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HOW TO DEFEND THE BIBLEA Beginner’s Course on How to Respond to the Ten Most Common Objections Against the Bible

IntroductionThe goal of this course is to correct all of the sensationalism, ignorance, criticism, misinformation, and “trash talk” we hear about the Bible in our culture. A lot of times these criticisms come from misinformed bloggers, documentaries and media personalities, and it is unfortunate because very few people have access to sound conservative scholarship about the Bible.

What we will do in this course is cover the ten most common objections against the Bible in our culture. This list of ten objections is in no way exhaustive of all the objections people have about the Bible, but they are the most common objections people have given my experience of working in this area and interacting with oth-ers for over the last ten years.

These are the objections we will be covering:

How To Answer The 10 Most Common Objections To The Bible

1. The Old Testament God Was A Wicked Tyrant Who Commanded Horrible Things

2. All That Jesus Stuff Was A Myth Based On Pagan Mythology

3. We Don’t Even Know Who Wrote The Gospels

4. The Gospels Are Not Reliable History

5. The Gospels Weren’t Even Written By Eyewitnesses

6. The Gospels are Full of Contradictions and Can’t Be Trusted

7. The Gospel Writers Were Biased And Can’t Be Trusted

8. There Are No Non-Christian Sources That Even Mention Jesus

9. The Gospels Were Written Late and Have Been Corrupted.

10. There Is No Evidence That Jesus Ever Existed

I have made this course very easy to follow. Simply take the lessons in order, one at a time. Watch the video for each lesson and follow along and take notes in this study guide. Review the responses to the objections often and try to memorize

A lot of times these criticisms come from misinformed bloggers, documentaries and media personalities,

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them. I also highly suggest “role playing” with a friend or family member. Have them drill you with these objections and see how well you can respond to them.

Also, don’t forget to watch the free bonus videos that come with this course. Drs. Evans, Blomberg, and Licona are experts in this area and these free videos are packed with more helpful information.

Finally, to take your education even further, please refer to the list of recommend-ed resources at the end of this study guide. They were all very helpful to me in producing this course and will go into even more detail on how to answer these objections and more.

OBJECTION #1: “The Old Testament God was a wicked tyrant who commanded horrible things.”

RESPONSE:

I. This is a very popular attack today, especially by those who call them-selves the “new atheists”. Skeptics like this will point out apparent mor-al imperfections in the OT such as the killing of homosexuals in Levit-icus (Lev. 20:13) or even the massive slaughter of animals.

II. This objection then can take many forms. There are numerous possi-bilities here and so we can’t go in to all the details of each one.

III. So what I’m going to recommend here is a “general catch-all re-sponse.” This response will work for all or at least most of these objec-tions. It’s a three step process.

IV. Take any alleged immoral passage in the OT and let’s just call it X. Whatever passage it is, let X stand for the passage in question. There are three important things we need to consider.

A. Did God actually command X?

i. Passages must be interpreted correctly. A lot of times ob-jectors will point out a passage where someone is acting immorally, but when you look at the passage you see God didn’t command it. The passage is just being descriptive of what the person is doing. If God didn’t command any al-leged immorality there is nothing here to explain.

B. If God really did command X, was it truly immoral for him to do so?

i. What kind of act would it be wrong for God to command? What makes something wrong in the first place? If God

A lot of times objectors will point out a passage where

someone is acting immorally, but when you look at the

passage you see God didn’t command it.

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chooses to take someone’s life, is that wrong for Him to do so? Isn’t He the author of life anyway? Don’t all things ulti-mately belong to Him?

ii. “Whatever is taken by the command of God, to Whom all things belong, is not taken against the will of its owner, whereas it is in this that theft consists.” S.T. I-II.94.5 ad.2

iii. If God didn’t command anything wrong then the objection fails right here.

