Tag Archives: gospels

In this episode of the Cold-Case Christianity Broadcast, J. Warner answers listener email and discusses the nature of the New Testament Gospels. Can they legitimately be considered “eyewitness accounts”? If so, how do we overcome the fact that they would not qualify as anything other than “hearsay” accounts in a …

When I first started investigating the reliability of the New Testament Gospels, I was fascinated by the ancient non-Canonical stories and legends related to Jesus. While they were written too late to be legitimate eyewitness accounts, they were built on the core truths of Gospels (albeit altered and embellished by …

As an early investigator of Christianity, I was interested in everything ever written in antiquity about Jesus. One day, while searching the religion section of a local bookstore, I discovered a book entitled, The Lost Books of the Bible. I purchased it immediately, expecting to find evidence our current understanding …

I get email occasionally from skeptics who challenge the historicity of Jesus due to what they see as a deficiency in the historical record. If a man such as Jesus really existed, performing miracles and rising from the dead, wouldn’t his life and resurrection have created a much larger historical …

As an unbelieving skeptic, I was willing to accept the possibility that Jesus lived and taught as a 1st Century Rabbi, but I rejected much of the gospel accounts as fiction. I suspected the gospels had been corrupted and altered through the centuries. Defense attorneys often have similar questions about …

While the absence of any description of the temple’s destruction can reasonably be interpreted as a piece of circumstantial evidence supporting the early dating of the New Testament accounts, skeptics sometimes use this fact to make just the opposite case. Many have proposed that Jesus’s prediction related to the destruction …

Not long ago, Daniel Wallace (no relationship to me, except that all us Wallace’s claim to descend from William) posted some great news about an early fragment of the Book of Romans that was recently discovered. This fragment dates to the early third century which puts it in rare company. …

As a skeptic, I was willing to accept a “nice guy” version of Jesus. You know, the wise sage from the past who was misunderstood and mythicized into something divine by leaders of a movement who were either mistaken or deceptive. Jesus might have been a nice guy and a …

Even if we accept a few minimal truths related to the alleged Resurrection of Jesus (i.e. the tomb was empty, the disciples believed they saw the risen Jesus, and the disciples were transformed following their alleged Resurrection observations), there are still a number of possible explanations for this set of …

When you write a book seeking to evaluate the Gospels as eyewitness accounts, you shouldn’t be surprised to find some critics will attack the premise that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts in the first place. Several skeptics have either emailed me or posted comments questioning whether or not the Gospels …