Tag Archives: gospel of John

A fellow Christian Case Maker I met at Frank Turek’s CrossExamined Academy is teaching a church group about the reliability of the New Testament. A question was raised about the Apostle John: “How could John, an uneducated fisherman, have written such a literate and theologically rich gospel account?” After all, …

One Sunday in church, our pastor preached from John chapter 11, the Raising of Lazarus. It brought back memories of my old atheistic resistance to this story and reminded me of John Shelby Spong’s comment a few years back challenging the historicity of this event. Spong believes the Gospel writer …

While teaching a recent Colson Center Short Course, I was asked about the dating of John’s Gospel. This New Testament text is generally believed to have been written after the other gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke). I think there are several good reasons to accept this claim, given the historical …

I am a big fan of Sententias, the ministry of Max Andrews, although I’ll admit there are times when I have to stop and read (and re-read) his blog posts to get my hands around his impressive reasoning skills. Max recently wrote a post that even I could quickly understand …

You don’t have to read much of Cold-Case Christianity to realize I’m an evidentialist. The title usually gives it away. As a result, my inbox is filled with email from people who want to convince me that true faith is independent of evidence. Many of them point to the well-known …

When investigating the gospel accounts of the Crucifixion, I was immediately interested in John’s description of the blood and water that came from Jesus’ side when one of the soldiers pierced Him with a spear (John 19:34). I wondered how John, the ancient peasant fisherman, would have known about any …

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’ve been examining the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ birth and responding to a number of skeptical objections related to the virgin conception. If the virgin conception was an historical event that was well known to the earliest Christians, why wasn’t it mentioned by Mark? Mark’s gospel is widely accepted …