C. Some aspects of the Old Testament ethic were inferior, limit-ed, and temporary

i. Suppose God really did command X and although techni-cally it wasn’t wrong for God to command it, but still the objector just doesn’t like it. (That’s not really an argument by the way, if God didn’t command something wrong then the objection fails.) They might wonder, even if it wasn’t wrong, why would God do that?

ii. Nevertheless, there is something else to consider that might at least make one feel better about it.

iii. Some aspects of the OT ethic were inferior

a. The reason why is because the moral code of ancient Israel is NOT God’s ideal. God’s ideals are in place at creation (as seen in Genesis 1-2).

b. Jesus himself gives us an example. Jesus said divorce was permitted by Moses because of their hardness of heart (Mark 10:5). So, even Jesus says that the OT ethic was imperfect in some respects. God has temporarily per-mitted immorality for some reason.

c. We could say the same about many things like that. “Be-cause of your hardness of heart, Moses (God) permitted wars and slavery…”

d. The reality is that ancient Israel had a lot of moral problems and God didn’t wipe out all of the social problems at once. God allowed for some things be-cause of their own moral depravity. He accommodates the hard heartedness of sin and He leads them, gradual-ly, step by step, out of their moral inferiority.

So, even Jesus says that the OT ethic was imperfect in some respects. God has temporarily permitted immorality for some reason.

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e. In other words, God met these ancient people where they were and moved them out gradually. As we prog-ress in scripture and revelation the moral code of God becomes clarified over time. The OT laws move in the right moral direction.

f. However its worthy of note that even with the inferior morality of ancient Israel, it was still a dramatic moral im-provement over what other ancient cultures were doing!

iv. The Mosaic laws were not only inferior but they were also temporary and limited.

a. They were not binding on all cultures nor were they to be binding for all times.

v. So one has to look at the whole trajectory of revelation. It’s not enough to pick out some moral low point in the his-tory of revelation and conclude that is the ideal norm. In other words, you can’t “camp out” on some OT verse and assume it is the all-time standard!. It might be, (like the Ten Commandments), but it might not be either. It depends.

vi. Every decent person, Christian or not, can willingly ac-knowledge the inferior moral culture of ancient Israel. The Christian doesn’t have to try and justify everything bad that was done in the OT because THE CHRISTIAN POSITION IS THAT PARTS OF THE OT MORAL STANDARD WERE INFERIOR, LIMITED AND TEMPORARY.

V. Particular questions need to be properly interpreted and handled on a case by case basis. For a more detailed and point by point defense of the various issues that arise with the Old Testament, see Paul Copan’s book Is God a Moral Monster?

IMPORTANT POINT: DON’T MAJOR IN THE MINOR THINGS

• For a Christian there are certain parts of the Bible that are more fun-damental than others.

• You need to know the most important areas first. These are the areas that concern the divinity of Jesus.

• If Jesus was God and we can know that, then Christianity is true and at that point we are free to figure out the other problems at our leisure.

The Christian position is that parts of the OT moral

standard were inferior, limited, and temporary.

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• It’s not like you have to figure out everything in advance to be a follower of Christ. Rather, we figure out the most important things (things con-cerning Christ) then we can work on the other problems at our leisure. We may hopefully figure some of those problems out, or we may not.

• But regardless, we at least can know that Christianity is true and live our lives accordingly.

• So I’m recommending that you don’t get bogged down in a never ending discussion about the problems of interpreting the Old Tes-tament before you feel justified in becoming a Christian. You don’t need to know, for example, if the Genesis creation account is literal or not (I think it’s largely allegorical) or if, say, Jonah was a real person or not, etc. These are great questions but they are secondary to the truth of Christianity.

• In other words, you can know that Christianity is true without having to figure all of that stuff out first.

So for this reason we are going to move in to those core issues regarding Jesus and turn to the New Testament.

OBJECTION #2: “All that Jesus stuff was a MYTH based on pagan mythology.”

RESPONSE:

This is one of those cases that if you repeat a lie often enough, a lot of people will start to believe it. In fact, in my experience, this lie is extremely widespread. I hear young people say this kind of thing all the time.

It’s really sad too because the idea that the Jesus story is just a rehash of pagan myth is rejected by virtually all of contemporary critical scholarship, and for good reason, it’s demonstrably false.

There are three reasons why:

1. The Pagan Objection Is Based On Exaggeration: The similarities be-tween the Jesus narratives and pagan myths are greatly exaggerated. The alleged similarities are not that similar at all. It’s a stretch.

