Preaching the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel
www.LeeStrobel.com

As a new Christian, I volunteered at church to answer questions that people would submit at our weekend services. One Sunday I got a card from a 12-year-old girl who said she wanted to know about Jesus. I called her and she said: “Would you and your wife come over to my house and have dinner with me and my dad and tell us about Jesus?”

I thought, “How cute is that?” I told her, “Of course we will!” So Leslie and I drove over there Friday night. Her father opened door, and as we walked in I saw piles of heavyweight books on the coffee table. It turns he was a scientist who had spent years studying books attacking the Christian faith!

For hours over pizza, he peppered me with the toughest objections to Christianity I had ever heard. He raised some issues I had never investigated during the spiritual investigation that preceded my decision to follow Christ. Frankly, my head was spinning! I felt “spiritual vertigo” – that sense of dizziness, disorientation, confusion, and even panic you feel when someone challenges the core of your faith in a way that you cannot answer.

I thought: “Maybe he’s right! Maybe I didn’t ask the right questions in my investigation. Maybe I swallowed Christianity hook, line, and sinker, without adequately checking it out.”

Let me hit the pause button so I can ask you a question: have you ever felt spiritual vertigo? Well, here’s my prediction: if you haven’t, you probably will – and soon.

Why do I say that? Because Christianity is currently under a widespread and vociferous attack by militant atheists, radical scholars, popular authors, and others in bestselling books, TV documentaries, and on the Internet. Or if you don’t come down with a case of spiritual vertigo, the chances are that your kids will when they go off to college, where the percentage of atheists among professors is three times greater than in the population as a whole.

The challenges are coming fast and furious. Did you know that Christianity copied its beliefs from earlier mythology? Or that Jesus never really died on the cross? Or that Jesus’ mother Mary got pregnant because of her affair with a Roman soldier? Or that the church has suppressed alternative Gospels that present Jesus in an entirely different light than the Bible? Or that the New Testament is hopelessly riddled with errors? One reporter said to me: “It seems like it’s open season on Jesus!” And he’s right.

Here’s an e-mail I got from a young man after he read a current bestseller that attacks the text of the New Testament: “Please help me. I was raised in the church and I’m now 26 years old. This book has devastated my faith. I don’t want to be kept in the dark: I want to know what really is going on in the Bible and what I should believe, even if it goes against what I’ve believed since I was a little boy.”

As a pastor, what are you going to do when someone in your congregation reads a book like that and peppers you with questions? First Peter 3:15 tells all followers of Jesus: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” Are you ready to define and defend Christianity – for your friend’s sake?

For 2,000 years, the picture of Christ painted by the church has been the divine Jesus – the God who became man. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas: God incarnate. But now, critics are popularizing radically different pictures of him – and they’re all claiming that their Jesus is the real Jesus! How can we tell for sure?

Some of their arguments sound persuasive. That’s why we can suffer from spiritual vertigo! But look at Proverbs 18:17: “The first to speak in court sounds right – until the cross-examination begins.” In other words, the picture can change radically when you hear the other side of the story.

So for my latest book, The Case for the Real Jesus, I traveled 24,000 miles to cross-examine experts on the most powerful objections to Christianity circulating in popular culture. Basically, I did what First Thessalonians 5:21 tells us: “Test everything. Hold on to the good.”

Today, I want to paint for you five of the dozens of different portraits of Jesus that are being promoted by skeptics in the popular media. Then I’ll “cross-examine” them to see what emerges when we put theories under the light of evidence, history, and logic.

 

The first picture of Jesus is: “The Mythological Jesus.”

This is all over the Internet and in popular books. The claim is basically this: Christianity is actually a copycat religion that stole its beliefs from earlier mythology or so-called “mystery religions.” In other words, the resurrection of Jesus never happened – it was merely a story that Christians plagiarized from ancient mythology.

This idea was popularized by The Da Vinci Code, which said: “Nothing in Christianity is original.” And when the claim is first presented, the evidence sounds strong. For instance, proponents say that long before Jesus, there was mystery religion built around worship of a mythological god named Mithras. They say Mithras was born of a virgin…in a cave…on December 25… was considered a great traveling teacher…had 12 disciples…sacrificed himself for world peace…was buried in a tomb…and rose again three days later.

