by Lee Strobel
“In a sense,” he said, “it was my skepticism that led to faith, because it pushed me to question everything, to doubt my own doubts, and to demand answers that could stand up to scrutiny.”
The answers ended up convincing him that Jesus, in time and space, actually did conquer his tomb and thereby provide convincing evidence of his divinity. It was that meticulous investigation of the miraculous resurrection that prompted me to jump on a plane and fly to Southern California, where I met with Wallace at his ranch-style house in Orange County.
The Interview with J. Warner Wallace, MTS
“I’m an ‘all in’ kind of guy,” Wallace said to me. “C. S. Lewis said if Christianity isn’t true, it’s of no importance, but if it is true, nothing is more important—and I agree.2 That’s why I’ve jumped in with both feet.”
After becoming a Christian in 1996, Wallace earned a master’s degree in theological studies from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, served as a youth pastor, and planted a church. Currently, he is an adjunct professor of apologetics at Biola University, is a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and teaches at Summit Ministries in Colorado.
I have been a friend of Wallace’s for several years, ever since I wrote the foreword to his book Cold-Case Christianity, in which he offers ten principles from his detective work that can be used to examine the reliability of the gospels.
His other books include God’s Crime Scene, in which he examines eight pieces of evidence from the universe that make the case for the existence of God; Alive, which focuses on the resurrection; and Forensic Faith, which helps readers become better defenders of Christianity. Ever the artist, Wallace creates his own drawings to illustrate his books.
During his two decades of investigative work, Wallace was awarded the Police and Fire Medal of Valor “Sustained Superiority” Award and the CopsWest Award for solving a 1979 murder. Although now retired from the force, he still consults on cold-case homicides and acts as an investigative consultant for television networks. Wallace and I even did cameo appearances in the motion picture God’s Not Dead 2, where we testified on the historicity of Jesus in a fictional court case.
Today, this once-doubting atheist travels the country to speak on becoming a “Christian case maker,” or someone who can effectively articulate the evidence that backs up the essential claims of the faith.
Wallace is a bundle of crackling energy, speaking in fast, clipped sentences, sometimes verbally machine-gunning others with a flurry of facts. He’s constantly taking his eyeglasses off and putting them back on as he speaks, almost using them as a prop. Slender and fit, he looks as though he’s still in good enough shape to run down a burglar, although at the same time, his close-cropped silver hair gives him the air of a senior investigator.
I’ve always appreciated Wallace’s no-nonsense, “just give me the facts” exterior, which syncs up well with my own journalistic bent, but I also admire what’s underneath—an exceedingly compassionate and gracious heart toward others. I know, because I’ve been the grateful recipient of his kindness in the past.
Oddly, though, I had never talked at length with Wallace about his journey from atheism to faith. After we sat in his recreation room and chatted for a while about family, I asked, “What prompted you to start checking out the gospels?”
“My wife, Susie, was raised with a cultural Catholicism, so she thought it was important to take the kids to church, and I went along,” he explained. “One Sunday, the pastor said, ‘Jesus was the smartest guy who ever lived, and our Western culture is grounded in his moral teaching.’”
“How did you react?”
“I thought, I’m a cop enforcing the penal code, but I know there’s a universal moral law above that. After all, adultery is legal, but it isn’t right. So it got me thinking about where that moral code came from. That’s why I went out and bought this.”
He pulled a red pew Bible from the shelf and handed it to me. “I got this for six bucks,” he said.
I flipped it open to a random page and saw that it was very neatly but quite thoroughly marked up. There were homemade tabs, notes in small print in the narrow margins, and color-coded underlining throughout. I went to the gospel of Mark and saw that it was thoroughly annotated.
“I was using forensic statement analysis to analyze the gospels—for instance, here in the gospel of Mark I was looking for the influence of Peter, so that’s what one of the colors represents,” he explained. “I was nitpicking the details; by the time I was done, I had gone through three Bibles.”
“How long did your analysis take?”
“Six months.”
“What was your verdict?”
“That the gospels reliably recorded true events,” he said. “But that presented a problem for me.”
“Why?”
“Because they talk about the resurrection and other miracles,” he said. “I could believe the gospels if they said Jesus ate bread, but what if they said the loaf levitated? C’mon, I couldn’t believe that. I didn’t believe miracles could happen, so I rejected them out of hand.”
Getting Past Stubborn Presuppositions
I could relate to the impediment of the supernatural, since it was a stubborn obstruction in my own spiritual investigation. “What changed your mind?” I inquired.
“I asked myself, Do I believe anything supernatural? And I concluded that, well, yes, even as an atheist, I did believe something extra-natural occurred.”
“For instance?”
“The big bang,” he replied. “Everything came from nothing. If nature is defined as everything we see in our environment, then there had to be something before that, a first cause that was beyond space, matter, and time. That meant the cause couldn’t be spatial, material, or temporal.”
I smiled, remembering my conversation with physicist Michael Strauss in the two preceding chapters.