2. The Pagan Myth Objection Takes Jesus and the Gospels Out of Context: The life of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels needs to be kept in histori-cal context. These were first century, monotheistic Jews. Jews were not at all prone to just willy nilly start believing in pagan myths.

3. The Pagan Myth Objection is Demonstrably False Because Key Details In The Gospels Have Been Historically Verified

…the idea that the Jesus story is just a rehash of pagan myth is rejected by virtually all of contemporary critical scholarship, and for good reason, it’s demonstrably false.

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a. Key elements in the Jesus narrative can be shown to be historical! The Gospels refer to real people like Caiaphas, John the Baptist, Pontius Pilate, and Jesus. They refer to real places (like the pool of Bethesda) and real events that have been historically verified by other sources.

b. Many of the specific events concerning the life of Jesus can be histori-cally verified such as the Last Supper, the death by crucifixion, and the discovery of the empty tomb.

c. Since many important details in the Gospels can be historically veri-fied, this shows that they aren’t myths.

d. You don’t get this sort of real reference to things with myths. This means that the genre (the kind of literature they are) of the Gospels is HISTORICAL and more precisely, BIOGRAPHICAL. These works are works of historical biography about the life of Jesus.

OBJECTION #3: “We don’t even know who wrote the Gospels.”

RESPONSE:

This objection is not only false but it wouldn’t matter even if it were true.

I. The “We don’t even know who wrote the Gospels” objection is false

A. There is a very strong case that can be made for the tradi-tional authorship of the Gospels (Mark wrote Mark, Matthew wrote Matthew, etc.)

B. This comes from both external and internal evidence.

i. External evidence (historical evidence outside of the NT)- Everybody writing in ancient history in the 1st or 2nd cen-tury says that Matthew wrote Matthew, Luke wrote Luke, Mark wrote Mark and John wrote John.

a. Example - Papias and Irenaeus support it

b. So the external evidence is unanimous. This should be taken VERY SERIOUSLY.

ii. Internal evidence (evidence from within the NT itself) sup-ports the external testimony. To list just a couple:

a. The criterion of Embarrassment suggests traditional authorship for 3 of the 4 Gospels

1. Matthew wasn’t an apostle but was a tax collector – regarded as suspect – thus probably not invented

Many of the specific events concerning the life of Jesus can be historically verified

such as the Last Supper, the death by crucifixion, and the discovery of the empty tomb.

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2. Mark wasn’t an apostle, why make him an author?

3. Luke wasn’t an apostle, why make up that name?

4. So we have three relatively “unspectacular writers” Why would someone make up names like this? Why not make up a more authoritative name? Peter? Paul? James? Thomas?

b. Furthermore, details in Gospel of John suggest the:

1. Author was a Jew with detailed knowledge of Hebrew feasts customs and scriptures

2. Author was a Palestinian with his knowledge of local geography

3. Author was an Eyewitness – given the repeated com-pelling references to people, places, etc.

4. Author was an Apostle – given his acquaintance with the activities of the Twelve.

5. All of this sounds a lot like John!

iii. All of this amounts to a very strong case for traditional au-thorship! So whoever says “we don’t even know who wrote the Gospels” would have to shoulder a tremendous burden of proof to go against all of this evidence.

“Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the evidence remains strong that the Gos-pels were written by the authors to whom they are traditionally ascribed – apostles or close associates of the apostles.” — Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, p. 41.

II. The “We don’t even know who wrote the Gospels” objection wouldn’t matter even if it were true!

A. Even if a guy named Bill wrote the Gospel still that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have accurate information.

B. What really matters is HISTORICAL ACCURACY NOT AU-THORSHIP

i. We have methods in place for determining historical accu-racy.

ii. Historiographical principles like the principle of multiple attestation and the principle of embarrassments show this.

What really matters is historical accuracy, not authorship.

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iii. These criteria help show that the Gospels are reliable reports of the life and teaching of Jesus.

OBJECTION #4: “The Gospels are not reliable history.”

RESPONSE:

This is nothing but an assertion that goes against the evidence. All of the evidence suggests that the Gospel writers were able to write accurate history, intending to do so, and actually did as far as we can tell.

But before we talk about that it’s important to say a few words about method. When we are talking about determining the reliability of an ancient historical docu-ment, it’s important to keep in mind that it is impossible to corroborate every detail of an ancient text. Since one cannot possibly corroborate everything, the best we can do is establish a general reliability.