Does that sound familiar? On the surface, it seems like strong evidence that Christianity stole its beliefs about Jesus from Mithraism. In fact, you might be feeling spiritual vertigo. How would you answer this challenge? Well, let’s look at the other side of the story. We’ll go down the list of supposed parallels between Mithras and Jesus.

• Mithras was born of a virgin in a cave. That’s what popular writers say, but when you go back to the original myth, you find that Mithras actually emerged fully grown out of a rock – and he was wearing a hat! There was no virgin and no cave. Besides, nowhere does the Bible say Jesus was born in a cave anyway.
• Mithras was born on December 25. Okay, but so what? The Bible doesn’t tell us the date that Jesus was born. Some think it was in the spring; others think it was in January. It wasn’t until centuries later that Christians chose Dec. 25 as the date to celebrate his birth because it was close to the Winter Solstice when there were many pagan celebrations, and Christians hoped to influence those celebrations for Christ. So there’s no parallel between Mithras and Jesus here, either.
• Mithras was a traveling teacher with 12 disciples. No, he was supposedly a god, not a teacher, and the Iranian Mithras had one follower while the Roman Mithras had two – not 12.
• Mithras sacrificed himself for world peace. No, he didn’t! He was known for killing a bull. He didn’t sacrifice himself for anything or anyone.
• Mithras was buried in a tomb and resurrected after three days. No, there’s no record of any belief regarding the death of Mithras, and hence there was no resurrection at all.

Look what happened – the parallels between Mithras and Jesus evaporated when they were put under the light of scrutiny. And here’s the clincher: scholars have now established that the Mithras mystery religion didn’t even exist in the West until after Christianity! So Christianity couldn’t have stolen its beliefs from it.

Here’s the truth, as summarized by senior Swedish scholar T.N.D. Mettinger in a recent academic treatise: the nearly universal consensus of scholars around the world is that there are no examples of any mythological gods dying and rising from the dead that came before Jesus. These resurrection myths came after Christianity! So obviously Christianity could not have borrowed from them. Mettinger said he was going to take a decidedly minority position and claim there may have been a few of these stories before Jesus, but then he analyzed them and said there were absolutely no parallels between them and Jesus, because these myths dealt with such things as the vegetation cycle. Ultimately, Mettinger concludes: “The death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions.”

 

Let’s look at a second picture of Jesus – this one being promoted by Muslims. It’s “The Uncrucified Jesus.”

Christians believe Jesus claimed he was the Son of God and proved it by allowing himself to be killed and then returning from the dead. That’s one reason why the resurrection is so central to Christianity – it establishes that Jesus was telling the truth when he said he’s divine.

But increasingly in debates, on the Internet, and in books, Muslims are claiming Jesus was not the Son of God, but instead he was just a great prophet. They say he never really died on the cross in the first place and therefore was never resurrected from the dead. Muslims base these beliefs on Qur’an, which says in Surah 4, verses 157-158, that Jesus was not crucified. But is that credible?

I have a friend who’s a Muslim. One day I said to him, “Would you like me to tell you why I’m not a Muslim?” He said, “Sure.” I said, “Let me tell you about the evidence I have that Jesus did die on the cross. We have confirmation in all four biographies of Jesus in the New Testament, which are rooted in eyewitness accounts and which date back to the same era as Jesus. We have confirmation from a creed of the early church that confirms Jesus died for our sins and dates back virtually to the cross itself. We have confirmation from five sources outside the Bible, including the early secular historians Tacitus and Josephus, and even the Jewish writings known as the Talmud. And we even have atheist New Testament scholars like Gerd Ludemann, James Tabor, and many others conceding that Jesus’ death by crucifixion is an indisputable historical fact. As radical scholar John Dominic Crossan said: ‘That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical ever can be.’ Okay, and what do you have for evidence on the other side to back up your belief that Jesus didn’t die on the cross? With all due respect, six hundred years after Jesus, Mohammed says an angel in a cave told him it’s not true. That’s it! Now, set aside religion – purely from a historical standpoint, where does evidence point?” I think the answer is pretty clear: the evidence supports the claim that Jesus did, indeed, die on the cross.

 

And that brings us to a third portrait of Jesus being promoted by skeptics: “The Powerless Jesus.”

This is the Jesus who can’t perform miracles like returning from the dead. This is the Jesus who is merely human.