“I realized,” Wallace continued, “that if there was something extra-natural that caused the beginning of all space, time, and matter as recorded in Genesis 1:1, then that same cause could accomplish all miracles recorded in the gospels. In other words, if there is a God, then miracles are reasonable, maybe even expected.”
“So you got past your presupposition against the miraculous,” I said.
“I did. As a detective, I knew presuppositions can derail an investigation. I remember a case in which a woman was found dead in her bed. She was a locally notorious drug addict, and there was drug paraphernalia on her nightstand. The patrol officers got there and didn’t even bother to pull down the sheets, since this was so obviously an overdose. But when investigators got there, they pulled down the sheets—and they saw she had been stabbed to death.”
He paused as the implications registered with me. “Presuppositions can be impediments to truth,” he said. “The resurrection was the most reasonable inference from the evidence, but I was ruling out miracles from the outset.”
“What led you to conclude that this first cause of the universe was personal and not just some force?”
“I recognized that there are universal moral laws,” he replied. “For example, it’s wrong to torture a baby for fun in any culture, anywhere, anytime. And transcendent moral laws are more than simply truths—they are obligations between persons. If there are objective, transcendent moral obligations, the best explanation for them is an objective, transcendent moral person.”
“Okay, you concluded that the gospels contain reliable eyewitness accounts, even of the miraculous,” I said. “What came next?”
“I was stuck on the ‘why’ question: Why did Jesus come, die, and return from the dead? I started analyzing Paul’s writings, and I was amazed by his insights into what he called ‘natural man’ or sinful people. His description fit me in an uncanny way,” he replied.
“Plus, the message of grace is so counterintuitive. Every other religion is based on performance, which makes sense because humans love to achieve and compete to get a reward.
This message of grace—of unearned forgiveness—didn’t sound like it had human origins. It came off as either ridiculous or divine. This doesn’t prove anything in and of itself, but it was one more piece of the puzzle.”
“In the end, then, it was a cumulative case,” I said, a declaration more than a question.
“Bingo,” he said crisply. “The totality of the evidence overwhelmed me. When we’re trying to solve a homicide, we typically put all the facts on a whiteboard and see if we can make the case. I didn’t have to do that here. The case made itself.”
The Eyewitness Gospels
As someone who covered criminal justice as a journalist for years, I’m fascinated by how DNA evidence has been used to solve crimes that happened decades earlier. For Wallace, though, DNA hasn’t been a factor in any cold case he has solved.
“Typically, we’ve solved them through the analysis of eyewitness testimony,” he said. “And that’s the way I tested the gospels.”
“Michael Shermer believes they’re just moral stories that don’t have a historical core to them,” I said. “Why are you convinced they’re based on eyewitness accounts?”
“There’s good evidence that John and Matthew wrote their gospels based on their eyewitness testimony as disciples of Jesus. While Luke wasn’t a witness himself, he said he ‘carefully investigated everything from the beginning,’3 presumably by interviewing eyewitnesses. According to Papias, who was the bishop of Hierapolis, Mark was the scribe of the apostle Peter—and my forensic analysis of Mark’s gospel bears that out.”
“In what ways?”
“Mark treats Peter with the utmost respect and includes details that can best be attributed to Peter,” Wallace replied. “Mark also makes a disproportionate number of references to Peter. And unlike the other gospels, Mark’s first and last mention of a disciple is Peter, which is an ancient bookending technique where a piece of history is attributed to a particular eyewitness.
“Of course,” he continued, “Peter called himself an eyewitness,4 and John said he was reporting what ‘we have seen with our eyes.’5 In fact, when they were arrested for testifying about the resurrection, they said, ‘We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.’6 Over and over, the apostles identified themselves as ‘witnesses of everything he [Jesus] did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.’”7
“Nevertheless,” I interjected, “you and I both know that eyewitness testimony has been challenged in recent years. In fact, some defendants convicted by eyewitness testimony have been exonerated through new DNA evidence.”
“No question—all eyewitness accounts have to be tested for reliability. In California, judges give jurors more than a dozen factors to weigh in evaluating an eyewitness account,” he said. “We can apply these tests to the gospels—for instance, is there any corroboration, did the witnesses have a motive to lie, did their stories change over time? When we do, we find they hold up well.”
“How early do you date the gospels?”
“Acts doesn’t report several major events that occurred in the AD 60s—including the martyrdoms of Paul, Peter, and James—apparently because it was written before they occurred. We know Luke’s gospel came before Acts, and we know Mark was written before Luke, because he uses it as one of his sources. Even before that, Paul confirms the resurrection in material that goes back to within a few years of Jesus’ execution.8 When you consider that Jesus died in AD 30 or 33, the gap shrinks to where it’s not a problem.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that the gospels were passed along verbally before being written down?” I asked.
“Not at all. I’ve seen witnesses in cold cases say their memories from thirty-five years ago are like it happened yesterday—why? Because not all memories are created the same.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“If you asked me what I did on Valentine’s Day five years ago, I probably couldn’t recall very much. That’s because it’s only one of many Valentine’s Days I’ve celebrated with Susie. But if you asked me about Valentine’s Day of 1988, I can give you a detailed report of what took place.”