That means that if the things we can check up on turn out to be factual, the docu-ment should earn the benefit of the doubt on the things we cannot double check. In other words, the assumption at that point should be that the whole is factual unless there is good reason to think otherwise. This is how we establish general reliability.

So, the proper historical procedure is to begin with an open mind and then look at the evidence to form a general presumption about the trustworthiness of a docu-ment. When we do that we can see that the Gospel writers were not only able and intending to write accurate history, but they actually did so in those areas we can check up on.

I. Able: The Gospel writers were able to write accurate history because they were written relatively early and in close contact with eyewitnesses.

II. Intending: That the Gospel writers intended to write accurate history comes from the fact that the genre of the Gospels (the kind of literature they are) is historical. Two of the Gospel writers (Luke and John) ex-plicitly say their intent is historical and since Matthew and Mark close-ly resemble Luke their genre is historical as well. Furthermore, their willingness to include counterproductive details like Jesus’s brother James not believing in him, or Jesus not knowing the day or the hour of the end times all suggests historical intent as well. It shows an hon-esty to tell the story as it really was, warts and all. Finally, it is rather obvious that the writers had a strong theological motivation to write accurately. They at least really believed this stuff and thought it was important.

…we can see that the Gospel writers were not only able

and intending to write accurate history, but they

actually did so in those areas we can check up on.

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III. Did: We know the Gospel writers did in fact write accurately about some things for a number of reasons.

A. First of all, many things the Gospels say about Jesus are con-firmed by other sources. For example, the NT epistles are inde-pendent sources from the Gospels and were even written earlier. Although these epistles are occasional letters written for some specific purpose, still they give us many incidental details about the life of Jesus and his teaching. If you gather up all of the infor-mation about Jesus’ life in the NT epistles, you get a short sum-mary of Jesus’ life that matches perfectly with what we see in the four Gospel themselves. It amounts to a mini-Gospel in itself.

B. Ancient non-Christian testimony also confirms the overall Gospel portrait of Jesus. If we look at the works of the works of Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian, and the Babylonian Talmud we can gather that there was this man named Jesus, who was a “so called Christ” with wise and persuasive teachings and a doer of

“miracles” and other sorts of “sorcery”, and who go into trouble with the Jewish authorities and was crucified on a cross.

C. We also know certain things are historical because they work against the Christian mission but were reported anyway. The fact that the Gospel writers tell us that their leader was cruci-fied as a common criminal is an embarrassing detail that is not likely to be made up. The Gospel writers say the tomb of Jesus was discovered by women, which is a rather counterproductive detail since women were not commonly thought of as reliable witnesses in ancient Palestine. Hence the inclusion of this detail means it is probably factual.

D. Also, archaeological findings have confirmed some of what the Gospels say. For example, archaeologists have uncovered the Pool of Bethesda mentioned by John and have seen that it was as John said it was.

E. Finally, the lack of any outcry against the Gospels is a negative proof that what they say must have been factual. The story of Je-sus was important to the early Christians. If the Gospels were just a bunch of falsified information about Jesus, surely we would ex-pect to hear some outcry from the Christian leaders or commu-nity testifying to that fact. But there aren’t any and so the absence of any outcry or counterclaim supports historical accuracy.

Once established as a generally reliable document, a historically favorable pre-sumption prevails and the burden of proof falls at that point is on those who assert

If you gather up all of the information about Jesus’ life in the NT epistles, you get a short summary of Jesus’ life that matches perfectly with what we see in the four Gospel themselves.

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they are unhistorical. This is all one can reasonably expect from history and this is the situation we have with the Gospels.

OBJECTION #5: “The Gospels weren’t even written by eyewitnesses.”

RESPONSE:

This objection is not only false but it wouldn’t matter even if it were true.

Why This Objection is False: The objection is false because strong evidence sug-gests that two of the Gospels (Matthew and John) were written by eyewitnesses. This is supported by the evidence for the traditional authorship discussed above in objection 3. The other two Gospels (Mark and Luke) don’t claim to be eyewitness-es, but that doesn’t matter and the reason why which brings us to the next point.

