Jesus

In Cold-Case Christianity, I make the case for the reliability of the New Testament Gospels based on a template we use to test eyewitnesses in criminal trials. This book traces my own personal journey as I investigated the Gospels and ultimately became a Christian. When I first started considering the …

I was born in 1961, so I was too young to recall the national tragedy that my mother remembered with such shock and dismay. She talked often of presidential assassination that occurred in 1963, and it was clear that it impacted her deeply. You probably already know the president to …

A recent podcast listener offered the following objection: Couldn’t the disciples have been wrong about the death of Jesus? After all, when Paul was stoned by the Jews from Antioch and Iconium (in Acts 14) they drug him out of the city and left him for dead. “While the disciples …

I can still remember the first time I took high school students to Berkeley on a missions trip that put them in direct contact with prominent local atheists and atheist students groups on the campus of UC Berkeley. In one of our first lectures with an atheist presenter, the students …

As a non-believer, I suspected the stories about Jesus grew more elaborate and grandiose over time. That’s why it was so important to me to read through the earliest documents related to Jesus; I expected the initial accounts to portray Jesus as a wise teacher, but little more. I certainly …

As a skeptical non-believer, I was willing to grant that someone named Jesus actually lived in the early first century. I was also willing to grant that he might have been a wise, charismatic teacher. But I firmly believed that the supernatural aspects of Jesus’ character were untrue; a late …

As a detective, I’ve learned to carefully examine the words of suspects (I’ve written an entire chapter about this in Cold Case Christianity). Killers don’t often willingly confess to murder, but they usually give themselves away by saying something that is consistent with their involvement as the murderer, or something …

Of the many skeptical, alternative theories of the Resurrection, the impostor theory is sometimes offered in an effort explain the apparent confusion of the disciples. There are a number of places in the Gospels where followers of Jesus seem to be slow to recognize Him. Mary mistakes Jesus for a …

Many Christians are unaware of the ancient legends, distortions and stories about Jesus known as the “non-canonical gospels”. Maybe that’s why opportunistic skeptics are able to make outrageous and profitable claims about Jesus every Christmas and Easter season. In just the past few years we’ve endured the timely arrival of …

With the rise in popularity of movies like Zeitgeist: The Movie and The God Who Wasn’t There, skeptical objections to the historicity of Jesus sometimes take the form of comparisons between Jesus and ancient mythologies preceding Him. Skeptics highlight similarities between Jesus and Horus, Mithras, Osiris or other ancient examples …