The Case for the Real Jesus

Faith is only as good as the one in whom it's invested.

An equal-opportunity phenomenon, the World Wide Web doesn’t discriminate between sober-minded scholars and delusional crackpots, leaving visitors without a reliable filter to determine what’s trustworthy and what’s not.

We can’t treat the Bible with kid gloves. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it.

I think an excellent case can be made for dating the Gospels earlier, but let's go with the more generous estimations. That's still extremely close to the event themselves, especially compared to many other ancient historical writings. Our two best sources on Alexander the Great, for instance, weren't written until at least four hundred years after his life. “As for Caesar Augustus, who is generally regarded as Rome’s greatest emperor, there are five chief sources used by historians to write a history of his adulthood: a very brief funeral inscription, a source written fifty and a hundred years after his death, and three sources written between a hundred and two hundred years after he died. So it’s really remarkable that in the case of Jesus, we have four biographies that even liberals agree were written within thirty-five to sixty-five years after his execution.

Martin Hengel said that the only difference between a fundamentalist and a radical liberal is their starting presuppositions. Their methods are the same: they start with where they want to end up and then look at all the evidence selective for their purposes, rather than being open to what the evidence actually reveals.

Faith is only as good as the one in whom it’s invested.

But ultimately the truth is this: Faith is only as good as the one in whom it’s invested.