Why This Objection is Wouldn’t Matter Even If It Were True: This objection is irrelevant because you don’t have to be an eyewitness to write accurate history. All you need to have is reliable sources. This is how most historians write anyway. Most histories are not written by eyewitnesses but by people who do research, interview eyewitnesses etc., and then write their work. All four Gospels were writ-ten when eyewitnesses were still living and available for consultation even if the Gospel authors themselves were not eyewitnesses.

With the Gospels we have FOUR biographies of Jesus written within the first gen-eration after the events of Jesus’ life had taken place. This is almost unprecedented in ancient history.

OBJECTION #6: “The Gospels are full of contradictions and can’t be trusted.”

RESPONSE:

This objection is both unsubstantiated and invalid. Even if it were true that the Gospels contained contradictions, it doesn’t follow that they can’t be trusted. Let me explain what I mean.

First, it’s just not clear that there are in fact contradictions in the Gospels. There are several apparent discrepancies, but scholars have given many plausible harmo-nizations for these discrepancies which would show that there is no contradiction there after all.

Secondly, even if we grant for the sake of argument that no harmonizations work, still it wouldn’t follow that the Gospels can’t be trusted. The reason why is because the discrepancies are about minor details in the story. (This is precise-ly what we would expect if the same story were told by multiple witnesses!) It would be absurd to throw out that core story just because there are some minor discrepancies between the witnesses.

It would be absurd to throw out that core story just

because there are some minor discrepancies between the

witnesses.

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Imagine how ridiculous that would be if we were to apply to other obvious ex-amples like a car accident. One witness says person A pulled out in front of person B and another witness says the opposite. Both witnesses agree however on the core story that the two cars collided at this intersection at about the same time. You wouldn’t say, “Well since the two witnesses contradict each other on this minor detail therefore we should conclude there wasn’t an accident at all”! We can know what happened at the scene of an accident even if some of the witnesses’ details are “fuzzy.”

This happens all the time in real life. Witnesses to the Titanic disaster have given conflicting reports about whether the ship broke in half before sinking or not. But that doesn’t mean we conclude that therefore the Titanic didn’t sink!

So, the point is that just because historical sources conflict on some details doesn’t mean you throw it all out. The core story remains correct and reliable even if there are minor discrepancies.

So, the Christian can even admit, for the sake of argument, that yes, there are some apparent conflicts in the minor details of the Gospels – but what follows from that? Nothing at all.

The “gist” or core story is where we can affirm historical reliability with the great-est amount of confidence and this certainly been faithfully preserved even if it were true that there are irreconcilable variations. It’s the similarities of the core story that matter most because these are far more striking, numerous and import-ant than the minor differences.

OBJECTION #7: “The Gospel writers were biased and can’t be trusted.”

RESPONSE:

There is no incompatibility between believing in Jesus and giving an accurate report about him. “Bias” doesn’t mean “untrustworthy”. All a bias means is that someone cares about the topic at hand; it doesn’t necessarily mean they are falsi-fying information. Rape victims are “biased” but they can still be good witnesses. Survivors of the Holocaust can be “biased” but that doesn’t mean they can’t give us reliable reports about what happened.

The fact is that everybody has biases. We all talk about things that we really care about, but that doesn’t mean our testimony is unreliable.

The same goes for history. You can’t throw out a source just because its author cared about the topic. If we did that, we’d know almost nothing about the past at all!

So here again we see the critic committing that fallacy of special pleading. Ameri-cans can write accurate American history, Romans can write reliable Roman his-

The “gist” or core story is where we can affirm historical reliability with the greatest amount of confidence and this certainly been faithfully preserved even if it were true that there are irreconcilable variations.

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tory and so on, but for some unjustified reason, the critic thinks that Christians are an exception and can’t be trusted to write reliable history.

There isn’t a shred of evidence to show that the biases of the Gospel writers com-pelled them to falsify the facts. On the contrary, there is every good reason to think that the Gospel writers are trustworthy and did report reliable history (see objection #4 above).

OBJECTION #8: “There are NO non-Christian sources that even mention Jesus.”

RESPONSE:

This is both false and misguided.