I cocked my head. “I give up,” I said. “Why’s that?”
Wallace smiled. “Because that’s the day Susie and I got married,” he replied. “When witnesses experience something that’s unique, unrepeated, and personally important or powerful, they’re much more likely to remember it. Of course, many of the disciples’ experiences with Jesus met those criteria.
“Can they remember all the times their boat got stuck in a storm?” he asked. “Probably not, but they could remember the time Jesus quieted the squall. And think of the resurrection—as much as anything they experienced, that was unique, unrepeated, and extremely powerful.”
Dealing with Gospel Discrepancies
“But what about the conflicts among the various gospel accounts—don’t they cast doubt on the reliability of the eyewitness testimony?” I asked.
“Based on my years as a detective, I would expect the four gospels to have variances,” he replied. “Think of this: the early believers could have destroyed all but one of the gospels in order to eliminate any differences between them. But they didn’t. Why? Because they knew the gospels were true and that they told the story from different perspectives, emphasizing different things.”
“The conflicts aren’t evidence they were lying?”
“People might assume that if they’ve never worked with eyewitnesses before. In my experience, eyewitness accounts can be reliable despite discrepancies. Besides, if they meshed too perfectly, it would be evidence of collusion.”
That echoed the assessment of Simon Greenleaf of Harvard Law School, one of America’s most important legal figures, after he studied the gospels. “There is enough of discrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them,” he wrote, “and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of the same great transaction.”9
Interestingly, while writing this chapter, I was reading a breakthrough book by New Testament scholar Michael R. Licona, published by Oxford University Press, which offers one innovative way to resolve differences between the gospels.10 Licona, who earned his doctorate at the University of Pretoria, is a noted resurrection scholar and a colleague of mine at Houston Baptist University.
His research shows that many apparent discrepancies between the gospels can be explained by the standard compositional techniques that Greco-Roman biographers typically used in that era. As Craig Keener pointed out in my interview with him for this book, the gospels fall into the genre of ancient biography.
For example, one common technique, modeled by the historian Plutarch, is called “literary spotlighting.” Licona likened this to a theatrical performance where there are multiple actors onstage but the lights go out and a spotlight shines on only one of them.
“You know other actors are on the stage,” he said, “but you can’t see them because the spotlight is focused on one person.”
Applying this to the gospels, he noted that Matthew, Mark, and Luke say multiple women visited Jesus’ tomb and discovered it empty. However, John’s gospel only mentions Mary Magdalene. Is that a discrepancy that casts doubt on the gospels?
“It seems likely that John is aware of the presence of other women while shining his spotlight on Mary,” Licona said. “After all, he reports Mary announcing to Peter and the Beloved Disciple, ‘They have taken the Lord from the tomb and we don’t know where they have laid him.’11 Who’s the ‘we’ to whom Mary refers? Probably the other women who were present.
“Then observe what happens next,” Licona continued. “In John, Peter and the Beloved Disciple run to the tomb and discover it empty, whereas Luke 24:12 mentions Peter running to the tomb and no mention is made of the beloved disciple. However, just twelve verses later, Luke reports there were more than one who had made the trip to the tomb.12 These observations strongly suggest Luke and John were employing l
iterary spotlighting in their resurrection narratives.”
Based on exhaustive analysis of the gospels, Licona reaches this conclusion: “If what I’m suggesting is correct—that an overwhelming number of Gospel differences are . . . most plausibly accounted for by reading the Gospels in view of their biographical genre—the tensions resulting from nearly all of the differences disappear.”13
Consequently, he said, the argument that the gospels are historically unreliable due to their differences would be “no longer sustainable.”
Gospel Mysteries Solved
Wallace then made the counterintuitive statement that some of the differences between the gospels actually show their cohesion in a way that would be expected if they were based on independent eyewitness accounts.
“I noticed that sometimes one of the gospels would describe an event but leave out a detail that raised a question in my mind—and then this question gets unintentionally answered by another gospel writer,” he explained.
“You’re referring to what have been described as ‘undesigned coincidences,’” I said.
“Right,” he replied. “There are more than forty places in the New Testament where we see this kind of unintentional eyewitness support.”14
“What are some examples?”
“In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus encounters Peter, Andrew, James, and John for the first time. They’re fishermen mending nets. He says, ‘Follow me,’ and, sure enough, they spontaneously do.15 Now, doesn’t that seem odd—that they would drop everything and immediately follow this person they’ve never met?”
“That does create a mystery,” I conceded.
“Fortunately, we have Luke’s gospel. He says Jesus got into Peter’s boat and preached from it. Then he told Peter to put out his nets, and Peter reluctantly did so, even though they had worked all night and caught nothing. Miraculously, the nets emerged teeming with so many fish that they began to break. In fact, the catch filled two boats. Luke says Peter and the others were astonished and Peter recognized Jesus as Lord.”16