by Lee Strobel
When Keener wrote his dissertation at Duke University, where he received his PhD in New Testament and Christian Origins in 1991, it took more than one hundred pages just to list the sources he cited. The dissertation was nearly five hundred pages in total. Today, it takes eighty-five pages to list all of his books, awards, scholarly and popular articles, and lectures from around the world.
A few of Keener’s other books include The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (add another 831 pages to his total) and commentaries on the gospel of John (with thirty thousand references from ancient sources); Matthew (winning Book of the Year in Biblical Studies from Christianity Today); Romans; 1 and 2 Corinthians; and Revelation. His IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament garnered even more awards.
Now a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, Keener lives in Wilmore with his wife, Médine, who holds a PhD and teaches French, and their two adopted children from Africa—a son, nineteen, and a daughter, sixteen. Médine was once a refugee for a harrowing eighteen months in the forest of her native Congo. She and Craig tell their story in the book Impossible Love: The True Story of an African Civil War, Miracles, and Love against All Odds.
Keener and I settled into chairs facing each other; I set up a digital recorder to capture our conversation. I began by summarizing my interview with Michael Shermer, going over that conversation point by point, which Keener considered with intense interest.
“Dr. Shermer has had a fascinating journey,” I commented at the end. “He was a professing Christian but is now a skeptic.”
Keener raised an eyebrow. “Quite the opposite from me.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “Tell me your story.”
A Presence and a Purpose
Keener grew up the son of a clothier and an artist in a small Ohio community named after French Catholic Bishop Jean-Baptiste Massillon. Keener clearly fit the dictionary’s definition of precocious: at age thirteen, he was reading Plato. By then, he was already calling himself an atheist.
“When I was nine, my mother asked if I believed in life after death,” he said. “I told her no. She said she didn’t either, and she cited a poll saying that most intellectuals didn’t. I felt affirmed, but I also lacked any meaning or purpose in life, which was consistent with my worldview.
“Plato got me thinking about the immortality of the soul. I didn’t want to be snuffed out forever. But I thought if immortality were available through God, why would he love me? I was not a loving person. I was entirely selfish, and I knew it.
“Besides, Christianity didn’t seem credible. I thought, If I ever find out there’s a God, I would give him everything, but 80 percent of people in this country claim to be Christians, and yet they don’t give everything they are to God. They just live like this is the only life. It seemed to me that most so-called Christians didn’t really believe it.”
I said, “So even as a teenager, you were wrestling with major spiritual issues.”
“That’s right. I remember that somewhere along the line, I said, ‘If somebody is out there—if there’s a God or gods—then please show me.’”
“What happened?”
“When I was fifteen, I was walking home from Latin class, and two fundamentalist Baptists cornered me. They asked me where I would go when I died, and they started telling me how I could be saved in light of the Bible. After going back and forth for a long time, I said, ‘Look, guys, I’ve been humoring you, but you’re telling me stuff from the Bible. I don’t believe the Bible. I’m an atheist. You’ve got to give me something other than the Bible.’”
“Did they?”
“It was clear they didn’t have anything. So I pressed my big question: ‘If there’s a God, where did the dinosaur bones come from?’”
I smiled. “You were trying to stump them.”
“Yeah. I liked to make fun of Christians. One of them told me, ‘The devil put them there to deceive us.’ That’s when I said, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m leaving.’ As I turned to walk off, one of them called out, ‘You’re hardening your heart against God, and every time you do that, it makes it harder for you to repent. Eventually, you’ll burn in hell forever.’”
“Well,” I said, “there’s a good example of friendship evangelism.”
“They didn’t know friendship evangelism; they didn’t know apologetics; and they certainly didn’t know paleontology,” replied Keener. “Still, as I walked home, I felt convicted by the Holy Spirit. I passed a Catholic church and saw a cross atop the steeple. I knew about the Trinity, and I wondered whether the Trinity was looking down on me. I finally got to my bedroom, where I began arguing back and forth with myself—This can’t be right. But what if it is? And then I sensed it.”
“Sensed what?”
“God’s very presence—right there, right then, right in my room. I had been wanting empirical evidence, but instead God gave me something else: the evidence of his presence. So it wasn’t apologetics that reached me; my brain had to catch up afterward. I was simply overwhelmed by the palpable presence of God. It was like Someone was right there in the room with me, and it wasn’t something I was generating, because it wasn’t what I was necessarily wanting.”
I leaned forward, drawn in by his story. “How did you respond?” I asked.
“I said, ‘God, those guys on the corner said Jesus died for me and rose again and that’s what saves me. If that’s what you’re saying, I’ll accept it. But I don’t understand how that works. So if you want to save me, you’re going to have to do it yourself.’”
“And did he?”
“All of a sudden, I felt something rushing through my body that I’d never experienced before. I jumped up and said, ‘What was that?’ I knew God had come into my life. At that moment, I was filled with wonder and worship.”