The objection is false because there ARE non-Christian sources that mention Jesus. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus as well as John the Baptist, James, Pontius Pilate and others. We should also think that Josephus’ information is independent from the Gospels since Josephus tells us that James was martyred, which is a fact the Gospels don’t mention.

The objection is misguided because it presupposes that only non-Christian tes-timony “counts” since the Christian sources are unreliable. As we said above (objection #7), just because the author is a Christian and cares about the subject matter doesn’t mean they are lying or unreliable. On the contrary, the Christian writings are the best sources for the life of Jesus. We have several, 1st century, in-dependent documents on the life of Jesus and his teaching. These are the primary sources, written by either eyewitnesses or those who were in close contact with eyewitnesses. In short, these are the earliest documents we have written by those who were closest to him. Not only are they the earliest sources, but there are also good reasons to think that they are correct in what they report (See objection #4).

To just reject wave all of this off and say you are only going to count the non-Chris-tian sources means you would be choosing the later, indirect, secondary sources over the earlier primary sources, for no good reason whatsoever! This is a very bad way to do history indeed!

OBJECTION #9: “The Gospels were written late and have been corrupted.”

RESPONSE:

“Late” is a relative term. When someone says “late” ask them what they mean. What the average person on the street usually means by “late” is a few centuries. This is flat out not true about the Gospels.

There are strong arguments for a relatively early composition of the Gospels (showing that all of the NT was written before 70 A.D.!) but we don’t need to even

…just because the author is a Christian and cares about

the subject matter doesn’t mean they are lying or

unreliable.

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go into those since the commonly accepted “later” dates do not pose a problem for historical accuracy.

According to the most commonly accepted later dates the Gospels were written about 35-65 years after the death of Jesus.

So we are only dealing with a time gap of 35-65 years (at the latest), and this time gap is not a problem for three reasons:

I. The Power of Ancient Oral tradition – In oral cultures like this peo-ple often memorized LARGE amounts of material. Passing on infor-mation orally was the NORM in ancient Palestine. This means that people living in such an environment developed memory skills that sound amazing to our modern ears. For example:

A. Greek kids memorized Homer’s Iliad

B. Jewish kids memorized the OT

C. The Gospels are SHORT by comparison. Memorizing the Gos-pels would have been a piece of cake.

D. The events and teachings of Jesus are not that hard to remember anyway since the Gospel material is small and manageable and easily memorized.

E. One must also account for the fact that the memorization of the Jesus tradition was a COMMUNITY EFFORT. Jesus had many disciples that, in the words of NT scholar Craig Evans, acted as a living “tape recorder.” There were many people around who could correct mistakes. Memorizing the Jesus tradition would have been a group effort and not dependent on just one guy!

II. The Likelihood of Written Notes – Taking notes to SUPPLEMENT oral teaching was a widespread practice in the ancient world. Jewish rabbis often used private notebooks written in a kind of shorthand – so it’s not unreasonable to think that Jesus’ disciples adopted the practice.

III. Eyewitnesses Were Still Alive When the Gospels Were Written – NT writers like Luke, John, Paul and Peter all claim that witnesses are still available at the time their respective works are written. Moreover, other early Christians like Papias and Quadratus say that they had ac-cess to eyewitness accounts as well. (NT scholar Richard Baukham goes into the details of this point in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.)

So, the point here is that Gospels were not “late” in this sense that they can’t be his-torical. All of the evidence suggests the Gospels were rather “early” that is, “early enough” to give an accurate report of what actually happened.

All of the evidence suggests the Gospels were rather “early” that is, “early enough” to give an accurate report of what actually happened.

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As far as “corruption” goes that is just naïve. Textual criticism shows that we can be virtually certain that our copy of the NT accurately matches the original.

I. We have a lot of old manuscripts of the Gospels and a very objective and trustworthy methodology called “textual criticism” that is able to compare these manuscripts, find the anomalies (often it’s just things like spelling errors and other unintentional mistakes) and remove them. This process allows us to reconstruct a very accurate copy of the original NT.

II. ALMOST NO ONE DOUBTS THIS ANYMORE. Even most critics admit we have a very accurate Gospel of the originals.

OBJECTION #10: “There is no evidence that Jesus ever existed.”

