’s portrait of Jesus unreliable because of mistakes or deliberate changes by scribes through the centuries? No, there are no new disclosures that have cast any doubt on the essential reliability of the New Testament. Only about one percent of the manuscript variants affect the meaning of the text to any degree, and not a single cardinal doctrine is at stake. Actually, the unrivaled wealth of New Testament manuscripts greatly enhances the credibility of the Bible’s portrayal of Jesus.

  Have new explanations refuted Jesus’ resurrection? No, the truth is that a persuasive case for Jesus rising from the dead can be made by using five facts that are well-evidenced and which the vast majority of today’s scholars on the subject—including skeptical ones—accept as true: Jesus death by crucifixion; his disciples’ belief that he rose and appeared to them; the conversion of the church persecutor Paul; the conversion of the skeptic James, who was Jesus’ half-brother; and Jesus’ empty tomb. All the attempts by skeptics and Muslims to put Jesus back into his tomb utterly fail when subjected to serious analysis, while the overblown and ill-supported claims of the Jesus Tomb documentary and book have been decimated by knowledgeable scholars.

  Were Christian beliefs about Jesus stolen from pagan religions? No, they clearly were not. Allegations that the virgin birth, the resurrection, communion, and baptism came from earlier mythology simply evaporated when the shoddy scholarship of “copycat” theorists was exposed. There are simply no examples of dying and rising gods that preceded Christianity and which have meaningful parallels to Jesus’ resurrection. In short, this is a theory that careful scholars discredited decades ago.

  Was Jesus an imposter who failed to fulfill the messianic prophecies? On the contrary, a compelling case can be made that Jesus—and Jesus alone—matches the “fingerprint” of the Messiah. Only Jesus managed to fulfill the prophecies that needed to come to fruition prior to the fall of the Jewish temple in AD 70. Consequently, if Jesus isn’t the predicted Messiah, then there will never be one. What’s more, Jesus’ fulfillment of these prophecies against all odds makes it rational to conclude that he will fulfill the final ones when the time is right.