Two days later, Keener walked to a nearby church, where the pastor asked him, “Are you sure you’ve been saved?” Keener said, “No, I don’t know if I did it right.” That’s when the minister led him in a prayer of repentance and faith.
“This time I felt the same overwhelming sense of God’s majesty and greatness and awesomeness,” Keener told me. “I felt a kind of joy I’d never experienced before. And for the first time, I understood what my purpose was. What the purpose is.”
“And what is that?”
“Our purpose is in God—to live for him, to serve him, to worship him.” He paused, giving emphasis to one further thought: “Everything is to be built around Jesus.”
A Firm and Confident Faith
It didn’t take long for young Keener to realize that even children in Sunday school knew more about the Bible than he did, so he crammed to catch up. And catch up he did. He found if he read forty chapters a day, he could read through the New Testament every week and the entire Bible every month.
He turned down a National Merit Scholarship in order to study at a Bible college. After receiving his undergraduate degree in the Bible, he went on to seminary, earning his master’s degree in biblical languages and a master of divinity degree. After that he received his doctorate at Duke.
From the beginning, questions swirled in the mind of this onetime doubter, and answers came slowly at first. He would write out each of his objections and then systematically pursue answers, asking God each time for insight and wisdom.
Over the years, especially after he gained access to academic libraries, he emerged with a firm and confident faith, not just based on his personal experience with God but also grounded in history, science, and philosophy.
He said, “I wondered why there were brilliant liberal scholars who questioned the fundamentals of the faith. I’d read their arguments, and I could refute them on paper. But I wondered, What if they had a chance to reply? Then when I finally got a chance to engage them, I’d give my best arguments and they’d come back with their answers, and it turned out they were pretty easy to refute. I was perplexed—how could their positions be so weak and yet they believed them?”
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“Maybe,” I suggested, “it wasn’t simply about the evidence or arguments, but a predisposition against the miraculous.”
“Well, I remember debating for hours with a professor who was a former Christian. I was frustrated that I couldn’t persuade him. A friend who was with me said, ‘You’ve refuted everything he said.’ But this professor dismissed every line of evidence I gave. Finally, I asked him, ‘If somebody were raised from the dead in front of you, would you believe it?’”
“What was his answer?” I asked.
“He said, ‘No.’”
Keener stopped for a moment, as if stunned anew by that reply. “I just shook my head,” he said. “Here he was, accusing me of being closed-minded because I’m a Christian, but he very clearly had an anti-supernatural presupposition that was shutting him off from a full consideration of the arguments and evidence.”
That was different from Keener’s attitude all along. “Even when you were an atheist, it seems to me you were nevertheless receptive to being challenged with something you hadn’t considered,” I said.
“I like to think I was,” came his reply. He shrugged his shoulders. “Shouldn’t we all be willing to reevaluate our position based on new evidence?”
For Keener, decades of intense study and reflection have only solidified a faith that came to him initially through—what? A miracle?
Yes, it could be argued that the supernatural experience in his bedroom fits the definition of a miraculous occurrence. It was brought about by God’s power; it was a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature; and it showed that God is acting not just in history, but in this fifteen-year-old boy’s heart and life—right then, right there.
Could Keener prove that miracle to a skeptic? It was, after all, a personal kind of experience, not witnessed or authenticated by anyone else. And yet it has been confirmed time after time by the radical transformation of his character, values, morality, and priorities—a life devoted to worshiping God with his heart and mind.
And now, decades later, after immersing himself in history and theology, Keener would be the one to write the definitive scholarly tome about the reality of the supernatural in the world today.
“What prompted you to research miracles?” I asked him.
“Well,” he replied, “it all started as a footnote to my Acts commentary. Before long, the footnote grew to two hundred pages—and that’s when I decided to turn it into a book.”
But I wondered if the real impetus reached back to his bedroom some four decades earlier, when the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob deigned to manifest his presence to a precocious teenager who had been reading Plato and debating Baptists on street corners. A young man who had seen a cross atop a steeple and wondered whether there was anyone watching who could guide him Home. A budding atheist who vowed to devote everything to God if he ever encountered him—and who then kept his promise.
Based on Keener’s story, the God of miracles supernaturally touched the life of this young but adamant atheist. And now here was Keener as one of the world’s foremost scholars describing and defending God’s signs and wonders to an increasingly skeptical world.
I pulled out several pages of typewritten questions from my notebook and inched to the edge of my chair. There was much more to ask.
CHAPTER 5
From Hume to Jesus
As professors from various backgrounds were discussing Craig Keener’s book The Historical Jesus of the Gospels at a scholarly conclave, a member of the left-wing Jesus Seminar stood to address the gathering.
“There are two kinds of scholars: critical scholars and evangelicals,” he told the group. “Evangelicals shouldn’t even be in the same room with critical scholars, because they’re not really critical.”
Keener protested that he had followed standard historiographical principles in writing his book. The gospel accounts, he pointed out, are in the genre of ancient biographies, which are normally based on historical events.