RESPONSE:

If that were true, then there’s no evidence that anyone else from ancient history ever existed either, since the evidence for Jesus is far greater than nearly all other figures from ancient history.

You should know that this objection expresses a very weird and radical view – well deserving of the name “crackpot” or “crank”. In fact, it is so off the wall that it is usually counterproductive to even argue against it, since by arguing against it one runs the risk of giving the objection more credibility than it deserves. But because this view is so widely touted by teenagers and the common “skeptic on the street” I can address it more here.

The truth is we have more evidence for Jesus than we have for anybody else in his time period. When we use the same historical standards as we do in other ar-eas of ancient history, the historical evidence that Jesus existed is overwhelming. Virtually every professional historian regards the existence of Jesus as historically certain. There are numerous reasons for this, which I will only summarize here:

I. Ancient Christian sources say Jesus was a historical person: Jesus is mentioned as a historical person in the New Testament epistles and the Gospels. Moreover, he is also mentioned in numerous Christian sources outside of the New Testament. To reject all of these sources just because they are Christian and “biased” commits the fallacy of special pleading. Just like Jews can be reliable historical sources about the Holocaust, so too Christians can be reliable sources about Jesus.

II. Numerous non-Christian sources says Jesus was a historical person: For example, the ancient Jewish historian Josephus says Jesus was a his-torical person, and also mentions other New Testament figures were

The truth is we have more evidence for Jesus than we

have for anybody else in his time period.

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too like John the Baptist, King Herod, Pilate, and others. Other ancient writers also mention Jesus and treat him as a historical person. They didn’t think Jesus was a mythical figure – so why should we?

III. The historical Jesus is the best explanation for the rise of Christianity: If Jesus never existed; we would be without any explanation for the explosive origins of Christianity. Why would there ever be a Christian religion that grew so rapidly if Jesus never existed? Why would the apostles risk their lives in promoting a man who never existed?

IV. If Jesus never existed, why didn’t the early Jewish enemies of Chris-tianity point this out? If Jesus never really existed, why didn’t any of the ancient rabbis (who hated Jesus and Christianity and wanted to stomp it out) ever use this argument? Not one ancient rabbinical writing ever makes the argument that “Jesus never existed.” On the contrary, they all use the events of his life against him, saying he was a born out of wedlock, worked tricks with evil magic, taught heresy and led fellow Jews astray, and was justifiably executed. This means, at the very least, that Jesus’ worst enemies confirmed his existence!

Finally, here is a selection of quotes to show that there is no scholarly dispute about the existence of Jesus:

I. “Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed.” Graham Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, (Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1989) p. 145.

II. “That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus...agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.” John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolu-tionary Biography. (HarperOne 1995) p. 145.

III. “…biblical scholars and classical historians regard it [theories of the non-existence of Jesus] as effectively refuted.” Robert E. Van Voorst Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evi-dence (Eerdmans Publishing, 2000) p. 16.

IV. [the theories of non-existence of Jesus are] “a thoroughly dead the-sis.” James D. G. Dunn, “Paul’s understanding of the death of Jesus” in Sacrifice and Redemption ed. S. W. Sykes (Cambridge University Press: 2007) pp. 35-36.

V. “Combining the evidence of Thallus, Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonious one can accumulate enough data to refute the fanciful notion that Jesus never existed without even appealing to the testimony of Jew-ish or Christian sources.” Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP, 1987) p. 197.

If Jesus never existed; we would be without any explanation for the explosive origins of Christianity.

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So, the Christian has every good reason to comfortably rest with the academ-ic mainstream that holds Jesus really existed. Anyone who denies this goes against a mountain of historical evidence and would have to shoulder a tre-mendous burden of proof.

Recommended Resources:

Richard Baukham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels

Darrell Bock, Who Is Jesus?: Linking the Historical Jesus with the Christ of Faith and Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics. Dr. Craig has done wonderful work in this area and in fact, has a free podcast on this topic that was the inspiration for making this course. For this and more help on numer-ous other topics of this nature, see Craig’s website at www.ReasonableFaith.org.

Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels

Scott M. Sullivan, Christ 101: The Evidence for Christianity. This is a full-blown course on how to defend the divinity of Christ in our culture. Available at www.ScottMSullivan.com.