Why do some scholars claim Jesus is powerless? Because they rule out the possibility of the supernatural at the outset. They say miracles are impossible because they violate the laws of nature, which cannot be broken. So Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead; therefore, his resurrection must have been a big misunderstanding. And Mary couldn’t have conceived as a virgin, so she was either raped or had an affair with a Roman soldier.

But do you see how these scholars are letting their bias against the supernatural dictate what they will believe about history? This is totally unreasonable. In order to know there’s no supernatural, you’d have to be omniscient yourself – which would make you a supernatural god!

I would say the most logical, rational and open-minded approach would be to follow the historical evidence wherever it points – even if it points toward the uncomfortable conclusion that God can perform the miraculous.

You see, we have good independent evidence from cosmology that God brought the universe into existence, which I spell out in my book, The Case for a Creator. And if he brought the universe into existence, then a resurrection or a virgin birth would be child’s play for him!

What’s more, it’s inaccurate to say miracles are impossible because they overturn the laws of nature. Actually, the laws of nature are merely the way we describe how the world usually works. For example, if someone were to drop an apple, it would fall to the floor. That’s the law of gravity.

However, if someone were to drop an apple but I were to reach over and grab it before it hit the ground, I wouldn’t be overturning or violating the law of gravity. I would simply be intervening. Similarly, God is able to reach into the world he created by performing a miracle. He isn’t contravening, violating or overturning the laws of nature; he’s simply intervening.

Pastor, when people rule out miracles at the outset because of a philosophical bias against them, then we have to call them on it. Because the historical evidence for the miraculous resurrection of Jesus is simply overwhelming.

We’ve got early accounts that cannot be legend; we’ve got a tomb that even Jesus’ opponents admit was empty on that first Easter morning; and we’ve got at least 515 people who encountered the resurrected Jesus, including skeptics whose lives were revolutionized 180 degrees as a result. The most reasonable explanation for the historical facts is that Jesus did, indeed, die on the cross and rise again. Let’s not rule that out for philosophical reasons even before we look at the evidence!

Now, why did Jesus die on the cross in the first place? Historically, Christians have taught that this was in order to redeem humankind – to pay the penalty for our sins as our substitute so he could offer forgiveness and eternal life as a free gift. But some people deny that. Rather than the redeeming Jesus, they picture Jesus as: “The Gnostic Jesus.” That’s the fourth portrait of Jesus we’ll examine.

 

The Gnostic Jesus

The word “Gnostic” comes from the Greek and means “secret knowledge.” According to scholar N.T. Wright, Gnostics are diverse, but generally they believe the world is evil, it was a product of an evil creator, salvation consists of being rescued from it, and the rescue comes through secret knowledge. That’s a far different message than the one in the biblical Gospels!

The Gnostic picture of Jesus is reflected in several alternative Gospels unearthed since 1945. The most prominent is the gospel of Thomas, which the far left-wing Jesus Seminar says is just as reliable as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

But Jesus’ message and mission are far different in Thomas than in the New Testament Gospels. For example, the Gospel of John says we experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus; Thomas says the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by all humanity. In other words, we all have this divine spark within.

Whereas salvation in biblical Gospels is available as free gift to all who come in repentance and faith, with the gospel of Thomas and the Gnostics, it is only available to a select group of worthy people – the special insiders to whom this secret knowledge is entrusted.

But is Thomas telling the truth? Let’s investigate it. One way to determine whether any ancient writing has historical validity is to verify how close to the events it describes, was it written? As a general rule – not universal – the shorter the time gap between when the events occurred and when the document was written, the more likely it’s going to be accurate.

Now, even skeptical scholars concede that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written in the very same (first) century when Jesus lived, so they were written close to his life, and certain details in them are corroborated by archaeology and secular history. In addition, as a recent scholarly book reaffirmed once more, they are rooted in eyewitness testimony. Consequently, they have the earmarks of accuracy.

On the other hand, historians have determined that these alternative Gospels were written late in the second century – at the earliest. Some were written in the third, fourth and fifth centuries. So they’re simply too far removed from Jesus to tell us much that’s accurate about his life. Plus, they’re skewed by Gnostic philosophy.