“But,” countered the scholar, “they have miracles in them!”
His unstated point: if the gospels report that miracles were performed by Jesus, then they simply cannot be taken as historically reliable. Rather, they must be based on legend, mythology, or mistake. Why? Because everyone since David Hume knows that miracles simply don’t occur.
I continued my conversation with Keener by saying, “The skeptic Michael Shermer believes the gospel writers didn’t even attempt to record actual history. Instead, they tell far-fetched stories about fictional miracles in order to make a moral point.”
“Yes, the gospels do make moral points,” came Keener’s reply, “but that doesn’t mean they weren’t reporting on historical happenings. Readers from the middle of the second century through most of the nineteenth century regarded the gospels as biographies of some sort. That view changed in the early 1900s, when some scholars searched for a new classification for them. But now the prevailing assessment has come full circle: today the gospels are widely viewed by scholars as being biographies.”
“What does that suggest about them—that they’re like modern biographies, which presumably report what actually occurred in a person’s life?”
“There are differences between ancient and modern biographies. Ancient biographies weren’t as concerned with chronology, for example, or the childhood of the person they were writing about. But like contemporary biographies, ancient biographies were supposed to deal with historical information, not imaginary events that were simply invented to make a point.”
“Then we can’t legitimately classify the gospels as being mythology,” I said.
“Certainly not. The gospel accounts are a far cry from tales in the mythological genre, which tend to deal with the distant past rather than more recent historical individuals. They addressed mythic topics, were set in primeval times, and featured fantastical creatures. No, mythology is a decidedly different genre than the gospels, no question about it.”
Keener paused for a moment before resuming. “Think of the opening words of Luke’s gospel. He says he ‘carefully investigated everything from the beginning’ so that he could ‘write an orderly account’ of what took place with Jesus’ life and ministry.”
His tone turned more intense. “Those aren’t the words of someone bent on manufacturing fairy tales out of thin air in order to teach a lesson. Those are the words of someone who wants to report on the certainty of what took place.”
Jesus the Healer and Exorcist
The gospels attribute more than thirty miracles to Jesus. “Walking on water, raising the dead, instantly curing leprosy—you have to admit those are pretty fantastical claims,” I said to Keener.
“But look at the way the gospels report them,” he replied. “In a sober fashion, with an eye for details. There were eyewitnesses; in fact, often Jesus’ miracles were performed before hostile audiences. His opponents didn’t dispute that he performed miracles; instead, they simply objected that he did them on the Sabbath. Plus, the gospels were written during the lifetimes of Jesus’ contemporaries, who surely would have disputed the facts if they had been made up.”
“Okay, maybe these miracle stories aren’t myths, but couldn’t they be legends—that is, stories that began with a small kernel of truth but grew and grew into more fanciful tales over long periods of time?” I asked.
“Actually, if you drill down to the earliest material about Jesus, you still find him described as a miracle-working healer and exorcist.”
“For example . . . ?” I prodded.
“Mark is regarded as the first gospel to be written, and 40 percent of his narrative involves miracles in some way,” Keener said. “And there’s an acknowledgment of Jesus’ miracles in Q, which many scholars believe was a very early source used by Matthew and Luke in writing their gospels. In fact, Q material refers to the Galilean villages of Chorazin and Bethsaida as being judged for not responding to Jesus’ extraordinary miracles among them. That’s bedrock tradition about Jes
us, not some later legend.”1
He continued. “In another Q account, Jesus tells the followers of John to report back that they had witnessed him performing miraculous feats, including healing the blind, the deaf, the lame, and those with leprosy, and even raising the dead.2 Further, you see miracles in the material that is unique to Matthew and Luke, as well as in Paul’s writing. For instance, Paul appeals to eyewitness knowledge about Jesus’ greatest miracle—his resurrection—in a letter he wrote to the church in Corinth.3 Scholars have dated that tradition to within a few years—or even months—of Jesus’ death.”4
“What about non-Christian sources?”
“The rabbis and the anti-Christian Greek philosopher Celsus are clear that Jesus was a miracle worker. Of course, later non-Christian sources attributed his feats to sorcery, but that’s still an acknowledgment that something extraordinary took place. Also, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus wrote that Jesus was a wise man who ‘worked startling deeds.’”
“Startling deeds?”
“Yes. What’s significant is that this is the same way he describes the miracles associated with the prophet Elisha.”
“But isn’t that passage in Josephus disputed?” I asked. “Critics charge it was added later by Christians.”
“The Jewish historian Geza Vermes of Oxford analyzed the writing style of Josephus and concluded that this particular miracle claim is, indeed, authentic,” Keener said.5 “Frankly, I have to agree with what scholar Raymond Brown said about Jesus, which is that even ‘the oldest traditions show him as a healer.’”6
“But why did Jesus heal the sick, boss around nature, and cast out demons?” I asked. “Obviously, he wasn’t merely trying to prove his divinity, because his disciples later performed miracles—and they certainly weren’t deities. What was Jesus’ motive?”