For example, consider the gospel of Thomas. The latest research points toward Thomas being written after 175 AD and closer to 200 – a minimum of 140 years after Jesus. Let’s put this in contemporary terms. Who do you think would be more accurate in writing the story of Abraham Lincoln: someone who lived in the same time frame he did and who was able to draw from eyewitness accounts of his life, or someone today – 140 years later – who’s relying on stories and rumors that have floated down through almost a century and half of time – and who’s promoting an agenda alien to Lincoln’s?

Of course, the earlier and eyewitness-based account is more likely to be better. The same is true of the Gospels: the earlier and eyewitness-based Gospels in the New Testament are far more likely to be accurate than Gospels coming a century and a half later and based on legend and hearsay.

Besides, these alternative gospels are simply wacky. For example, Jesus is quoted in the gospel of Thomas as saying: “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.” What?

Jesus also is quoted in Thomas as saying: “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.” Does that sound like the Jesus we know?

And Thomas portrays Jesus as anti-women. At one point, Simon Peter says, “Mary [Magdalene] should leave us, for females don’t deserve life.” Jesus supposedly responds by saying, “Look, I will guide her to make her male, so she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the domain of heaven.” That’s not the real Jesus of the Bible, who raised the status of women in a radically counter-cultural way!

The bottom line is this: there are no accounts about Jesus that pass the tests of history the way the four Gospels of the Bible do. We can trust biblical Gospels because they were written close to the life of Jesus, they’re rooted in eyewitness testimony, and corroborated at points by archaeology and secular history – none of which is true of Thomas or these other alternative gospels. The only places where we can actually trust them are where they have lifted material from the biblical accounts.

 

While talking about the New Testament, let’s move to the last popular portrait of Christ: “The Misquoted Jesus.”

This comes from the title of the huge best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus by agnostic professor Bart Ehrman.

Ehrman correctly points out we don’t have the original copies of the New Testament. They crumbled into dust long ago. Before they did, however, Christians began copying them by hand. For about 1,500 years, until the invention of movable type printing, this is how the New Testament was preserved. Of course, along the way these scribes made mistakes and even some intentional changes. In fact, as Ehrman correctly says, we have 200,000 to 400,000 variants, or differences, between handwritten manuscripts. The implication is obvious: how can we trust the New Testament if we don’t have the original copies, and the manuscripts we do have are pockmarked with errors?

This has shaken the faith of many people, including the 26-year-old whose email I read earlier. But actually, we have good reason to believe the New Testament has been reliably preserved – and here’s why.

We have more handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament than any other ancient writings. For example, we only have 9 copies of The Jewish War by Josephus, and the first copy comes almost 1,000 years after the original. Other than the New Testament, we have the most manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – 2,400 copies combined. But for the New Testament, we have up to 30,000 handwritten manuscripts, including 5,700 of the earliest Greek copies. About 10 percent of those come from the first millennium, starting in the 2nd century. On top of that, we have a million quotations of the New Testament in the writings of early church fathers, starting at the turn of the first century.

Look at it this way: if you stacked the number of manuscripts of the average Greek author in a pile, it would reach about four feet tall. Stack up copies of the New Testament, and they would reach more than a mile high – and that doesn’t include any quotations from the early church fathers. When you have that many copies, it’s fairly straightforward to compare and contrast to determine what the original said.

Now, let’s talk about variants. Each and every time a manuscript or church father has a different word in one place, that’s counted as a variant. Yes, there are between 200,000 to 400,000 of them. But that’s because there are so many manuscripts, which is a good thing!

What’s more, up to 80 percent of variants are minor spelling errors that can’t even be translated into English. Sometimes John is spelled with two n’s. So what? We know the reference is to John, not Mary! Many other variants are merely quirks of Greek grammar that don’t make any difference in English. Only 1 percent of variants affect the meaning of the text to some degree and have a decent chance of going back to original text.

But even these are rather insignificant issues. For example, here’s one of “big ones” that scholars grapple with: does Romans 5:1 say, “We have peace,” or, “Let us have peace?” The difference is one letter in Greek. Scholars are split over this, but there’s nothing at stake that affects the teachings of Scripture.

The academic discipline of figuring out what the original text said is called “textual criticism.” For my book, The Case for the Real Jesus, I interviewed one of the leading experts in this field: Dr. Daniel B. Wallace. He told me about a very revealing seminar he has conducted dozens of times on this topic.

On Friday night, he has volunteer “scribes” copy a document. In all, six generations of copies are produced. All the scribes make mistakes – intentionally and not. In fact, the resultant copies are significantly more corrupt than the manuscript copies of the New Testament. This short document can have hundreds of variants.

The next morning, other volunteers try to reconstruct the wording of the original text while the scribes remain silent. The earliest copies are hidden. After two hours, these amateur textual critics come up with what they think the original text said. Sometimes there are doubts, but they are minor – for example, is the original word “shall” or “will?”

Then they compare their findings with the original. After doing this seminar 50 times, amateur sleuths often get the original wording exactly right – and the essential message of the original is always intact. Get this: they’ve never missed reconstructing the original text by more than three words. In fact, they’ve been off by three words only once. Often spontaneous applause breaks out!

So here’s the lesson: if amateurs untrained in “textual criticism” can reconstruct a text that’s terribly corrupt and do it that fast, isn’t it likely that those trained in textual criticism can do the same with the New Testament?

Here’s the point to remember: in his book, Ehrman didn’t prove that one single cardinal doctrine of the church is in any jeopardy whatsoever. In fact, there are no new disclosures that cast any doubt on the essential reliability of the New Testament or change the picture of Jesus as the unique Son of God.

But here’s something very revealing. Ehrman said he became a spiritual skeptic after studying the text of the New Testament. Yet he dedicates his book to his mentor: the greatest expert on the text of the New Testament in the last century – Bruce Metzger of Princeton. Ehrman extols him: he says Metzger “taught me the field” and continues to inspire him in his work. So wouldn’t it be interesting to know what Ehrman’s beloved mentor believed?

Well, guess what? I found out. Metzger died this year, but several years ago I met with him at his office in Princeton. I specifically asked how his lifetime of intensively studying the text of the Bible affected his faith. This is what he told me: “Oh, it has increased the basis of my personal faith to see the firmness with which these materials have come down to us, with a multiplicity of copies, some of which are very ancient.”

When I pressed him on whether his scholarship had diluted his faith in any way, he replied, “On the contrary, it has built [my faith]. I’ve asked questions all my life, I have dug into the text, I’ve studied this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well placed.” Then he paused before he added with emphasis: “Very well placed.”

And that’s the lesson of my new book, The Case for the Real Jesus, and my article today: the deeper we look at the evidence, the more confident we become that the portrait of Jesus as the resurrected Son of God is based on a solid bedrock of historical truth.

The mythological Jesus is the myth; the real Jesus left real footprints in history…the uncrucified Jesus doesn’t exist; the real Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins and rose from the dead…the powerless Jesus isn’t the Jesus of the Bible, who controlled the wind and waves, knew the secrets of people’s hearts, and demonstrated power over death…the Gnostic Jesus fails the test of history…and the misquoted Jesus is much ado about nothing.

So let me finish the story I started with. Remember the scientist who invited me to dinner and peppered me with objections that put me in a tailspin of spiritual vertigo? At the end of the evening, I said: “You’ve raised a lot of good issues. But I suspect that after 2,000 years you didn’t come up with an objection that’s going to topple Christianity. Let me investigate as honestly as I can and get back to you.”

Sure enough, the more I investigated, the more I discovered good answers to every single one of his questions! I was able to go back to him with solid evidence for the picture of Jesus as the unique Son of God.

And what did this investigation do for my faith? First, it increased it, just as Bruce Metzger experienced. And, second, it helped prepare me, so that now, when I get asked these kinds of questions, I’m ready give an answer for the hope that I have.

So let me end with some practical advice: when spiritual vertigo hits you, don’t freak out, but check it out!

Go to reliable books or other resources to get the other side of the story. That’s why I sought out excellent scholars for The Case for the Real Jesus. I didn’t just ask for their opinions but I pressed them for the evidence that backs up their conclusions. And we’ve now created a free resource – a web site with hundreds of free video clips of experts answering tough questions about what Christians believe and why. You can use the search engine at LeeStrobel.com to get answers to your questions before spiritual vertigo hits.

 

Lee Strobel was a legal editor for the Chicago Tribune and former atheist. Today he is a Christian apologist. He has served as teaching pastor of Willow Creek Community Church and Saddleback Community Church. He is best known for writing the semi-autobiographical bestsellers The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator and most recently, The Case for the Real Jesus. You may visit Lee’s popular video apologetics web site LeeStrobel.com.